Old English was an Anglo-Frisian language

It was brought to south-eastern Great Britain in the 5th century AD

Germanic settlers from various parts of northwest Germany (Saxons, Angles) as well as Denmark (Jutes).

The Germanic invaders dominated the original Celtic-speaking inhabitants, whose languages survive largely in Scotland, Wales, Brittany, Cornwall, and Ireland

The dialects spoken by the invaders formed what would be called Old English or Anglo-Saxon

"Anglo-Saxon" is the term applied to the English-speaking inhabitants of Britain up to the time of the Norman Conquest (1066), when the Anglo-Saxon line of English kings came to an end

Old English shared its Germanic heritage in vocabulary, sentence structure and grammar with its sister languages in continental Europe

Some features were specific to the West Germanic language family

Some other features were inherited from the Proto-Germanic language

Old English was fully inflected with five grammatical cases: the nominative, accusative, genitive, dative and instrumental

It had dual plural forms for referring to groups of two objects, in addition to the usual singular and plural forms

It assigned gender to all nouns, including those that describe inanimate objects: for example, sēo sunne (the Sun) was feminine, while se mōna (the Moon) was masculine (cf. modern German die Sonne vs. der Mond)

Old English was spelled essentially as it was pronounced