The Anglo-Saxons were a cultural and ethnic group that inhabited much of England and what became southeastern Scotland from the 5th to the 11th centuries. The term Anglo-Saxon generally refers to the period and people of early medieval England, before the Norman conquest of 1066 introduced Norman culture and the French language, or Old English, the language spoken by the Anglo-Saxons and closely related to Old Frisian, Old Dutch, and Old Saxon, which developed into the Modern West Germanic languages.