Middle English
Middle English is the forms of the English language that were spoken in England after the Norman Conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century, roughly coinciding with the High and Late Middle Ages. The Middle English dialects displaced the Old English dialects under the influence of Anglo-Norman French and Old Norse, and were in turn replaced in England by Early Modern English.
Middle English had significant regional variety and churn in its vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, and orthography. The main dialects were Northern, East Midland, West Midland, and Southern in England, as well as Early Scots and the Irish Fingallian and Yola.
During the Middle English period, many Old English grammatical features either became simplified or disappeared altogether. Noun, adjective, and verb inflections were simplified by the reduction of most grammatical case distinctions. Middle English also saw considerable adoption of Anglo-Norman vocabulary, especially in the areas of politics, law, the arts, and religion, as well as poetic and emotive diction. Conventional English vocabulary remained primarily Germanic in its sources, with Old Norse influences becoming more apparent. Significant changes in pronunciation took place, particularly involving long vowels and diphthongs, which in the later Middle English period began to undergo the Great Vowel Shift.
Little survives of early Middle English literature, due in part to Norman domination and the prestige that came with writing in French rather than English. During the 14th century, a new style of literature emerged with the works of writers including John Wycliffe and Geoffrey Chaucer, whose Canterbury Tales remains the most studied and read work of the period.
By the end of the period, and aided by the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1439, a standard based on the London dialects had become established. This largely formed the basis for Modern English spelling, although pronunciation has changed considerably since that time. In England, Middle English was succeeded by Early Modern English, which lasted until about 1650. In Scotland, Scots developed concurrently from a variant of the Northumbrian dialect.
History
Transition from Old English
The transition from Late Old English to Early Middle English had taken place by the 1150s to 1180s, the period when the Augustinian canon Orrm wrote the Ormulum, one of the oldest surviving texts in Middle English.Contact with Old Norse aided the development of English from a synthetic language with relatively free word order to a more analytic language with a stricter word order, as both Old English and Old Norse were synthetic languages with complicated inflections. Communication between Vikings in the Danelaw and their Anglo-Saxon neighbours resulted in the erosion of inflection in both languages; this effect was characterized as being of a "substantive, pervasive, and of a democratic" manner. Like close cousins, Old Norse and Old English resembled each other, and with a lot of vocabulary and grammatical structures in common, speakers of each language roughly understood each other, but according to the historian Simeon Potler, the main difference lay in their inflectional endings, which led to much confusion within the mixed population that existed in the Danelaw, thus endings tended gradually to become obscured and finally lost, "simplifying English grammar" in the process, leading to the emergence of the analytic pattern. The dramatic changes that happened in English contribute to the acceptance of the hypothesis that Old Norse had a more profound impact on the development of Middle and Modern English than any other language.
Viking influence on Old English is most apparent in pronouns, modals, comparatives, pronominal adverbs, conjunctions, and prepositions show the most marked Danish influence. The best evidence of Scandinavian influence appears in extensive word borrowings; however, texts from the period in Scandinavia and Northern England do not provide certain evidence of an influence on syntax.
While the Old Norse influence was strongest in the dialects under Danish control, which approximately covered Yorkshire, the central and eastern Midlands, and the East of England, words in the spoken language emerged in the 10th and 11th centuries near the transition from Old to Middle English. Influence on the written languages only appeared from the beginning of the 13th century onwards; this delay in Scandinavian lexical influence in English has been attributed to the lack of written evidence from the areas of Danish control, as the majority of written sources from Old English were produced in the West Saxon dialect spoken in Wessex, the heart of Anglo-Saxon political power at the time.
The Norman Conquest of England in 1066 saw the replacement of the top levels of the English-speaking political and ecclesiastical hierarchies by Norman rulers who spoke a dialect of Old French, now known as Old Norman, which developed in England into Anglo-Norman. The use of Norman as the preferred language of literature and polite discourse fundamentally altered the role of Old English in education and administration, even though many Normans of this period were illiterate and depended on the clergy for written communication and record-keeping. A significant number of Norman words were borrowed into English and used alongside native Germanic words with similar meanings. Examples of Germanic/Norman pairs in Modern English include pig and pork, calf and veal, wood and forest, and freedom and liberty.
The role of Anglo-Norman as the language of government and law can be seen in the abundance of Modern English words for the mechanisms of government that are derived from Anglo-Norman, such as court, judge, jury, appeal, and parliament. There are also many Norman-derived terms relating to the chivalric cultures that arose in the 12th century, an era of feudalism, seigneurialism, and crusading.
Words were often taken from Latin, usually through French transmission. This gave rise to various synonyms, including kingly, royal, and regal. Later French appropriations were derived from standard, rather than Norman, French. Examples of the resulting doublet pairs include warden and guardian.
The end of Anglo-Saxon rule did not result in immediate changes to the language. The general population would have spoken the same dialects as they had before the Conquest. Once the writing of Old English came to an end, Middle English had no standard language, only dialects that evolved individually from Old English.
Ralph d'Escures’
Homily on the Virgin Mary, a French work translated into Latin and then English in the first half of the 12th Century, was either one of "the very latest compositions in Old English, or, as some scholars would
have it, the very earliest in Middle English," having an Old English vocabulary co-existing with simplified inflexion.
Early Middle English
Early Middle English has a largely Anglo-Saxon vocabulary but a greatly simplified inflectional system. The grammatical relations that were expressed in Old English by the dative and instrumental cases were replaced in Early Middle English with prepositional constructions. The Old English genitive -es survives in the -'s of the modern English possessive, but most of the other case endings disappeared in the Early Middle English period, including most of the roughly one dozen forms of the definite article. The dual personal pronouns also disappeared from English during this period.The loss of case endings was part of a general trend from inflections to fixed word order that also occurred in other Germanic languages. Therefore, it cannot be attributed simply to the influence of French-speaking sections of the population; English did, after all, remain the vernacular. It is also argued that Norse immigrants to England had a great impact on the loss of inflectional endings in Middle English. One argument is that, although Norse and English speakers were somewhat comprehensible to each other due to similar morphology, the Norse speakers' inability to reproduce the ending sounds of English words influenced Middle English's loss of inflectional endings.
Important texts for the reconstruction of the evolution of Middle English out of Old English are the Peterborough Chronicle, which continued to be compiled up to 1154; the Ormulum, a biblical commentary probably composed in Lincolnshire in the second half of the 12th century, incorporating a unique phonetic spelling system; and the Ancrene Wisse and the Katherine Group, religious texts written for anchoresses, apparently in the West Midlands in the early 13th century. The language found in the last two works is sometimes called the AB language, one of a range of regional dialects: East Midlands, South West, Western and Northern.
Additional literary sources of the 12th and 13th centuries include Layamon's Brut and The Owl and the Nightingale.
Some scholars have defined "Early Middle English" as encompassing English texts up to 1350. This longer time frame would extend the corpus to include many Middle English Romances.
Late Middle English
Gradually, the wealthy and the government Anglicised again, although Norman remained the dominant language of literature and law until the 14th century, even after the loss of the majority of the continental possessions of the English monarchy.In the aftermath of the Black Death in the 14th century, there was significant migration into London, particularly from the counties of the East of England and the East Midlands and, to a lesser extent, from the West Midlands and the North of England, and a new prestige London dialect began to develop as a result of this clash of the different dialects, that was based chiefly on the speech of the East Midlands but also influenced by that of other regions. The writing of this period, however, continues to reflect a variety of regional forms of English. The Ayenbite of Inwyt, a translation of a French confessional prose work, completed in 1340, is written in a Kentish dialect. The best known writer of Middle English, Geoffrey Chaucer, wrote in the second half of the 14th century in the emerging London dialect, although he also portrays some of his characters as speaking in northern dialects, as in "The Reeve's Tale".
In the English-speaking areas of lowland Scotland, an independent standard was developing, based on the Northumbrian dialect. This would develop into what came to be known as the Scots language.
A large number of terms for abstract concepts were adopted directly from scholastic philosophical Latin. Examples are "absolute", "act", "demonstration", and "probable".