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With the Norman conquest began the transition from Old English to Middle English. William the conqueror and later William I invaded the island of Britain from France. He crushed the opposition and deprive the Anglo-Saxon of their properties. The Normans descended from Vikings, settling in northern France who adopted the French language.
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London became the Norman capital and the other regional varieties came to be stigmatized as lacking social prestige and indicating a lack of education.
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During the reign of the Norman King Henry II and his queen Eleanor of Aquitaine many more Francien words from central France were imported. Many more Latin-derived words came into use.
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Orm, a monk, wrote the “Ormulum”, a 19,000 line biblical text, which is a source of the way Middle English was pronounced.
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The venerable “Anglo-Saxon Chronicle” recorded its last historical entry of the English people.
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The University of Oxford was founded.
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King John and England lost the French part of Normandy to the King of France, so England became more isolated.
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The University of Cambridge was founded.
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English emerged as the language of England.
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English was the language mainly of uneducated peasantry, and as a result many of the grammatical complexities and inflections of Old English gradually disappeared like noun genders and adjective inflections. Word order became more important (subject+verb+object). In pronunciation many vowels developed in the “schwa” sound.
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The Black death plague killed a third of the English population. After it, the English-speaking laboring and merchant classes grew in importance. The linguistic division between nobility and commoners was over.
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More French additions continued to stream into English.
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English was adopted as the official language according to The Statue of Pleading. King Edward III addressed Parliament in English.
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English became the language of instruction in schools.
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Henry IV was the first monarch to have English as his mother tongue whereas other kings and the nobility spoke Anglo-Norman French, but Latin was mostly used by the church and in official records. However, the peasantry and lower classes spoke English. The mixture of old English and Anglo-Norman is usually referred to as Middle English.
