The letter W is a child of the fall of Rome. In the fifth century CE, the western half of the Roman Empire disintegrated into a patchwork of new kingdoms and new rulers. The reasons behind this collapse of imperial power are complex, but a large role was played by various peoples who had formerly lived outside its borders.

The Romans might have looked down on these migrants as ‘barbarians’, but they also increasingly came to rely on them for military support. They were foederati—peoples bound by treaty to fight Rome’s enemies in return for land and food. It was only with the help of the foederati (a Latin word related to English federation) that the Romans were able to see off the threat of Attila the Hun in 451.

Yet the more power these regional leaders had, the less authority the emperor and the central state could wield. This culminated in the overthrowing of the last emperor in the west in 476. Language would have been a part of the divide between Roman and barbarian.

By the fourth and fifth centuries, the western empire had become overwhelmingly Latin-speaking. By contrast, the newcomers spoke their own languages, perhaps with a passing knowledge of Latin too. From what we can tell, a great many of these migrants spoke Germanic languages.

One of these incoming tongues was the ancestor of the language you are reading right now, English, which arrived in the remains of Roman Britain during this era. Germanic-speaking elites could now be found from southern Spain to the coasts of the North Sea. These new rulers were keen to sell themselves as legitimate successors to the emperors, and there was considerable continuity during this turbulent period.

By keeping up appearances and styling themselves as good Romans, they could dampen the jealousy of the old aristocracy and gain popular support. The new kings did not insist that scribes ought to write official documents in their own Germanic tongue, but eagerly adopted the more prestigious Latin language. This worked fine most of the time, but might occasionally hit a snag.

Latin-writing lands were now ruled by men whose names contained un-Latin sounds. A new king might want his scribes to draw up a charter for some great display of generosity, but how were the scribes to spell that king’s name? One of the troublesome sounds for writers was /w/. This is the common consonant in English water and want, and it would have been present in kingly Germanic names like Clovis, Vitiges and Odoacer.

The trouble was, the Latin alphabet now had no letter for this sound. Nonetheless, W established itself as a standard way to spell the Germanic sound /w/, including in Latin texts produced in England. In ancient times, you would’ve heard the sound /w/ all around the Mediterranean Sea.

Both Latin and Ancient Greek once used the sound, and both the Romans and the Greeks had letters to spell it. This was a sound that they, just like English, had inherited as part of their common Indo-European ancestry. Yet, as we saw in Chapters F and U, it was now foreign to them.

In Greek, the consonant and its letter Ϝ had faded away, while in Latin, V had come to stand for the fricative /v/ instead.91 Time and time again, we find the ancient sound /w/ being lost or altered across the Indo-European family of languages. It would later happen in Continental Germanic languages too; in German today, W stands for /v/. The English consonant /w/ is actually a rare survivor, rescued from potential change by its migration to the island of Britain.

Out of the meeting of languages and writing in the new post-classical world, a letter was born to spell the alien /w/. From the sixth century onwards, likely starting in the powerful kingdom of Francia, innovative scribes doubled U. Within Latin texts, we find Germanically-named individuals like the abbot UUandeberctus and King UUaldemarus.

The two letters were increasingly written as -one, and at least by the 11th century, they had fused into the letter W as we know it.