| Old English Dialects
Four principal dialects were spoken in Anglo-Saxon England:
Kentish, a dialect spoken in the area known now as Kent and Surrey [sari] (Суррей) and in the Isle of Wight. It had developed from the tongue of the Jutes and Frisians.
West Saxon, the main dialect of the Saxon group, spoken in the rest of England south of the Thames and the Bristol Channel, except Wales and Cornwall, where Celtic tongues were preserved. Other Saxon dialects in England have not survived in written form and are not known to modern scholars.
Mercian, a dialect derived from the speech of southern Angles and spoken chiefly in the kingdom of Mercia, that is in the central region, from the Thames to the Humber.
Northumbrian, another Anglian dialect spoken from the Humber north to the river Forth (hence the name North-Humbrian).
The boundaries between the dialects were uncertain and movable. The dialects passed into one another and dialectal forms were freely borrowed from one dialect to another.
Though Standard Modern English is in large part a descendant of Mercian speech, the dialect of OE is West Saxon. During the time of Alfred and for a long time thereafter, Winchester, the capital of Wessex and therefore in a sense of all England, was a center of English culture. Though London was at the same time an important and commercial city, it later acquired its cultural and even political importance.
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