English is very much a European language, as the story of its origins shows. These origins lie rather long ago chronologically, but not particularly far away geographically. It was more than 1,500 years ago that boatloads of Germanic people started crossing the North Sea to the eastern shores of Britain. But they had not come from very far away. The Germanic people who arrived were mostly members of the tribal groupings we now refer to as the Jutes, Angles, Saxons and Frisians, who had resided mainly in coastal districts just across the North Sea from Britain.