English is a solidly Germanic language, and always has been. Its core vocabulary is Germanic, but even more important, its grammar is Germanic. Those who tout the influence of French (Old French, Norman French, medieval French, etc.) on our language are spouting irrelevancies. Yes, English borrowed enormous loads of words from French at various stages. But then, English has borrowed from virtually every language it has come in contact with. These are, in Hamlet’s phrase, just “words, words, words.” If you want to measure the impact of another language on English, Old Norse had a far greater influence on English than French (of any stage or variety). Old Norse changed our system of noun plurals. It changed the little operational words we use – like definite articles and pronouns. It even affected that most basic of verbs, “to be.” Beyond vocabulary – stuff to talk about – French had little impact on the operation of English, except in poetry forms. The alliterative meter of Old English was given up for rhyming verse in Middle English. As C.S. Lewis said, we have been humming an old French tune ever since. That said, though, French poetry and English poetry still don’t work the same. English stress accent makes our prosody very different; it is impossible, for instance, to write a limerick in French. Meanwhile, grammar and syntax in English have remained basically Germanic. Only in modern times has English word order even changed significantly; the KJV is full of V2 word order, which now appears archaic. Even that oddity that drives English teachers nuts, the use of nouns to modify nouns in association (like the form we used in the Department of SDED, the Teacher Classroom Activity Profile ) is simply the same sort of thing German would do by making a huge compound word; English separates the elements into its component words instead of agglomerating them, but it’s still a very Germanic thing to do. French would make you say “the profile of activity within the classroom by the teacher” or something. English has also borrowed enormous amounts of Latin words into its vocabulary. The reason should be obvious: because people wanted to talk about Latin things in English. The English, from the beginning, wanted things in their own language. Sometimes, they would invent a word using Old English elements to talk about the thing that Latin made them aware of, but they also simply nativized Latin words for convenience. We say, “what is the ratio of [this thing] to [that thing]?” blissfully unworried by the fact that ratio is a Latin word. The Old English word for the sacrament of bread and wine was husl, (“little house/host”) and attending church was huslgang, which have gone out of use; now we say either “communion” (from Latin) or “eucharist” (from Greek). But when people don’t know our fancier words, we say, “the Lord’s supper” (all good English words there). Finally, it should be noted that when translating a text from Old English into modern English, you can pretty much do a word-for-word translation. It may sound a little stilted, but it will still make sense. You cannot do this with French or Latin. Neither of those languages work like English does. Despite all the vocabulary we’ve pillaged from them, they remain very foreign to us, and we to them.