Middle English creole hypothesis

The Middle English creole hypothesis is a proposal that Middle English was a creole, which is usually defined as a language that develops during contact between two groups speaking different languages and that loses much of the grammatical elaboration of its source languages in the process. The vast differences between Old English and Middle English, and English's status as one of the least structurally elaborated of the Germanic languages, have led some historical linguists to argue that the language underwent creolisation at around the 11th century, shortly after the Norman conquest of England. Other linguists suggest that creolisation began earlier, during the Scandinavian incursions of the 9th and 10th centuries.

Much of the debate over the Middle English creole hypothesis revolves around how terms like creole or creolisation should be defined. While there does not exist a consensus that Middle English should be classified as a creole, there does exist a consensus that Old English underwent fairly radical grammatical simplification in the process of evolving into Middle English, and that this evolution was due in large part to contact with speakers from other language groups.

Middle English as an Anglo-Norman creole

File:Origins of English PieChart.svg

Only an estimated 26% of English words are of Germanic origin. However, these include the core vocabulary and most commonly used words in the language.

This hypothesis was first proposed by C.-J. Bailey and K. Maroldt in 1977,<ref name=BM>Template:Cite book</ref> followed by Nicole Domingue<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> and Patricia Poussa.<ref name=PPoussa>Template:Cite journal</ref> These authors argued that Middle English was a creole that developed when the Anglo-Norman-speaking invaders learned Old English imperfectly and expanded their reduced English into a full language. Evidence cited in support of the hypothesis was the heavy admixture of Norman words into the English lexicon, including some basic words such as the words for uncle, niece, danger, trouble, cause; the frequent loss of Old English verb and adjective affixes in favor of loans from Norman (e.g. enclosid, inpacient, disheritance); a number of grammatical changes that appear to have been modeled after Norman, such as expression of the perfect aspect using the verb have (as in "she has eaten"), the use of of to express the genitive (as in French {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}), and constructions such as "it is me", "it is him" (compare modern French {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}, {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}); and English's complete loss of case and gender markers on nouns.

Defining creole and creolisation

Linguists' conception of what constitutes a creole has changed substantially in the years since Bailey & Maroldt's original proposal, and the question of whether Middle English is a French creole depends to some extent on how one defines the term creole.<ref name=ISingh>Template:Cite book</ref>

Broadly speaking, two definitions of creole and creolisation are current in the linguistic literature:<ref name=MSebba>Template:Cite book</ref>

Middle English comes reasonably close to satisfying the three criteria that define McWhorter's creole prototype. For instance, by the end of the twelfth century, grammatical gender was all but lost in northern English dialects, and two centuries later it had disappeared even in the south.<ref name=BStrang/> However Middle English did not lose all of Old English's noncompositional derivational morphology; for instance, Old English understandan → Middle English understanden → English understand. Nevertheless, Middle English is highly simplified compared with Old English, suggesting, according to McWhorter, a contact-based explanation, though not necessarily contact with French:

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Scandinavian influence

While they emphasised the influence of French, both Bailey & Maroldt<ref name=BM/> and Poussa<ref name=PPoussa/> also discussed the possibility that it was contact between Old English speakers and the invading Vikings during the ninth and tenth centuries, that was responsible for much of the loss of Germanic inheritance, followed only later by a Norman French influence. According to this scenario, Middle English would be more appropriately described as an Old Norse creole rather than a Norman French creole.

A number of arguments have been advanced in support of the hypothesis that Scandinavian contact profoundly influenced the course of English's evolution prior to the Norman invasion:<ref name=TK/><ref name=McW2002>Template:Cite journal</ref>

• Unlike the French elites, Scandinavians settled among the general population and often married Anglo-Saxon women.
• Lexical borrowing from Old Norse, while not as extensive as later borrowings from Norman French, included many domestic content words (happy, knife, skirt, window, neck) as well as commonly-used words such as they, their, them, though, both, same, against.
• Loss of grammatical gender in English appears to have occurred first in the north and east, the regions of greatest Scandinavian settlement.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
• The rapid loss of Old English verbal prefixes is attributed to the fact that Old Norse had already lost most of the Germanic prefixes, and so lacked cognates for English prefixed verbs.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

McWhorter,<ref name=McW2005/> in summarizing the evidence for Scandinavian influence, writes that "the evidence strongly suggests that extensive second-language acquisition by Scandinavians from the eighth century onwards simplified English grammar to a considerable extent". More specifically, the claim is that the inflectional and other losses in English resulted from Old Norse speakers' incomplete acquisition of English.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Creolisation of English might have occurred due to interaction between Common Brittonic and English, however evidence supporting the influence of the Celtic languages on English is hampered by a lack of written sources.<ref>Görlach, M., "Middle English – a creole?", in Linguistics Across Historical and Geographical Boundaries, Part 1, de Gruyter 1986, pp. 329ff.</ref>

Middle English as a semi-creole

A number of linguists, e.g. John Holm,<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> have argued that creolisation occurs along a cline, that is, that a language can be creolised to various degrees. Even if Middle English does not fully satisfy the criteria that would make it a creole, it has been argued that it might still be characterisable as a semi-creole.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> A semi-creole is defined as a language that harbors symptoms of a break in transmission due to large-scale adult acquisition, without those symptoms being extreme enough to put it in the creole class. Such languages are often thought of as dialects of the lexifier language rather than as different languages. Recognized examples of semi-creoles include Afrikaans (Dutch as morphologically streamlined by contact with Khoisan), Reunionnais French, Lingala, and Shaba Swahili. McWhorter<ref name=McW2002/> argues that English is even more extreme than Afrikaans in having shed much of its Germanic content, and therefore that the case for describing English as a semi-creole is even stronger than for Afrikaans.

See also

• English-based creole languages
• History of English
• Influence of French on English
• Template:Annotated link
• Germanic substrate hypothesis

External links

• Brandy Ryan, "Middle English as Creole: "Still trying not to refer to you lot as 'bloody colonials'"", University of Toronto, 2005