influenced by another Germanic language, Old East Norse, spoken by Danish Viking invaders who settled mainly in the North-East. English, England and East Anglia are derived from words referring to the Angles: Englisc, Angelcynn and Englaland. For 300 years following the Norman Conquest in 1066, the Anglo-Norman language was the language of administration and few Kings of England spoke English. A large number of French words were absorbed into Old English, which also lost most of its inflections, resulting in Middle English. Around the year 1500, the Great Vowel Shift marked the transformation of Middle English into Modern English. The most famous surviving work from Old English is Beowulf; the most famous Middle English work being Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. The rise of Modern English began around the fifteenth century, with Early Modern English reaching its literary pinnacle at the time of William Shakespeare. Some scholars divide Early Modern English and Late Modern English at around 1800, in concert with the British conquest of much of the rest of the world, as the influence of native languages affected English enormously. Classification and related languages English belongs to the western sub-branch of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family of languages. The closest undoubted living relatives of English are Scots and the Frisian languages. West Frisian is spoken by approximately half a million people in the Dutch province of Friesland (Fryslân). Saterland Frisian is spoken in nearby areas of Germany. North Frisian is spoken on the North Frisian Islands in the North Sea. While native English speakers are generally able to read Scots, except for some odd unfamiliar words, Frisian is largely unintelligible (though it was much closer to modern English's predecessors, Middle English and especially Old English). After Scots and Frisian, the next closest relative is the modern Low German language of the eastern Netherlands and northern Germany, which was the old homeland of the Anglo-Saxon invaders of Britain. Other less closely related living languages include Dutch, German, and the North Germanic languages. Many French words are also intelligible to an English speaker, as English absorbed a tremendous amount of vocabulary from the Norman language after the Norman conquest, and French in later centuries; as a result, a substantial proportion of English vocabulary is very close to French, with some slight spelling differences (word endings, use of old French spellings, etc.) and some occasional shifts in meaning. English in