As the name of this period indicates, Middle English (ME), constitutes a kind of middle stage within the evolution of English when one looks at it from a contemporary perspective. Lasting from about 1150 to about 1500, ME is the period that lies between Old English (650-1100) and (Early) Modern English (1500-today). But rather than regarding the period as a purely temporal middle stage, ME should be seen as a transition point. The transformation of English in the Middle Ages marks its turn from the early Anglo-Saxon to the modern period. By the end of the ME stage, all the basic linguistic parameters that lead to its modern structure and anatomy are established.

In the Middle Ages, English was marked by important landmarks that drove its development into a direction that was markedly different from the development of other West Germanic languages such as German. The evolution of English from the second half of the Old English to the end of the Middle English period was deeply influenced by language contact situations that disturbed its smooth development as a Germanic language.

In early Anglo-Saxon times, Old English dialects co-existed with Latin, the language of church. However, while Latin was only spoken by a small educated elite, the status of English was strong; this is reflected by the impressive literature written in the West-Saxon standard.

The linguistic anatomy of Old English was first affected by its contact with Old Norse in the North, North East and mid-East of England – the result of Viking invasions and settlement. Leading to an adstratum situation, Scandinavian flowed into English through mutual exchange in the regions mentioned above.

The second decisive language contact situation to strike English defines the Middle English period to a great extent. Namely, the advent of French after 1066.

The landmark that triggered many of the most striking changes in the Middle English period was the Norman Conquest of England. In 1066, William the Conqueror invaded England from Normandy and killed king Harold in the Battle of Hastings.

The events at Hastings were woven into the famous Bayeux tapestry - a unique and extraordinary document to reflect this episode of English history.

The historical and political context that led to the Norman invasion frames a complex story about collaboration, intrigue, and treachery. Both Harold and William the Conqueror had claims to the throne, which they both regarded as their rightful inheritance. When William invaded England he came to gain what he regarded his own possession and right.

The origin of the Normans is hidden in their very name: Nor(se)man. The Normans came to France in the 9th century. They were Norwegian Vikings who raided the French territory when sailing up the Seine. In 911 their king, Rollo, forced the French king to cede French territory.

As a consequence, Rollo became the independent ruler of Normandy. By 1000 Normandy became one of the most powerful and successful regions in Western Europe. In the process, the Normans adopted the language, religion, and customs of the surrounding French population.

What consequences did the Norman invasion have for the English population? It is uncontroversial that the Normans did not civilize the Anglo-Saxon population. The Anglo-Saxons had a highly developed culture: they had an extraordinary literature and crafted beautiful jewellery, they were christianized, and profited from a well-developed and well-functioning economy. The same is true for the Vikings who mixed with them in the North and East of England. Therefore, the Norman Conquest was not a mission of civilization.

Very simply, the Normans brought power with them: the Normans were more powerful politically and ecclesiastically.

At the time of the Conquest, the Anglo-Saxon kingdom was politically weak due to internal quarrels. Since many of the Anglo-Saxon nobility were wiped out at Hastings, the English ruling class was replaced by Norman noblemen. The Normans imported the feudal system and lordship by taking the key positions in the state and church. These positions correspond to the high ranks of power in the medieval social order, which was defined by the three-estates of nobility, clergy, and peasants. Since the grammar schools also lay in the hands of the church in the Middle Ages, the Normans also controlled education. In a nutshell, they established the new upper-class.

Material tokens of Norman power are still conspicuously present in today’s England. The Normans built around 1000 castles, among them the White Tower of London.

Evidence of Norman ecclesiastical power is visible in the many impressive cathedrals usually constructed in Romanesque style.

In addition, the Normans also imported their national symbols. The three golden lions in the coat of arms of England are derived from the symbol of the kingdom of Normandy.

But, the Normans also brought their language – Norman French.

The Norman Conquest influenced the linguistic landscape of England decisively. The following statement in the Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester from around 1300 illustrates this nicely:

Thus came, lo, England into Normandy's hand: and the Normans then knew how to speak only their own language, and spoke French as they did at home, and also had their children taught it, so that noblemen of this land, that come of their stock, all keep to the same speech that they received from them; for unless a man knows French, people make little account of him. But low men keep to English, and to their own language still. I think that in the whole world there are no countries that do not keep their own language, except England alone. But people know well that it is good to master both, because the more a man knows the more honoured he is.

So the chronicle indicates that the Norman upper-classes, first and foremost, spoke French – Norman French to be precise - and they taught this language to their children. French was the prestigious H-language. English, however, was the language of the lower classes – the vernacular. But, English was spoken by the majority of the population of England.

The chronicler bemoans this situation as being unique in the world: any nation should stick to its own language – in this case English. However, he nevertheless regards it as a virtue to speak both languages. Clearly, to learn French was the only way possible to climb up the social ladder. But what did the English vernacular look like?

Obviously, the advent of Norman French did not determine the use of Old English dialects. Conservative forms of English were still in use until about 1150. For instance, the archbishopric of Canterbury was fairly resistant to linguistic changes.

The move from Old to Middle English was not a drastic but a gradual development. Nevertheless, there is a recognizable gap in the transition from the Old English to the Middle English text corpus. This is the consequence of the political changes after the Norman Conquest. Written English was basically non-existent for about 100-150 years.

Writing, being an upper-class and church issue, was dominated by the Norman French ruling class. As we have seen, this class used French or Latin and not English. As a consequence, the West-Saxon written standard was replaced by French and Latin texts. Literature in English only started to be written again from about 1150 onwards.

Due to the absence of a written standard for English, this literature is highly dialectal. Middle English writers used a dialectal pronunciation-based spelling.

Middle English literature includes a variety of genres constituting an impressive corpus of Middle English literature, the most celebrated text being Geoffrey Chaucer’s masterpiece, the Canterbury Tales (1387, East Midland dialect)

The Middle English texts reveal that English went through considerable internal developments irrespective of the language contact situation with French: The Old English dialects evolved and became ME dialects.

Apart from changes in pronunciation, the most striking characteristic of this process is the influence of Scandiavian in the Danelaw, which led to the division of the Midland dialects (the former Mercian dialects) into the East and West Midlands dialect areas.

Among many other features, the Scandinavian influence can be seen in the use of the plural 3rd person personal pronoun they, which was first used in the North and East Midlands and then spread to the other dialects from there.

Looking at the upper-classes again, one can also find interesting shifts in the status of French. These shifts in sociolinguistics status possibly helped English to gain the status that it has today.

First, around 1250, Norman French came out of fashion at court and was replaced by Central French (Parisian French). This already indicates that the bonds of the Anglo-Norman nobility with Normandy became weaker and weaker.

From Around 1300 onwards, the status of French declined quite drastically, but why? Quite simply, the change in attitude towards French was caused by political developments. Living both in Normandy and in England the Anglo-Norman kings had one foot on the island and the other on the continent.

In 1204, King John got into conflict with king Philip of France and lost Normandy to the French kingdom, which ruled over England for one year. King John regained England, but due to the conflict, the majority of the Norman nobility fled to England. As a consequence, the bonds of England with Normandy were weakened and developing a spirit of English nationalism the Anglo-Norman nobility gradually became English.

In 1348 English became the language of grammar-schools (excluding Oxford and Cambridge where Latin was used) and in 1362 the Language Act declared English the official language of the law courts. In 1399, Henry IV was the first man on the throne with English as his mother tongue. From 1423 onwards all parliament records were written in English.

With the decline of French, English regained its social status as the language of the ruling class. As a consequence, a new written standard was necessary. Although the modern English standard, as we know it, was only established in the centuries to follow, a minimum standard had already developed towards the end of the Middle English period. The standard was based on the East Midland dialect.

The most important reason for this dialect to become the basis for the novel standard was the strong economic and cultural influence of the East-Midlands triangle: London-Oxford-Cambridge. This centre attracted a great number of people from all over England all of them contributing to the development of the new standard.

A further important factor that supported the standardisation process was the introduction of the printing press by William Caxton in 1476. In addition, the Chancery scribes, the writers of the royal administrative documents, had their office at Westminster very close to Caxton’s printing press. It is possible that their spelling influenced the written standard as well, though only marginally.

The contact with French obviously did not leave English unaffected. The most striking effect of language contact with French is the vast amount of French loan words that flooded the English language and transformed its lexicon.

The influx of French loan words correlates with the decline of the status of French. In this context, Barber (1993: 145) states: “In the eleventh and twelth centuries, when French was the unchallenged language of the upper classes, the number of words borrowed by English was not great, but in the thirteenth, and still more the fourteenth century, there was a flood of loan-words.” Bilingual speakers who switched to English felt the need for specialised terms and brought those terms over from French, replacing synonymous English words.

One can compare this to German computerese. Talking about computer issues in German leads to the automatic influx of specialist English computer vocabulary. The reason is simple. The lingua franca of information technology is English. This domain specific functional register flows into German once the relevant concepts are addressed.

A very similar process of code borrowing happened in the Middle English period. As we have seen, the French dominated the domains of courtly life, government, administration, the law court, and church. These are the domains where most loan words came from.

Coming from the language of the upper social classes, French loan words penetrated the English language socially downwards from the prestige language to the vernacular, whereas Scandinavian loan words entered the Northern and Mid-Eastern dialects and from there spread socially upwards. The high social status of French loan words can still be perceived in Modern English.

Coutly life: food, fashion, leisure & arts

appetite, beef, biscuit, dinner, fruit, poultry,boots, button, fashion, wardrobe, art, beauty, literature, painting, etc.

Administration, Government, Military & Law

authority, baron, council, court, crown, government, parliament, noble, minister, prince, tax, treaty, liberty, archer, enemy, soldier, accuse, arrest, crime, guard, warden, jury, prison, punishment, etc.

Religion & Church

abbey, catherdral, charity, clergy, confess, prayer, religion, saviour, virgin, Virtue, create, creator, divine, faith, etc.

Words that entered the language from French have nobler and more formal connotations than their near-synonyms of Germanic origin: e.g., mansion, palace vs. house, home. Moreover, the original social background of borrowed words becomes conspicuous in stylistics: a kingly meal points to size or portion, a royal meal is very noble, finally, a regal matter is a highly formal issue.

In the Middle English period, English also went through a major structural change which was not the direct consequence of Norman dominion. Rather, it was a large scale transformation of the grammatical system that had its origin in pronunciation, more specifically in a seemingly unrelated stress pattern change.

The pitch timing of Indo-European languages was characterized by free stress (cf. Verner's Law). This, however, changed in Germanic languages, which put the stress on the first syllable of content words. The same was true for Old English. With the heavy stress on the first syllable, the vowel quality in the following unstressed syllables was weakened and gradually reduced to schwa.

This reduction of different vowel qualities is called levelling. The weakening process continued and lead to the loss of vowels and corresponding syllables. The unstressed vowels dropped of (apocope) or they were lost within the word (syncope).

For the inflectional system of English this had drastic consequences. In Old English, all NP-constituents (articles, adjectives, nouns, pronouns) were sensitive to case, number, and grammatical gender distinctions. In most nouns and adjectives, these distinctions were marked by inflectional affixes with distinctive vowel qualities.

The process of levelling led to the gradual loss of these distinctions. As a consequence, information concerning the grammatical relations established by NPs was lost. Nouns were only left with a marker for the genitive singular and a marker for the plural, –es, which was the reduced form of the nominative and accusative plural and was generalized for the whole plural by analogy.

For the grammar of English the process of levelling and the loss of inflectional distinctions had far-reaching consequences. English moved away from a synthetic language to becoming an analytical language. In analytical languages grammatical distinctions are not marked by inflectional morphemes but by auxiliary dummy constructions.

In other words, syntax becomes the distinctive element in such languages. This was also true for English, in which grammatical relations had and still have to be expressed by word order and prop constructions as a direct result of the structural changes in the Middle English period.