Editing Middle English (section)

=== 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>