census, 98% of people over the age of three were reported as speaking English. English is a West Germanic language brought around the 5th century CE to the east coast of what is now England by Germanic-speaking immigrants from around present-day northern Germany, who came to be known as the Anglo-Saxons. The fusion of these settlers' dialects became what is now termed Old English: the word English is derived from the name of the Angles. English soon displaced the previously predominant British Celtic and British Latin throughout most of England. It spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria. Following the economic, political, military, scientific, cultural, and colonial influence of Great Britain and the United Kingdom from the 18th century, via the British Empire, and of the United States since the mid-20th century, it has been widely dispersed around the world, and become the leading language of international discourse. Many English words are based on roots from Latin, because Latin in some form was the lingua franca of the Christian Church and of European intellectual life. The language was further influenced by the Old Norse language, with Viking invasions in the 8th and 9th centuries. The Norman conquest of England in the 11th century gave rise to heavy borrowings from Norman French, and vocabulary and spelling conventions began to give what had now become Middle English the superficial appearance of a close relationship with Romance languages. The Great Vowel Shift that began in the south of England in the 15th century is one of the historical events marking the separation of Middle and Modern English. Wales Welsh () emerged in the 6th century from Brittonic, the common ancestor of Welsh, Breton, Cornish, and the extinct language known as Cumbric. Welsh is thus a member of the Brythonic branch of the Celtic languages, and is spoken natively in Wales. There are also Welsh speakers in (The Colony), a Welsh settlement in Argentina, which began in 1865 and is situated mainly along the coast of Chubut Province in the south of Patagonia. Chubut estimates the number of Patagonian Welsh speakers to be about 1,500. Both the English and Welsh languages have official, but not always equal, status in Wales. English has de facto official status everywhere, whereas Welsh has limited, but still considerable, official, de jure, status in only the public service,