Middle English After the Normans

During these Norman-ruled centuries in which English as a language had no official status and no regulation, English had become the third language in its own country. It was largely a spoken rather than written language, and effectively sank to the level of a patois or creole. The main dialect regions during this time are usually referred to as Northern, Midlands, Southern and Kentish, although they were really just natural developments from the Northumbrian, Mercian, West Saxon and Kentish dialects of Old English. Within these, though, a myriad distinct regional usages and dialects grew up, and indeed the proliferation of regional dialects during this time was so extreme that people in one part of England could not even understand people from another part just 50 miles away.

The universities of Oxford and Cambridge were founded in 1167 and 1209 respectively, and general literacy continued to increase over the succeeding centuries, although books were still copied by hand and therefore very expensive. Over time, the commercial and political influence of the East Midlands and London ensured that these dialects prevailed (London had been the largest city for some time, and became the Norman capital at the beginning of the 12th Century), and the other regional varieties came to be stigmatized as lacking social prestige and indicating a lack of education. The 14th Century London dialect of Chaucer, although admittedly difficult, is at least recognizable to us moderns as a form of English, whereas text in the Kentish dialect from the same period looks like a completely foreign language.

It was also during this period when English was the language mainly of the uneducated peasantry that many of the grammatical complexities and inflections of Old English gradually disappeared. By the 14th Century, noun genders had almost completely died out, and adjectives, which once had up to 11 different inflections, were reduced to just two (for singular and plural) and often in practice just one, as in modern English. The pronounced stress, which in Old English was usually on the lexical root of a word, generally shifted towards the beginning of words, which further encouraged the gradual loss of suffixes that had begun after the Viking invasions, and many vowels developed into the common English unstressed “schwa” (like the “e” in taken, or the “i” in pencil). As inflectons disappeared, word order became more important and, by the time of Chaucer, the modern English subject-verb-object word order had gradually become the norm, and as had the use of prepositions instead of verb inflections.

The “Ormulum”, a 19,000 line biblical text written by a monk called Orm from northern Lincolnshire in the late 12th Century, is an important resource in this regard. Concerned at the way people were starting to mispronounce English, Orm spelled his words exactly as they were pronounced. For instance, he used double consonants to indicate a short preceding vowel (much as modern English does in words like diner and dinner, later and latter, etc); he used three separate symbols to differentiate the different sounds of the Old English letter yogh; and he used the more modern “wh” for the old-style “hw” and “sh” for “sc”. This unusual phonetic spelling system has given philologists an invaluable snap-shot of they way Middle English was pronounced in the Midlands in the second half of the 12th Century.

Many of Orm’s spellings were perhaps atypical for the time, but many changes to the English writing system were nevertheless under way during this period:

• the Old English letters ð (“edh” or “eth”) and þ (“thorn”), which did not exist in the Norman alphabet, were gradually phased out and replaced with “th”, and the letter 3 (“yogh”) was generally replaced with “g” (or often with “gh”, as in ghost or night);
• the simple word the (written þe using the thorn character) generally replaced the bewildering range of Old English definite articles, and most nouns had lost their inflected case endings by the middle of the Middle English period;
• the Norman “qu” largely substituted for the Anglo-Saxon “cw” (so that cwene became queen, cwic became quick, etc);
• the “sh” sound, which was previously rendered in a number of different ways in Old English, including “sc”, was regularized as “sh” or “sch” (e.g. scip became ship);
• the initial letters “hw” generally became “wh” (as in when, where, etc);
• a “c” was often, but not always, replaced by “k” (e.g. cyning/cyng became king) or “ck” (e.g. boc became bock and, later, book) or “ch” (e.g. cildbecame child, cese became cheese, etc);
• the common Old English "h" at the start of words like hring (ring) and hnecca (neck) was deleted;
• conversely, an “h” was added to the start of many Romance loanword (e.g. honour, heir, honest, habit, herb, etc), but was sometimes pronounced and sometimes not;
• "f" and "v" began to be differentiated (e.g. feel and veal), as did "s" and "z" (e.g. seal and zeal) and "ng" and "n" (e.g. thing and thin);
• "v" and "u" remained largely interchangeable, although "v" was often used at the start of a word (e.g. (vnder), and "u" in the middle (e.g. haue), quite the opposite of today;
• because the written "u" was similar to "v", "n" and "m", it was replaced in many words with an "o" (e.g. son, come, love, one);
• the “ou” spelling of words like house and mouse was introduced;
• many long vowel sounds were marked by a double letter (e.g. boc became booc, se became see, etc), or, in some cases, a trailing "e" became no longer pronounced but retained in spelling to indicate a long vowel (e.g. nose, name);
• the long "a" vowel of Old English became more like "o" in Middle English, so that ham became home, stan became stone, ban became bone, etc;
• short vowels were identified by consonant doubling (e.g siting became sitting, etc).

The “-en” plural noun ending of Old English (e.g. house/housen, shoe/shoen, etc) had largely disappeared by the end of the Middle English period, replaced by the French plural ending “-s” (the “-en” ending only remains today in one or two important examples, such as children, brethren and oxen). Changes to some word forms stuck while others did not, so that we are left with inconsistencies like half and halves, grief and grieves, speech and speak, etc. In another odd example of gradual modernization, the indefinite article “a” subsumed over time the initial “n” of some following nouns, so that a napronbecame an apron, a nauger became an auger, etc, as well as the reverse case of an ekename becoming a nickname.