Old English

Old English (Ænglisc, Anglisc, Englisc) or Anglo-Saxon is the earliest historical form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. 

Dialects

Old English should not be regarded as a single monolithic entity, just as Modern English is also not monolithic. It emerged over time out of the many dialects and languages of the colonising tribes, and it is perhaps only towards the later Anglo-Saxon period that these can be considered to have constituted a single national language. Even then, Old English continued to exhibit much local and regional variation, remnants of which remain in Modern English dialects.