Middle English

Middle English is the descendent of Old English. English after about 1100 C.E. had changed enough to warrant a different designation. Middle English had about five major dialects, Northern, West Midlands, East Midlands, Southwestern, and Kentish.

Middle English is characterized by the reduction and loss of inflectional endings and the introduction of a large number of words derived first from Latin through Norman or Middle French and subsequently from Middle Dutch. By the late fifteenth century, East Midlands Middle English, the language of London, had acquired enough changes to be designated Early Modern English, the language of Mallory (Le Morte d'Arthur).

Scots

Scotland was completely Celtic-speaking until about the 10th century, at which point Celtic began to be increasingly replaced by Germanic. Although the Gaelic language lives on in Scotland, the majority of Scotland's inhabitants today speak English or Scots. Scots has a history dating back to the seventh century, having descended from Old Northumbrian, the northernmost variety of Old English.

By the 14th century it had been greatly influenced by Norse and Anglo-Norman immigrants; it was known as Inglis up until the end of the 15th century when the term Scots began to be used. Around this time the guid Scots tongue supplanted Latin as the language of literature and record in Scotland, except that no Scots Bible was produced.

Up to the end of the 17th century, Scots flourished, though it was increasingly influenced by English (known in Scotland as Southron). The union of the crowns in the early 17th century removed the political reason for separate languages and English essentially replaced Scots in the written record, until a revival in the early 19th century, inspired by the poetry and literature of such writers as Allan Ramsay and Robert Burns. Some Scottish authors still write in a modern-day version of Scots, and its colloquial variants are widely spoken.

(Primary source: The Oxford Companion to the English Language, ed. by Tom McArthur, Oxford University Press 1992.)

East Germanic

Gothic, an East Germanic language, is the oldest Germanic language of which much is known. The main text corpus is a Bible translation by the bishop Ulfila from the 4th century C.E. (Common Era, also known as AD). The East Germanic languages (Gothic, Vandalic, Burgundian, Lombardic, Rugian, Herulian, Bastarnae, and Scirian) do not have present-day descendants.

Gothic

Gothic was the language of the Goths, originally found in the lower parts of the Vistula basin, in present day Poland. The Goths are later found in Northern Italy and in the Iberian Peninsula. Their language is known from a few texts, of which only one is more extensive, namely the so-called Silver Bible (Codex Argenteus), a translation of the New Testament into Gothic. The translation was made by bishop Wulfila in the 4th century, and the manuscript is assumed to be written in Ravenna around 550 C. E. Gothic is extinct; it probably remained a spoken language longest on the Crimean Peninsula, in present day Ukraine, where it is reported to have been spoken until the 16th century.