Historical background and linguistic situation

The Scandinavian Conquest. The Scandinavian Conquest of England was a great military and political event, which also influenced the English language. Scandinavian inroads into England began as early as the 8th century The Anglo-Saxons offered the invaders a stubborn resistance, which is seen in the narrations of the Chronicle. In the late 9th century the Scandinavians occupied the whole of English territory north of the Thames. In 878, King Alfred made peace with the invaders (the so-called Wedmore peace). The territory occupied by the Scandinavians was to remain in their power; it was henceforward called Danelaw (literally Danish law). The Scandinavians, in their turn, recognized the nominal supremacy of the king of England.

Scandinavians most thickly settled the northern and eastern parts of England; there were fewer of them in the central territories. About this very time, the Scandinavians invaded Ireland and occupied some of its coastal regions. In the late 10th century war in England was resumed, and in 1013, the whole country fell to the invaders. King Ethelred fled to Normandy. In 1016, the Danish king Knut (or Canute) became ruler of England. England became part of a vast Scandinavian empire in Northern Europe.

Scandinavian power in England lasted until 1042, when it was overthrown, and the power of Old English nobility was restored under King Edward the Confessor. The Scandinavian Conquest had far-reaching consequences for the English language. The Scandinavian dialects spoken by the invaders belonged to the North Germanic languages and their phonetic and grammatical structure was similar to that of Old English. They had the same morphological categories; strong and weak declension of nouns falling into several types according to the stem vowel; strong and weak declension of adjectives; seven classes of strong and three classes of weak verbs.

Close relationship between English and Scandinavian dialects made mutual understanding without translation quite possible. On the other hand, mass settlement off Scandinavians in Northern and Eastern England gave their language a great influence in these regions. The relation between the two languages corresponded to that between Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians: they were spoken by the same social layers and had equal rights. The result was a blending of Scandinavian and English dialects, this process was especially intensive in the North and East. Influence of Scandinavian dialects was felt in two spheres: vocabulary and morphology.

The Norman Conquest. The Norman conquest of England began in 1066. It proved a turning point in English history and had a considerable influence on the English language. The Normans were by origin a Scandinavian tribe. In the 9th century they began inroads on the northern coast of France and occupied the territory on both sides of the Seine estuary. Under a treaty concluded in 912 with the Norman chief Rollo, the French king Charles the Simple ceded to the Normans this stretch of the coast, which since then came to be called Normandy. During the century and a half between the Normans’ settlement in France and their invasion of England, they had undergone a powerful influence of French culture. Mixing with the local population, they adopted the French language and in the mid-eleventh century, in spite of their Scandinavian origin, they were bearers of French feudal culture and of the French language.

In 1066 king Edward the Confessor died. William, Duke of Normandy, who had long claimed the English throne, assembled an army with the help of Norman barons, landed in England, and rooted the English troops under King Harold near Hastings on October 14, 1066. In the course of a few years, putting down revolts in various parts of the country, the Normans became masters of England. The ruling class of Anglo-Saxons nobility vanished almost completely: some of them perished in battles and uprisings, others were executed, and the remainder emigrated. Norman barons, who spoke French, namely, its Norman dialect, replaced this nobility. Thus, because of the conquest England came to be ruled by a foreign ruling class.

William confiscated the estates of the Anglo-Saxon nobility and distributed them among the Norman barons. All posts in the church, from abbots upwards, were given to persons of French culture. Frenchmen arrived in England in great numbers. Among them were merchants, soldiers, teachers, seeking for a new field of activity. During the reign of William the Conqueror (1066-1087) about 200,000 Frenchmen settled in England. This influx lasted for about two centuries. The civil war in the reign of King Stephen (1135-1154) and the anarchy caused by it favoured the influx of Norman barons, who seized English estates. When King John Lackland lost his possessions in Normandy (1203), a great number of Normans who did not care to stay in their country under the new conditions started arriving in England.

During several centuries, the ruling language in England was French. It was the language of the court, the government, the courts of law, and the church; the English language was reduced to a lower social sphere: the main mass of peasantry and townspeople. The relation between French and English was, thus, different from that between Scandinavian and English: French was the language of the ruling class.

The Norman Conquest put an end to the dominating position of the West Saxon literary language. In the 12th and 13th centuries, all English dialects were on an equal footing and independent of each other. In some of them, especially in the north, Scandinavian influence on, the vocabulary became more pronounced. Under such circumstances, with two languages spoken in the country, they were bound to struggle with each other, and to influence each other. This process lasted for three centuries – the 12th, 13th, and 14th. The results were twofold: (1) the struggle for supremacy between French and English ended in favour of English, but (2) the English language emerged from this struggle in a considerably changed condition: its vocabulary was enriched by a great number of French words, while its grammatical structure underwent material changes.

Struggle between English and French. After the Norman conquest of 1066 the situation in England, as far as language is concerned, was as follows:

1)The country is divided into two layers: the feudal upper class, the government, the court speak Anglo-Norman, while the main balks of the population the peasantry and the townspeople – stick to English.

2)None of the territorial dialects enjoys any privilege as compared with the others.

3)There is a considerable layer of bilingual population, speaking both languages.

Such a state of things was bound to result in conflicts, whose outcome depended on the relative power of the various social layers in medieval England. Struggle between the two languages for supremacy lasted all through three centuries; towards the end of this period a path for the formation of an English national language began to emerge. The situation was still more complicated by the fact that alongside the two languages a third language existed, namely Latin as an international language of the church and medieval church science (within the boundaries of Western Europe).

In the latter half of the 14th century victory of English became evident: French lost one position after another. Only in the 15th century did it finally disappear from English social life. In the struggle between the two languages, there are some important dates, marking its successive stages.

The first English kings after the conquest did not know the English language. Henry IV (1399-1413) was the first king whose mother tongue was English. After the conquest Anglo-Saxon, laws were translated into Latin, then into French. French was also the language teachers used in schools. Official and private letters, agreements and other documents were written in Latin in the first centuries after the conquest. In the 13th century letters written in French appeared; isolated letters in French are found as late as 1440. Courts of law also used French in their procedures; parliamentary business was conducted in French. A symptom of the rise of English came in 1258, when Henry III addressed the population of the country in a Proclamation written in English (the London dialect).

In mid-14th century the influence of English rose. In 1362 (under king Edward III) Parliament, acting on a petition of the city of London, ruled that courts of law should conduct their business in English, as French was too little known, in the same year English was first used in Parliament itself. About this very time, English as the language in which teaching was conducted in schools replaced French. Thus, by the end of the 14th century supremacy of Anglo-Norman came to an end, though some scattered remains of it stayed on till a much later time, and isolated French formulas have survived until the present, such as the motto on the British coat-of-arms: Dieu et mon droit (God and my right). The victory of English was due to the rise of social layers that spoke it – the gentry and the town bourgeoisie, which took the upper hand in the struggle against the feudal top layer of society.

 

 

MIDDLE ENGLISH DIALECTS

Middle English dialects may be considered in a way as the development of those in Old English. But according to a tradition now firmly established, they are given new names. The Northumbrian dialect is now called Northern, Mercian is called Midland, and West Saxon and Kentish are united under the name of Southern. The boundary between Midland and Northern runs along the Humber that between Midland and Southern is close to the Thames. The midland dialect is subdivided into West Midland and East Midland. In spite of this connection the character of Middle English dialects is different: while the dialects in Old English were tribal, those in the Middle English language were territorial.

Northern Dialects. The Northern dialects were situated to the North of the Hember river and had the following phonetic and morphological features:

– the long [a:] in the Northern dialects did not change into the long [o:];

– the Old English vowels [y] and [y:] correspondingly changed into [i] and [i:];

– in some cases [k] did not change into [t ];

– the Old English cluster sc [sk] in unstressed syllables changed not into sh [ʃ] but into [s], e.g.: engelisc > inglis ‘English’;

– the noun in the form of the plural number in the Northern dialects had the inflection –s;

– the form of the present tense of the verb had the inflection -s, -es;

– Participle I ended in -and.

Among the literary documents written in the Northern dialects the following should be mentioned first of all: works by Richard Rolle de Hampole, Thomas Castleford, the Chronicles of the first half of the 14th century and mysteries (miracle plays) of the 14th – the early 15th centuries.

 

Central Dialects. The territory where the Central dialects were used was roughly limited by the Hember river in the North and the Thames in the South. They were further subdivided into the East-Central and West-Central dialects.

The Central dialects had the following characteristic features:

– the vowels [y] and [y:] in the East-Central dialect changed into [i] and [i:] and the West-Central dialect into [u] and [u:];

– the Old English vowel [æ] changed into [e] in the West-Central dialect;

– the long Old English [æ:] both in the West-Central and East-Central dialects changed into the narrow long [e:];

– the Old English diphthong [eo] changed into the vowel [o] which survived up to the 14th century.

Among the main literary documents which were written in the Central dialects there are such as: the translation of fragments of the Holy Bible (Genesis and Exodus), the so called Peterborough Chronicle. The outstanding poetic piece of medieval English literature Sir Gavayn and Green Knight also belongs to the Central dialect literary monuments.

Southern Dialects. The Southern dialects were spoken to the South of the Thames. They were further subdivided into the South-West dialect and the Kentish dialect.

The characteristic features of the Southern dialects are as follows:

– at the beginning of the word the consonant [f] was frequently voiced, that is changed into [v];

– the vowel [æ] changed into [e] which was later replaced by the vowel [a];

– the diphthong [ea] changed into [e], e.g.: eald > eld ‘old’;

– the short vowel [a] before nasal consonants changed into [o], e.g.: man > mon ‘man’, land > lond ‘land’;

– in the South-West dialect the long [y:] was shortened to [y];

– in the Kentish dialect [y:] > [e:] and [y] > [e];

– the form of the plural number of the noun often had the ending –en;

– Participle I ended in –inde;

– Participle II retained the prefix y- (from the Old English ӡ e-)but lost the ending -n, e.g.: y-founde ‘found’;

– the Southern dialects are easy to recognize by the characteristic forms of personal pronouns: ha, a ‘he, she, they’; hare ‘her, them’; ham ‘them’.

Among the literary documents in the Southern dialects the following works should be mentioned: Layamon’s poem Brut (the early 13th century), Dan Michel’s Ayenbyte of Inwyt (1340), The Status of Nuns, Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden translated from Latin by John de Trevisa (1387).