MIDDLE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Language: / Middle English / Date of Usage: / 1100 – 1450 AD
Location: / England
Replaced By: / Early Modern English / Style: / Alphabet
Who were they?
The people who spoke Middle English were the descendants of the EnglishSaxons and the French who took over the country in 1066 (The Battle of Hastings.) The resulting language was a combination of Old English (Saxon) and the French spoken by their conquerors.
Notable Characteristics:
  1. Middle English became dominant because the new king of England, William 1st was French, and began to force that language on the Saxon people of England. One of the ways he did this was by forcing schools to teach French.

  1. The result was a new language that contained elements of both Saxon and French.

  1. One of the results was that word order became a dominant element in the new language.

  1. Many Saxon words relating to sentence structure have survived such as prepositions, conjunctions, interrogative words, etc.

  1. The French who took over England were from Normandy and were themselves descendants of Vikings who had conquered that area.

  1. The new language was especially dominant in the 1300s and 1400s.

  1. Because of the French Normans’ close relation to the Vikings, their language included many Norse words as well.

  1. There were some spelling changes. For example, the letter C was replaced by K. (Cyning became King.) Additionally, E’s at the end of sentences eventually became silent.

  1. Saxon became the language of the lower classes.

  1. Middle English became dominant over a period of time. As the centuries passed, more French vocabulary was spoken, and less Saxon.

  1. Its growth was aided by the invention of the printing press.

  1. Middle English was a transitional period in the language, so not a lot of literature survived. However, there is more Middle English literature than Saxon literature.

Notable Writings:
  1. Geoffrey Chaucer’s series of stories, The Canterbury Tales is probably the most famous story in Middle English.

  1. The anonymously written Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is also a tale in Middle English.

  1. The religious allegory Piers Plowman.

  1. The publisher William Caxton began to standardize English spelling at this time.

Reason for disappearance:
The English Renaissance, a period where a large amount of works in the language began to be written, caused the language to alter into Early Modern English. (Shakespeare, Mallory, Ben Johnson, Christopher Marlowe, etc.