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Vikings had settled in northern France. They had completely abandoned their Old Norse language and adopted French.
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This event began the transition from Old English to Middle English.
William the Conqueror invaded the island of Britain from his home base in northern France and settled in his new acquisition along with his nobles and court. -
A 19,000 line biblical text written by monk Orm from northern Lincolnshire in the late 12th Century.Orm spelled his words exactly as they were pronounced.He used double consonants to indicate a short preceding vowel;three separate symbols to differentiate the different sounds of the Old English letter yogh and the more modern “wh” for the old-style “hw” and “sh” for “sc.This unusual phonetic spelling system gave philologists a snap-shot of they way Middle English was pronounced in the Midlands
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The Normans bequeathed over 10,000 words to English (about three-quarters of which are still in use today), including a huge number of abstract nouns ending in the suffixes “-age”, “-ance/-ence”, “-ant/-ent”, “-ment”, “-ity” and “-tion”, or starting with the prefixes “con-”, “de-”, “ex-”, “trans-” and “pre-”. Many of them are related to matters of crown and notability, government and administration, court and law, war and combat, authority and control.
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French scribes changed the common Old English letter pattern "hw" to "wh" (e.g. hwaer became where). A "w" was even added to some words that only began with "h" (e.g. hal became whole). When hwo became who, the pronunciation changed so that the "w" sound was omitted completely.
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While humble trades retained their Anglo-Saxon names (baker, miller, shoemaker, etc), the more skilled trades adopted French names (mason, painter, tailor, merchant, etc). While the animals in the field generally kept their English names (sheep, cow, ox, calf, swine, deer), once cooked and served their names often became French (beef, mutton, pork, bacon, veal, venison, etc).
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Sometimes a French word completely replaced an Old English word (e.g. people replaced leod). Sometimes French and Old English components combined to form a new word, such as the French gentle and the Germanic man combined to formed gentleman. Sometimes, both English and French words survived, but with significantly different senses.
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Different words with roughly the same meaning survived, and a whole host of new, French-based synonyms entered the English language (e.g. the French maternity in addition to the Old English motherhood). Over time, many near synonyms acquired subtle differences in meaning, adding to the precision and flexibility of the English language. Even today, phrases combining Anglo-Saxon and Norman French doublets are still in common use (e.g. law and order).
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The pronunciation differences between the harsher, more guttural Anglo-Norman and the softer Francien dialect of Paris were also carried over into English pronunciations. The Normans tended to use a hard “c” sound instead of the softer Francien “ch”, so that charrier became carry,etc. The Normans tended to use the suffixes “-arie” and “-orie” instead of the French “-aire” and “-oire”, so that English has words like victory (as compared to victoire) and salary (as compared to salaire), etc.
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The Normans, and therefore the English, retained the “s” in words like estate, hostel, forest and beast, while the French gradually lost it (état, hôtel, forêt, bête).
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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. 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.
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A myriad distinct regional usages and dialects grew up, and 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.
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Many more Latin-derived words came into use (sometimes through the French, but often directly) during this period, largely connected with religion, law, medicine and literature. French words continued to stream into English at an increasing pace, with even more French additions recorded after the 13th Century than before, peaking in the second half of the 14th Century.
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During the reign of the Norman King henry II and his queen Eleonor of Aquitaine, many more Francien words from central France were imported in addition to their Anglo-Norman counterparts (e.g. the Francien chase and the Anglo-Norman catch). Eleanor also championed many terms of romance and chivalry (e.g. romance, courtesy, honour, damsel, tournament, passion, etc).
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Even the venerable “Anglo-Saxon Chronicle”, which for centuries had recorded the history of the English people, recorded its last entry. But, despite the shake-up the Normans had given English, it showed its resilience once again, and, two hundred years after the Norman Conquest, it was English not French that emerged as the language of England.
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This university was foundend in 1167 and due to this, literary continued to increase over the succeeding centuries. The books were copied by hand and therefore very expensive.
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This university was foundend in 1167 and due to this, literary continued to increase over the succeeding centuries. The books were copied by hand and therefore very expensive.
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The Normans spoke a rural dialect called Anglo-Norman or Norman French. The differences between these dialects became even more marked after the Norman invasion of Britain, particularly after King John and England lost the French part of Normandy to the King of France in 1204 and England became even more isolated from continental Europe.
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The 14th Century London dialect of Chaucer 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.The pronunciation was misunderstood at first. All syllables were pronounced.
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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.
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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.
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Anglo-Norman French became the language of the kings and nobility of England for more than 300 years. Henry IV, who came to the English throne in 1399, was the first monarch since before the Conquest to have English as his mother tongue. Anglo-Norman was the verbal language of the court, administration and culture, though, Latin was mostly used for written language, especially by the Church and in official records.
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Two languages, English and Anglo-Norman, developed in parallel, only gradually merging as Normans and Anglo-Saxons began to intermarry. This mixture of Old English and Anglo-Norman is usually referred to as Middle English.
