Editing Middle English (section)

==History==

=== Transition from Old English ===
[[File:Middle English Dialects.png|thumb|The dialects of Middle English {{circa|1300}}]]

The transition from Late [[Old English]] to Early Middle English had taken place by the 1150s to 1180s, the period when the [[Augustinians|Augustinian canon]] [[Orrm]] wrote the ''[[Ormulum]]'', one of the oldest surviving texts in Middle English.<ref name="Johannesson2">{{Cite book |last1=Johannesson |first1=Nils-Lennart |url=https://reunido.uniovi.es/index.php/SELIM/article/download/20530/16515 |title=Ormulum |last2=Cooper |first2=Andrew |date=2023 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0-19-289043-6 |series=Early English text society}}</ref>

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,<ref name=":0" /><ref name=":3">{{Cite book |last=Baugh |first=Albert |title=A History of the English Language |publisher=Routledge & Kegan Paul |year=1951 |location=London |pages=110–130 (Danelaw); 131–132 (Normans)}}</ref><ref name=":2">{{Cite book |last=Jespersen |first=Otto |title=Growth and Structure of the English Language |publisher=B. G. Teubner |year=1919 |location=Leipzig |pages=58–82}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |last=Potter |first=Simeon |url=https://archive.org/details/ourlanguage00pott |title=Our Language |publisher=Penguin |year=1950 |location=Harmondsworth |pages=[https://archive.org/details/ourlanguage00pott/page/33 33] |url-access=registration}}</ref> leading to the emergence of the analytic pattern.<ref>{{Cite book |last1=Thomason |first1=Sarah Grey |title=Language contact, creolization, and genetic linguistics |last2=Kaufman |first2=Terrence |date=1988 |publisher=[[University of California Press]] |isbn=978-0-520-07893-2 |edition=1. paperback print |series=Anthropology: Linguistics |location=Berkeley |pages=303}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |last1=McCrum |first1=Robert |title=The Story of English |last2=Cran |first2=William |last3=MacNeil |first3=Robert |date=1986 |publisher=[[Penguin Books]] |isbn=978-0-14-200231-5 |location=New York |publication-date=2002 |pages=79}}</ref> 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.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Crystal |first=David |url=https://archive.org/details/cambridgeencyclo00crys |title=The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language |publisher=Cambridge University Press |year=1995 |isbn=978-0-521-40179-1 |page=[https://archive.org/details/cambridgeencyclo00crys_012/page/n35 32] |url-access=limited}}</ref><ref name=":1">{{Cite book |title=The Story of English |last=McCrum |first=Robert |publisher=Faber and Faber |year=1987 |location=London |pages=70–71}}</ref><ref>{{Cite AV media |date=27 December 2014 |publisher=BBC |title=Birth of a Language |time=35:00–37:20 |url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-OiNxknXdY |via=YouTube}}</ref>  

Viking influence on Old English is most apparent in [[pronouns]], modals, comparatives, [[pronominal adverbs]] (like ''hence'' and ''together''), 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. However, at least one scholarly study of this influence shows that Old English may have been replaced entirely by Norse, by virtue of the change from Old English to Norse syntax.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Faarlund |first1=Jan Terje |last2=Emonds |first2=Joseph E. |title=English as North Germanic |journal=Language Dynamics and Change |publisher=Brill |volume=6 |issue=1 |year=2016 |issn=2210-5824 |doi=10.1163/22105832-00601002 |doi-access=free |pages=1–17}}</ref> 

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;<ref name=":3" /> 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.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Wright |first1=Mary Anne |url=https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/elldr/files/2022/09/Wright2022.pdf |title=The Old Norse Influence on English, the 'Viking Hypothesis', and Middle English Word Order Parallels with Icelandic |year=2022 |publisher=English Language & Linguistics Dissertation Repository (ELLDR) |edition=2nd |location=Newcastle University |page=11 |access-date=August 24, 2024}}</ref>

The [[Norman Conquest]] of England in 1066 saw the replacement of the top levels of the English-speaking political and ecclesiastical hierarchies by [[Normans|Norman]] rulers who spoke a dialect of [[Old French]], now known as [[Old Norman]], which developed in England into [[Anglo-Norman language|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 language|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''.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=White |first=Taylor |date=1901 |title=A Philological Study in Natural History |url=https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/TPRSNZ1901-34.2.8.1.9 |journal=Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand |volume=34}}</ref>
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'' (inherited from Old English), ''royal'' (from French, inherited from Vulgar Latin), and ''regal'' (from French, which borrowed it from Classical Latin). Later French appropriations were derived from standard, rather than Norman, French. Examples of the resulting [[doublet (linguistics)|doublet]] pairs include ''warden'' (from Norman) and ''guardian'' (from later French; both share a common ancestor loaned from Germanic).<ref>{{cite encyclopedia |url=https://deaf-server.adw.uni-heidelberg.de/book/garder |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230829010554/https://deaf-server.adw.uni-heidelberg.de/book/garder |archive-date=2023-08-29 |encyclopedia=Dictionnaire Étymologique de l'Ancien Français (DEAF) |title= Garder |language=fr}} </ref>

The end of Anglo-Saxon rule did not result in immediate changes to the language. The general population would have spoken the same [[Old English dialects|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.<ref>{{cite web |author=<!-- not stated --> |date=12 April 2023 |title=From Old to New: How the English Language Evolved Throughout History |url= https://online.utpb.edu/about-us/articles/humanities/from-old-to-new-how-the-english-language-evolved-throughout-history/|website=UTPB |location=Odessa, Texas |publisher=University of Texas Permian Basin |access-date=7 March 2025}}</ref>

[[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.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Treharne |first1=Elaine |chapter=The Life of English in the Mid-Twelfth Century: Ralph d'Escures's Homily on the Virgin Mary |title=Writers of the Reign of Henry II |date=2006 |pages=169–186 |doi=10.1007/978-1-137-08855-0_8|isbn=978-1-349-73340-8 }}</ref>

===Early Middle English===
Early Middle English (1150–1350)<ref>{{cite book |last1=Fuster-Márquez |first1=Miguel |last2=Calvo García de Leonardo |first2=Juan José |year=2011 |title=A Practical Introduction to the History of English |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=QQLBqKjxuvAC |location=[València] |publisher=Universitat de València |page=21 |isbn=9788437083216 |access-date=19 December 2017 }}</ref> has a largely Anglo-Saxon vocabulary (with [[Scandinavian influence in English|many Norse borrowings]] in the northern parts of the country) but a greatly simplified [[inflection]]al system. The grammatical relations that were expressed in Old English by the [[dative]] and [[instrumental case]]s were replaced in Early Middle English with [[preposition]]al constructions. The Old English [[genitive]] -{{lang|ang|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 [[Old English declension#Articles|roughly one dozen forms]] of the [[definite article]] ("the"). The [[Dual (grammatical number)|dual]] personal pronouns (denoting exactly two) 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 (though more slowly and to a lesser extent), and, 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<ref>McWhorter, ''Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue,'' 2008, pp. 89–136.</ref> 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 {{lang|enm|[[Ancrene Wisse]]}} and the [[Katherine Group]], religious texts written for [[anchoress]]es, apparently in the [[West Midlands (region)|West Midlands]] in the early 13th century.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Burchfield |first=Robert W. |chapter=Ormulum |editor-first=Joseph R. |editor-last=Strayer |title=Dictionary of the Middle Ages |location=New York |publisher=Charles Scribner's Sons |year=1987 |volume=9 |page=280 |isbn=978-0-684-18275-9 }}, p. 280</ref> The language found in the last two works is sometimes called the [[AB language]]: one of a range of  regional dialects: East Midlands (London), South West (Kentish), Western (AB) and Northern.<ref>{{cite web |last1=Murchison |first1=Krista |title=Theme: Middle English Dialects |url=https://openmedieval.leidenuniv.nl/pages/dialects.html |website=Tomes |access-date=21 February 2025}}</ref>

Additional literary sources of the 12th and 13th centuries include ''[[Layamon's Brut]]'' and ''[[The Owl and the Nightingale]]''.

Some scholars<ref>{{cite web|url=http://hcmc.uvic.ca/makingEME/about.html|title=Making Early Middle English: About the Conference|website=hcmc.uvic.ca}}</ref> 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 (especially those of the ''[[Auchinleck manuscript]]'' {{circa|1330}}).

===Late Middle English===
Gradually, the wealthy and the government [[Anglicisation|Anglicised]] again, although Norman (and subsequently [[Law French|French]]) 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]] of the 14th century, there was significant migration into [[London]], of people from the counties of the east and central [[Midlands]] as well as from the [[South East England]], and a new [[prestige (sociolinguistics)|prestige]] London dialect began to develop as a result of this clash of the different dialects,<ref>{{cite book |last1=Montgomery |first1=Martin |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=isd_AgAAQBAJ&dq=great+vowel+shift+londoners&pg=PA56 |title=Ways of Reading: Advanced Reading Skills for Students of English Literature |last2=Durant |first2=Alan |last3=Fabb |first3=Nigel |last4=Furniss |first4=Tom |last5=Mills |first5=Sara |date=24 January 2007 |publisher=Routledge |isbn=978-1-134-28025-4 |language=en |access-date=14 February 2023}}</ref> that was based chiefly on the speech of the [[East Midlands]] but also influenced by that of other regions.<ref name="Wright">{{cite encyclopedia |author= Wright, L. |title=About the evolution of Standard English |encyclopedia= Studies in English Language and Literature |publisher=[[Routledge]] |year=2012 |page=99ff |isbn=978-1138006935}}</ref> The writing of this period, however, continues to reflect a variety of regional forms of English. The {{lang|enm|[[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 [[medieval Latin|scholastic philosophical Latin]] (rather than via French). Examples are "absolute", "act", "demonstration", and "probable".<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Franklin |first1=James |author-link1=James Franklin (philosopher) |date=1983 |title=Mental furniture from the philosophers |url=http://www.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/mental.pdf |journal=Et Cetera |volume=40 |issue= |pages=177–191 |doi= |access-date=29 June 2021}}</ref>

{{anchor|Chancery Standard}}

===Transition to Early Modern English===
The Chancery Standard of written English emerged {{circa|1430}} in official documents that, since the [[Norman Conquest]], had normally been written in French.<ref name="Wright"/> Like Chaucer's work, this new standard was based on the East Midlands-influenced speech of London. Clerks using this standard were usually familiar with [[French language|French]] and [[Latin]], influencing the forms they chose. The Chancery Standard, which was adopted slowly, was used in England by bureaucrats for most official purposes, excluding those of the Church and legalities, which used Latin and [[Law French]]  respectively.

The Chancery Standard's influence on later forms of written English is disputed, but it did undoubtedly provide the core around which [[Early Modern English]] formed.{{Citation needed|date=June 2018}} Early Modern English emerged with the help of [[William Caxton]]'s printing press, developed during the 1470s. The press stabilized English through a push towards standardization, led by Chancery Standard enthusiast and writer [[Richard Pynson]].<ref name="ReferenceA">cf. 'Sawles Warde' (The protection ''of the soul'')</ref> [[Early Modern English]] began in the 1540s after the printing and wide distribution of the [[English Bible]] and [[Book of Common Prayer|Prayer Book]], which made the new standard of English publicly recognisable and lasted until about 1650.