Sohag University

Faculty of Arts
English Department
Translation Program

History
of the
English Language

Fourth Year
First Semester
(September 2021 - January 2022)

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This course material is compiled from the following sources

Textbooks:
! “The Adventure of English” by Melvin Bragg (Sceptre, 2003)
! “Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language” by David
Crystal (Cambridge University Press, 1995)
! “English as a Global Language” by David Crystal (Cambridge
University Press, 1997)
! “Mother Tongue” by Bill Bryson (Penguin Books, 1990)
Television Series

“The Adventure of English". BBC History of English Language. (ITV,

2003) Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=3UqzBA1LNbE&list=PLHzvYltPyWa-TPD3kKRGvG97wBHuUqVYo

Websites:
A Brief History of the English Language
! (Anglik.net): http://www.anglik.net/englishlanguagehistory.htm
! A Brief History of the English Language (Study English Today):
http://www.studyenglishtoday.net/english-language-history.html
! A History of the English Language (Random History):
http://www.randomhistory.com/1-50/023english.html
! A (Very) Brief History of the English Language (Word Origins):
http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/site/comments/a_very_brief_
history_of_the_english_language3/
! Borrowed Words In English (Dan Short):
http://www.danshort.com/ie/borrowedwords.htm
! Brief History of English (Jeremy Smith):
http://members.peak.org/~jeremy/dictionaryclassic/chapters/history
.php
! English Language History (English Language Guide):
http://www.englishlanguageguide.com/english/facts/history/
! Global English: A Paradigm Shift (Google Knol):
http://knol.google.com/k/global-english-a-paradigm-shift

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 ! History of the English Language (English Club):
http://www.englishclub.com/english-language-history.htm
! History of the English Language (Soon Magazine):
http://soon.org.uk/page18.htm
! Language Timeline (British Library Board):
http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/changlang/across/languagetimeline
.html
! The Great Vowel Shift (Geoffrey Chaucer Page):
http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/vowels.html
! The History of English (Oxford Dictionaries):
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/page/thehistoryofenglish/
! The Origin and History of the English language (KryssTal):
http://www.krysstal.com/english.html
! What Are the Origins of the English Language (Merriam Webster):
http://www.merriamwebster.com/help/faq/history.htm
!
Websites - More Detailed
! English History and Its Language Development (English Word
Information): http://wordinfo.info/unit/4218?letter=E&spage=4
! History of the English Language (Wikipedia) (and other links from
there):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_English_language
! History of the English Language (University of Toronto):
http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~cpercy/hell/
! History of the English Language Links (University of Toronto):
http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~cpercy/helhome.htm
! Studying the History of English (Raymond Hickey):http://www.uni-
due.de/SHE/index.html
! Words In English (Rice University):
http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~kemmer/Words04/

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 Table of Contents
Maps

Chapter 1: Culture, History, and Language

Chapter 2: Before English (--< 450 A.D.)
Chapter 3: Old English (450-1066 A.D.)
Chapter 4: Middle English (1066-1500 A.D.)
Chapter 5: Early Modern English (1500-1800 A.D.)
Chapter 6: The Late Modern Period
Chapter 6: Language and socio-cultural change
Timeline

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5
6
7
The main influences on the development of the English language

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 Chapter 1
Basic Concepts in this course
Culture, History, Language
This chapter covers the following points:
1.1. What is Culture?
◦ Difference between Culture and Civilization
◦ General Characteristics of Culture
◦ Importance of Culture in Human Life
1.2. Cultural History: Macrohistory and Microhistory.
1.3. The History of the English Language as a Cultural Subject.
1.4. Why Study the History of English?

This course is about where the English language came from and how it
achieved the feat of transforming itself so successfully. This course
travels across time and space from fifth-century to the sixteenth-century
England. It focuses on the cultural and historical aspects which caused
the English language to change and develop.

1.1. Culture
The English word ‘Culture’ is derived from the Latin term ‘cult or
cultus’ meaning tilling, or cultivating or refining and worship. Culture is a
way of life. The food you eat, the clothes you wear, the language you
speak in and the God you worship all are aspects of culture. In very
simple terms, we can say that culture is the embodiment of the way in
which we think and do things. It is also the things. that we have inherited

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as members of society. All the achievements of human beings as
members of social groups can be called culture. Art, music, literature,
architecture, sculpture, philosophy, religion and science can be seen as
aspects of culture. However, culture also includes the customs,
traditions, festivals, ways of living and one’s outlook on various issues of
life.
Culture thus refers to a human-made environment which includes
all the material and nonmaterial products of group life that are
transmitted from one generation to the next. There is a general
agreement among social scientists that culture consists of explicit and
implicit patterns of behaviour acquired by human beings. These may be
transmitted through symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of
human groups, including their embodiment as artefacts. The essential
core of culture thus lies in those finer ideas which are transmitted within
a group-both historically derived as well as selected with their attached
value. More recently, culture denotes historically transmitted patterns of
meanings embodied in symbols, by means of which people
communicate, perpetuate and develop their knowledge about and
express their attitudes toward life.
Culture is the expression of our nature in our modes of living and
thinking. It may be seen in our literature, in religious practices, in
recreation and enjoyment. Culture has two distinctive components,
namely, material and non-material. Material culture consists of objects
that are related to the material aspect of our life such as our dress, food,
and household goods. Non-material culture refers to ideas, ideals,
thoughts and belief.
Culture varies from place to place and country to country. Its

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development is based on the historical process operating in a local,
regional or national context. For example, we differ in our ways of
greeting others, our clothing, food habits, social and religious customs
and practices from the West. In other words, the people of any country
are characterised by their distinctive cultural traditions.

1.1.i. Difference between Culture and Civilization

The word ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’ are often used synonymously.
However, they have clearly defined meanings differentiating them.
‘Civilization’ means having better ways of living and sometimes making
nature bend to fulfill their needs. It also includes organizing societies into
politically well-defined groups working collectively for improved
conditions of life in matters of food, dress, communication, and so on.
Thus some groups consider themselves as civilized and look down upon
others. This disposition of certain groups has even led to wars and
holocausts, resulting in mass destruction of human beings.
On the other hand ‘culture’ refers to the inner being, a refinement of
head and heart. This includes arts and sciences, music and dance and
various higher pursuits of human life which are also classified as cultural
activities. One who may be poor and wearing cheap clothes may be
considered ‘uncivilized’, but still he or she may be the most cultured
person. One possessing ostentatious wealth may be considered as
‘civlilized’ but he may not be cultured’.
Therefore, when we think of culture, we have to understand that it
is different from civilization. As we have seen, culture is the ‘higher levels
of inner refinement’ of a human being. Humans are not merely physical
beings. They live and act at three levels: physical, mental and spiritual.

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While better ways of living socially and politically and better utilization of
nature around us may be termed as civilization. This is not enough to be
cultured. Only when the deeper levels of a person’s intellect and
consciouness are brought into expression can we call him/her ‘cultured’.

1.1.ii. General Characteristics of Culture

Now let us discuss some general characteristics, which are common to
different cultures throughout the world.
1. Culture is learned and acquired: Culture is acquired in the sense
that there are certain behaviours which are acquired through heredity.
Individuals inherit certain qualities from their parents but socio-cultural
patterns are not inherited. These are learnt from family members, from
the group and the society in which they live. It is thus apparent that the
culture of human beings is influenced by the physical and social
environment through which they operate.
2. Culture is shared by a group of people: A thought or action may be
called culture if it is shared and believed or practiced by a group of
people.
3. Culture is cumulative: Different knowledge embodied in culture can
be passed from one generation to another generation. More and more
knowledge is added in the particular culture as the time passes by. Each
may work out solution to problems in life that passes from one
generation to another. This cycle remains as the particular culture goes
with time.
4. Culture changes: There is knowledge, thoughts or traditions that are
lost as new cultural traits are added. There are possibilities of cultural
changes within the particular culture as time passes.

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5. Culture is dynamic: No culture remains on the permanent state.
Culture is changing constantly as new ideas and new techniques are
added as time passes modifying or changing the old ways. This is the
characteristics of culture that stems from the culture’s cumulative quality.
6. Culture gives us a range of permissible behaviour patterns: It
involves how an activity should be conducted, how an individual should
act appropriately.
7. Culture is diverse: It is a system that has several mutually
interdependent parts. Although these parts are separate, they are
interdependent with one another forming culture as whole.
8. Culture is ideational: Often it lays down an ideal pattern of behaviour
that are expected to be followed by individuals so as to gain social
acceptance from the people with the same culture.
1.1.iii. Importance of Culture in Human Life
Culture is closely linked with life. It is not an add-on, an ornament
that we as human beings can use. It is not merely a touch of colour. It is
what makes us human. Without culture, there would be no humans.
Culture is made up of traditions, beliefs, way of life, from the most
spiritual to the most material. It gives us meaning, a way of leading our
lives. Human beings are creators of culture and, at the same time,
culture is what makes us human.
A fundamental element of culture is the issue of religious belief and
its symbolic expression. We must value religious identity and be aware of
current efforts to make progress in terms of interfaith dialogue, which is
actually an intercultural dialogue. As the world is becoming more and
more global and we coexist on a more global level we can’t just think
there’s only one right way of living or that any one is valid. The

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coexistence of cultures and beliefs is necessary. In order to not
make such mistakes, the best thing we can do is get to know other
cultures, while also getting to know our own. How can we dialogue with
other cultures, if we don’t really know what our own culture is?
The three eternal and universal values of Truth, Beauty and
Goodness are closely linked with culture. It is culture that brings us
closer to truth through philosophy and religion; it brings beauty in our
lives through the Arts and makes us aesthetic beings; and it is culture
that makes us ethical beings by bringing us closer to other human beings
and teaching us the values of love, tolerance and peace.

1.2. Cultural History

History is the study of the past as it is described in written documents.
However, part of the problem with writing history is that it's traditionally
written from a macro perspective- i.e. the history of kings, queens,
presidents, senators, generals, business leaders, wars and grand
geopolitical and economic themes. Part of the movement of the last few
decades is to make history look at the micro level as well, i.e. history
will look at the lives of common people (women, children, peasants,
minorities, etc) and the details of their everyday life.
Microhistory also tends to better focus on the humanity of the
situation, and thus will often paint a more pessimistic view of things that
macrohistory would. Military macrohistory looks better than military
microhistory, for the strategic picture of campaigns and maneunvers are
more appealing than the down-and-dirty life of the soldier on the front
lines. Thus a good military microhistory piece can frequently be

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described as "anti-war" for it shows the personal carnage that war
creates.

Likewise, civilian microhistory will look at the hard realities of lives

in different eras, much as Musgrave alludes to above. Many liberal-
leaning historians will gravitate towards that microhistory, both to
earnestly give a more complete view of history than our standard
macrohistory and to use the look at the lives of the commoners of the
past to cast doubts about the modern socioeconomic order.

Thus, this scuffle between classic macrohistory and modern

microhistory/social history has merits on both sides. Macrohistory hides a
lot of the social and economic pathologies behind cold statistics.
Microhistory, if done with the wrong spin, wallows in those pathologies to
make an ideological point. Both views are useful, just as
macroeconomics and microeconomics are useful. However, both should
be done accurately and try not to let the writer twist history in his
ideological direction.

1.3. The History of the English Language as a Cultural Subject.

The history of a language is determined in various ways by

social and cultural change.

An interest in the past was one of the distinguishing characteristics of

humans as compared with the other animals. The medium by which
speakers of a language communicate their thoughts and feelings to
others, the tool with which they conduct their business or the government
of millions of people, the vehicle by which has been transmitted the
science, the philosophy, the poetry of the culture is surely worthy of

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study. It is not to be expected that everyone should be a philologist (a
scholar who studies the structure, historical development, and
relationships of a language or languages) or should master the
technicalities of linguistic science. But it is reasonable to assume that a
liberally educated person should know something of the structure of his
or her language, its position in the world and its relation to other tongues,
the wealth of its vocabulary together with the sources from which that
vocabulary has been and is being enriched, and the complex
relationships among the many different varieties of speech that are
gathered under the single name of the English language. The diversity of
cultures that find expression in it is a reminder that the history of English
is a story of cultures in contact during the past 1,500 years. It
understates matters to say that political, economic, and social forces
influence a language. These forces shape the language in every aspect,
most obviously in the number and spread of its speakers, and in what is
called “the sociology of language,” but also in the meanings of words, in
the accents of the spoken language, and even in the structures of the
grammar. The history of a language is intimately bound up with the
history of the peoples who speak it. The purpose of this book, then, is to
treat the history of English not only as being of interest to the specialized
student but also as a cultural subject within the view of all educated
people,
The English language of today reflects many centuries of
development. The political and social events that have in the course of
English history so profoundly affected the English people in their national
life have generally had a recognizable effect on their language. For most
of the 1500 years of its history, English has been subjected to a pattern

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of continuous small-scale change interrupted by major events which
have brought about dramatic and sudden change. It is these major
discontinuities that enable us to divide the history of the language into
convenient 'periods'. The first of these is from around 450 A.D and
continued until shortly after the Norman conquest (1066 A.D). It is known
as Old English. The period of French domination is the Middle English
period (1066-1500 A.D.). Finally, from about the time of the introduction
of printing (1470), when the language becomes recognizably similar to
the modem language, it is possible to talk of Modern English. In order to
understand the details of language change, it is important to investigate
the different social and cultural factors that are involved and how they
can bring about changes in the language.

1.4. Why Study the History of English?

A good approach to studying languages is the historical one. To
understand how things are, it is often helpful and sometimes essential to
know how they got to be that way. If we are psychologists who want to
understand a person’ s behavior, we must know something about that
person’ s origins and development. The same is true of a language.
Another reason for studying the history of English is that many of
the irregularities in today’ s language are the remnants of earlier, quite
regular patterns. For example, the highly irregular plurals of nouns like
man-men, mouse-mice, goose-geese , and ox-oxen can be explained
historically. So can the spelling of Modern English, which may seem
chaotic, or at least unruly, to anyone who has had to struggle with it. The
orthographic joke attributed to George Bernard Shaw, that in English fish
might be spelled ghoti (gh as in enough , o as in women , and ti as in

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nation ), has been repeated often, but the only way to understand the
anomalies of our spelling is to study the history of our language.
Moreover, English, like all other languages, is subject to that
constant growth and decay that characterize all forms of life. It is a
convenient figure of speech to speak of languages as living and as dead.
When a language ceases to change, we call it a dead language.
Classical Latin, for example, is a dead language because it has not
changed for nearly 2,000 years. The change that is constantly going on
in a living language can be most easily seen in the vocabulary. Old
words die out, new words are added, and existing words change their
meaning. Much of the vocabulary of Old English has been lost, and the
development of new words to meet new conditions is one of the most
familiar phenomena of our language. Change of meaning can be
illustrated from any page of Shakespeare. Nice in Shakespeare’s day
meant foolish; rheumatism signified a cold in the head.
Studying the history of English can help us to understand the
literature of earlier times. In his poem “The Eve of St. Agnes,” John
Keats describes the sculptured effigies on the tombs of a chapel on a
cold winter evening:
The sculptur’d dead, on each side, seemed to freeze,
Emprison’d in black, purgatorial rails.
What image should Keats’ s description evoke with its reference to rails ?
Many a modern reader, taking a cue from the word emprison’d , has
thought of the rails as railings or bars, perhaps a fence around the
statues. But rails here is from an Old English word that meant ‘
garments’ and refers to the shrouds or funeral garments
in which the stone figures are clothed. Unless we are aware of such

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older usage, we are likely to be led badly astray in the picture we conjure
up for these lines.
In the General Prologue to his Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey
Chaucer, in describing an ideal knight, says: “His hors were goode.” Did
the knight have one horse or more than one? Hors seems to be
singular, but the verb were looks like a plural. The knight did indeed
have several horses; in Chaucer’ s day hors was a word, like deer or
sheep, that had a plural identical in form with its singular. It is a small
point, but unless we know what a text means literally, we cannot
appreciate it as literature.

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 Chapter 2
Before English
This chapter covers the following points:
2.1. Indo-European Family of Languages
2.2. The Indo-European Languages which
influenced the Development of the English
Language.
◦ The Germanic
◦ The Italic
◦ The Hellenic
2.3. The cultures and Languages in England before
English (before 450 A.D.)
◦ The Celts
◦ The Romans

2.1. The Indo-European Family of Languages

The English language, and indeed most European languages, traces it
original roots back to a Neolithic (late Stone Age) people known as the
Indo-Europeans or Proto-Indo-Europeans, who lived in Eastern Europe
and Central Asia from some time after 5000 BC (different hypotheses
suggest various different dates anywhere between the 7th and the 3rd
millennium BC).

We do not know exactly what the original Indo-European language

was like, as no writings exist from that time (the very earliest examples of
writing can be traced to Sumeria in around 3000 BC), so our knowledge
of it is necessarily based on conjecture, hypothesis and reconstruction.
Using the “comparative method”, though, modern linguists have been

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able to partially reconstruct the original language from common elements
in its daughter languages. It is thought by many scholars that modern
Lithuanian may be the closest to (i.e. the least changed from) the ancient
Indo-European language, and it is thought to retain many features of
Proto-Indo-European now lost in other Indo-European languages.

Indo-European is just one of the language families, or proto-

languages, from which the world's modern languages are descended.
This family of languages is by far the largest family, accounting for the
languages of almost half of the modern world’s population, including
those of most of Europe, North and South America, Australasia, the
Iranian plateau and much of South Asia. Within Europe, only Basque,
Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, Turkish, and a few of the smaller Russian
languages are not descended from the Indo-European family.

Spread of Indo-European Languages

Sometime between 3500 BC and 2500 BC, the Indo-Europeans
began to fan out across Europe and Asia, in search of new pastures and
hunting grounds, and their languages developed - and diverged - in
isolation. By around 1000 BC, the original Indo-European language had
split into a dozen or more major language groups or sub-families.

The branches of the Indo-European family fall into two well-defined

groups according to the modification that certain consonants of the
parent speech underwent in each. They are known as the centum and
satem groups. Centum (pronounced with initial /k/) is the word for
hundred in Latin and Satem is the word for hundred in Avestan (one of
the Eastern Iranian languages).
The satem group includes the following branches:

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European languages is usually attributed to the amateur linguist Sir
William Jones in 1786. Examples are:

! father in English, Vater in German, pater in Latin and Greek, fadir

in Old Norse and pitr in ancient Vedic Sanskrit.

! Brother in English, broeer in Dutch, Brüder in German, braithair in

Gaelic, bróðr in Old Norse and bhratar in Sanskrit.

! Three in English, tres in Latin, tris in Greek, drei in German, drie in

Dutch, trí in Sanskrit.

! Is in English, is in Dutch, est in Latin, esti in Greek, ist in Gothic,

asti in Sanskrit.
! Me in English, mich or mir in German, mij in Dutch, mik or mis in

Gothic, me in Latin, eme in Greek, mam in Sanskrit.

! Mouse in English, Maus in German, muis in Dutch, mus in Latin,

mus in Sanskrit.

2.2. The Indo-European Languages which influenced the

Development of the English Language.

Out of these two groups, we are interested in four branches:

A) the Germanic (because English belongs to this branch)

B) the Hellenic, and the Italic (because they influenced the history of

English Language)
C) the Celtic (because it was the language of Britain before English)

A) the Germanic
The branch of Indo-European we are most interested in is Germanic
(although the Hellenic-Greek branch and Italic-Latin branch, which gave
rise to the Romance languages, also became important later). The

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Germanic, or Proto-Germanic, language group can be traced back to the
region between the Elbe river in modern Germany and southern Sweden
some 3,000 years ago.

Over time, certain consonants in the Germanic family of languages

have shifted somewhat from the Indo-European base. Thus, Germanic
words like the English foot, West Frisian foet, Danish fod, Swedish fot,
etc, are in fact related to the Latin ped, Lithuanian peda, Sanskrit pada,
etc, due to the shifting of the “p” to “f” and the “d” to “t”. Several other
consonants have also shifted (“d” to “t”, “k” to “h”, “t” to “th”, etc),
disguising to some extent the common ancestry of many of the daughter
languages of Indo-European. This process explains many apparent root
differences in English words of Germanic and Latinate origin (e.g. father
and paternal, ten and decimal, horn and cornucopia, three and triple,
etc).

The early Germanic languages themselves borrowed some words

from the aboriginal (non-Indo-European) tribes which preceded them,
particularly words for the natural environment (e.g. sea, land, strand, seal,
herring); for technologies connected with sea travel (e.g. ship, keel, sail,
oar); for new social practices (e.g. wife, bride, groom); and for farming or
animal husbandry practices (e.g. oats, mare,ram, lamb, sheep, kid, bitch,
hound, dung).

The Germanic group itself also split over time as the people
migrated into other parts of continental Europe:

! North Germanic, which evolved into Old Norse and then into the

various Scandinavian languages, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and

26
 Icelandic (but not Finnish or Estonian, which are Uralic and not
Indo-European languages);
! East Germanic, spoken by peoples who migrated back to eastern
and southeastern Europe, and whose three component language
branches, Burgundian, Vandalic and Gothic (a language spoken
throughout much of eastern, central and western Europe early in
the first millennium AD), all died out over time.
! West Germanic, the ancestor of Old High German, Old Saxon,

Old Frisian, Old Low Franconian and others which in turn gave
rise to modern German, Dutch, Flemish, Low German, Frisian,
Yiddish and, ultimately, English.

Thus, we can say that English belongs to the West Germanic

branch of the Indo-European family of languages.

B) The Italic Languages

More important were the languages of the Italic branch itself. Chief of
these in the light of subsequent history was Latin, the language of Latium
and its principal city, Rome. As Rome colonized Spain and Gaul, the
district west of the Black Sea, northern Africa, the islands of the
Mediterranean, and even Britain, Latin spread into all these regions until
its limits became practically co-terminous with those of the Roman
Empire. The various languages that represent the survival of Latin in the
different parts of the Roman Empire are known as the Romance or
Romanic languages. Some of them have since spread into other
territory, particularly in the New World. The most extensive of the
Romance languages are French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. The

27
Romance languages, while representing a continuous evolution from
Latin, are not derived from the Classical Latin of Cicero and Virgil.
Classical Latin was a literary language with an elaborate and somewhat
artificial grammar. The spoken language of the masses, Vulgar Latin
(from Latin vulgus, the common people), differed from it not only in
being simpler in inflection and syntax but also to a certain extent
divergent in vocabulary. In Classical Latin the word for horse was equus,
but the colloquial word was caballus. It is from the colloquial word that
French cheval, Provençal caval, Spanish caballo, Italian cavallo, etc.,
are derived. It was naturally the Vulgar Latin of the marketplace and
camp that was carried into the different Roman provinces. This Vulgar
Latin developed differently in the different parts of Europe.

C. The Hellenic Languages

The Greeks , or the Hellens, penetrated from the north shortly after a
date about 2000 B.C. The entrance of the Hellenes into the Aegean was
a gradual one and proceeded in a series of movements by groups
speaking different dialects of the common language. They spread not
only through the mainland of Greece, absorbing the previous
populations, but also into the islands of the Aegean and the coast of Asia
Minor. The earliest great literary monuments of Greek are the Homeric
poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, believed to date from the eighth
century B.C.
Ancient Greek language had five principal dialectal groups, the
most important one was the Attic, the dialect of the city of Athens. It
owes its supremacy partly to the dominant political and commercial
position attained by Athens in the fifth century, partly to the great

28
civilization that grew up there. The achievements of the Athenians in
architecture and sculpture, in science, philosophy, and literature in the
great age of Pericles (495–429 B.C.) and in the century following were
extremely important for subsequent civilization. In Athens were
assembled the great writers of Greece—the dramatists Æchylus,
Euripides, and Sophocles in tragedy, Aristophanes in comedy, the
historians Herodotus and Thucydides, the orator Demosthenes, the
philosophers Plato and Aristotle. Largely because of the political and
cultural prestige of Athens, the Attic dialect became the basis of a koiné
or common Greek that from the fourth century superseded the other
dialects; the conquests of Alexander (336–323 B.C.) established this
language in Asia Minor and Syria, in Mesopotamia and Egypt, as the
general language of the eastern Mediterranean for purposes of
international communication. It is chiefly familiar to modern times as the
language of the New Testament and, through its employment in
Constantinople and the Eastern Empire, as the medium of an extensive
Byzantine literature. These Greek writers and poets and their canonical
literary works have influenced the English culture, literarture and
language during the 16th and 17th century, i.e. during the Renaissance.

2.3. The cultures and Languages in England before English (before

450 A.D.)
England had been inhabited by humans for thousands of years: 50,000
according to more moderate estimates, 250,000 in the opinion of some.
During this long stretch of time, there was a number of cultures that can
be detected; and each of these cultures had a language. However, the
historical knowledge of these cultures and languages is very little.

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Historical knowledge is only definite about two cultures in pre-historic
England. First, Celtic was probably the first Indo-European tongue to be
spoken in England. Second, Latin, was spoken rather extensively for a
period of about four centuries before the coming of English. Latin was
introduced when Britain became a province of the Roman Empire.
Because this was an event that has left a significant mark upon later
history.

The following sections explain these two cultures and languages in

details

First: The Celts and their languages

The earliest inhabitants of Britain about which anything is known are the
Celts (the name from the Greek keltoi meaning "barbarian"), also known
as Britons, who probably started to move into the area sometime after
800 BC. By around 300 BC, the Celts had become the most widespread
branch of Indo-Europeans in Iron Age Europe, inhabiting much of
modern-day Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Austria, the Balkans, Eastern
Europe and also Britain. Further waves of Celtic immigration into Britain,
particularly between 500 BC and 400 BC but continuing at least until the
Roman occupation, greatly increased the Celtic population in Britain, and
established a vibrant Celtic culture throughout the land.

Important Note:
Parts of Scotland were also inhabited from an early time by the Picts,
whose Pictish language was completely separate from Celtic and
probably not an Indo-European language at all. The Pictish language

30
and culture was completely wiped out during the Viking raids of the
9th Century AD, and the remaining Picts merged with the Scots.

With respect to the Celtic languages in Britain, it is impossible to say with

any confidence how the Celts came to England. The older view holds
that

! the first to come were Goidelic or Gaelic Celts who spread into
Scotland and the Isle of Man. Their language is represented in
modern times by Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx.
! The later to come were Brythonic Celts, who spread all parts of
England. They were driven westward to Wales by Germanic
invaders in the fifth century. Their language is represented in
modern times by Welsh, Cornish, and Breton.

Important Note:
! Some of the above-mentioned Celtic languages died out such

as: Cornish became extinct in the eighteenth century, and Manx,

once spoken by all the native inhabitants of the Isle of Man, has
died out since World War II.
! The only surviving Celtic languages today are the Gaelic
languages of Scotland and Ireland, the Welsh of Wales, and the
Breton language of Brittany.

The Celts themselves were later marginalized and displaced, as we

will see in the next chapter, and Celtic was not the basis for what is now
the English language. Despite their dominance in Britain at an early

31
formative stage of its development, the Celts have actually had very little
impact on the English language, leaving only a few little-used words such
as brock (an old word for a badger), and a handful of geographical
terms like coombe (a word for a valley) and crag and tor (both words for
a rocky peak). Having said that, many British place names have Celtic
origins, including Kent, York, London, Dover, Thames, Avon, Trent,
Severn, Cornwall and many more. There is some speculation that Celtic
had some influence over the grammatical development of English,
though, such as the use of the continuous tense (e.g. “is walking”
rather than “walks”), which is not used in other Germanic languages.

Second: The Romans and Latin

The Romans first entered Britain in 55 BC under Julius Caesar,
although they did not begin a permanent occupation until 43AD, when
Emperor Claudius sent a much better prepared force to subjugate the
fierce British Celts. Despite a series of uprisings by the natives (including
that of Queen Boudicca, or Boadicea in 61AD), Britain remained part of
the Roman Empire for almost 400 years, and there was a substantial
amount of interbreeding between the two peoples, although the Romans
never succeeded in penetrating into the mountainous regions of Wales
and Scotland.

! Romanization of England
It was inevitable that the military conquest of Britain should have
been followed by the Romanization of England. Where the Romans lived
and ruled, there Roman ways were found. The Romans established four
great highways across the country; and numerous lesser roads
connected important military or civil centers or branched off as spurs
from the main highways. Tens of small cities and more than a hundred

32
towns, with their Roman houses and baths, temples, and occasional
theatres, testify to the introduction of Roman habits of life. The houses
were equipped with heating apparatus and water supply, their floors
were paved in mosaic, and their walls were of painted stucco—all as in
their Italian counterparts. Roman dress, Roman ornaments and utensils,
and Roman pottery and glassware seem to have been in general use.
Among the other evidences of Romanization must be included the
use of the Latin language. A great number of inscriptions have been
found, all of them in Latin. The majority of these proceed no doubt from
the military and official class and, being in the nature of public records,
were therefore in the official language. They do not in themselves
indicate a widespread use of Latin by the native population. Latin did not
replace the Celtic language in Britain as it did in other places in Europe.
Its use by native Britons was probably confined to members of the upper
classes and some inhabitants of the cities and towns. Occasional graffiti
scratched on a tile or a piece of pottery, apparently by the worker who
made it, suggest that in some localities Latin was familiar to the artisan
class. Outside the cities there were many fine country houses, some of
which were probably occupied by the well-to-do. The occupants of these
also probably spoke Latin. On the whole, there were certainly many
people in Roman Britain who habitually spoke Latin or upon occasion
could use it. But its use was not sufficiently widespread to cause it to
survive and develop. Its use probably began to decline after 410, the
approximate date at which the last of the Roman legions were officially
withdrawn from the island.

The influence of Latin

33
 The linguistic influence of the Romans in Britain was surprisingly
limited. There is less than 200 “loanwords” coined by Roman merchants
and soldiers, such as win (wine), butere (butter), caese (cheese), piper
(pepper), candel (candle), cetel (kettle), disc (dish), cycene (kitchen),
ancor (anchor), belt (belt), sacc (sack), catte (cat), plante (plant), rosa
(rose), cest (chest), pund(pound), munt (mountain), straet (street), wic
(village), mil (mile), port (harbour), weall (wall), etc. However, Latin
would, at a later time (after the Coming of Christianity and Literacy and
the during the English Renaissance), come to have a substantial
influence on the language.

Latin did not replace the Celtic language in Britain as it had done in
different parts in Europe, and the use of Latin by native Britons during
the period of Roman rule was probably confined to members of the
upper classes and the inhabitants of the cities and towns. The Romans
were under attack at home from different enemies, so they abandoned
Britain to the Celts in 410 AD, completing their withdrawal by 436AD.
Within a remarkably short time after this withdrawal, the Roman influence
on Britain, in language as in many other walks of life, was all but lost, as
Britain settled in to the so-called Dark Ages.

34
 Chapter 3
OLD ENGLISH
(450-1066 A.D.)

Some Key Events in the Old English Period

The following events during the Old English period significantly
influenced the development of the English language.
! 449 Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians began to occupy Great

Britain, thus changing its major population to English speakers and

separating the early English language from its Continental
relatives. This is a traditional date; the actual migrations doubtless
began earlier.
! 597 Saint Augustine of Canterbury arrived in England to begin the

conversion of the English by baptizing King Ethelbert of Kent, thus

introducing the influence of the Latin language.
! 730 The Venerable Bede produced his Ecclesiastical History of the

English People , recording the early history of the English people.

! 787 The Scandinavian (the Vikings) invasion began with raids

along the northeast seacoast.

! 865 The Vikings occupied northeastern Britain and began a

campaign to conquer all of England and established the Kingdom

of Danelaw
! 871 Alfred became king of Wessex and reigned until his death in

35
 899, rallying the English against the Vikings, retaking the city of
London, securing the kingship of all England for himself and his
successors, and producing or sponsoring the translation of Latin
works into English.
! 871 “The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle” is begun.

! 878 Danelaw established, dividing Britain into Anglo-Saxon south

and Danish north

3.1. The Germanic Conquest: The Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes

About the year 449 an event occurred that profoundly affected the
course of history. In that year, as traditionally stated, began the invasion
of Britain by certain Germanic tribes, the founders of the English nation.
For more than a hundred years bands of conquerors and settlers
migrated from their continental homes in the region of Denmark and the
Low Countries and established themselves in the south and east of the
island, gradually extending the area they occupied until it included all but
the highlands in the west and north.

36
 The traditional account of the Germanic invasions goes back to
Bede and the Anglo- Saxon Chronicle. Bede in his Ecdesiastical History
of the English People, completed in 731, tells us that the Germanic
tribes that conquered England were the Jutes, Saxons, and
Angles.
Britain had been exposed to attacks by the Saxons from as early
as the fourth century. When the Romans withdrew in 410 the Celts in
England (in the south) went into war with the Scots and the Picts in
Scotland (in the north). So, the Celtic leaders entered into an agreement
with the Jutes whereby they were to assist the Celts in driving out the
Picts and Scots and to receive as their reward the isle of Thanet on the
northeastern tip of Kent. The Jutes recognized the weakness of the
Britons and decided to stay in the island and began making a forcible
settlement in the southeast, in Kent. The Jutes came in numbers and
settled on the lands of the Celts. They met the resistance of the Celts by
driving them out. Moreover the example of the Jutes was soon followed
by the migration of other continental tribes. The Saxons came in the
period between 477-547. They established themselves in the south coast
and the west. Finally in the middle of the next century the Angles
occupied the east coast and in 547 established an Anglian kingdom.

3.1.i. The Anglo-Saxon Civilization

It is difficult to speak with surety about the relations of the newcomers
and the native population. In some districts where the inhabitants were
few, the Anglo-Saxons probably settled down beside the Celts in more or
less peaceful contact. In others, as in the West Saxon territory, the Celts
met the Germanic invaders with stubborn resistance; but the invaders

37
succeeded in establishing themselves only after much fighting. The
invaders despised those they overcame. They called the Celts “Wealas”
(which led to Welsh), but fifteen hundred years ago it meant slave or
foreigner and the Celts became both of these in what had been their own
country. Many of the Celts undoubtedly were driven into the west and
sought refuge in Wales and Cornwall, and some emigrated across the
Channel to Brittany. In any case such civilization as had been attained
under Roman influence was largely destroyed. The Roman towns were
burnt and abandoned. Town life did not attract a population used to life in
the open and finding its occupation in hunting and agriculture. The
society was organized by families and clans with a sharp distinction
between two classes: the eorls, a kind of hereditary aristocracy, and the
ceorls, the simple freemen.
In time various tribes combined either for greater strength or, under
the influence of a powerful leader, to produce small kingdoms. Seven of
these are eventually recognized, Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia,
Kent, Essex, Sussex, and Wessex, and are spoken of as the Anglo-
Saxon Heptarchy. But the grouping was not very permanent, sometimes
two or more being united under one king, at other times kingdoms being
divided under separate rulers.

38
3.1.ii. The Names “England” and “English.”
The Celts called their Germanic conquerors Saxons
indiscriminately, probably because they had had their first contact with
the Germanic peoples through the Saxon raids on the coast. Early Latin
writers, following Celtic usage, generally call the Germanic inhabitants of
England Saxones and the land Saxonia. But soon the terms Angli and
Anglia occur beside Saxones and refer not to the Angles individually but
to the West Germanic tribes generally. Æthelbert, king of Kent, is styled
rex Anglorum (King of the English) by Pope Gregory in 601, and a
century later Bede called his history the Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis
Anglorum . In time Angli and Anglia become the usual terms in Latin
texts. From the beginning, however, writers in the vernacular never call
their language anything but Englisc (English) . The word is derived from
the name of the Angles (OE Engle) but is used without distinction for the
language of all the invading tribes. In like manner the land and its people
are early called Angelcynn (Angle-kin or race of the Angles), and this is

39
the common name until after the Danish period. From about the year
1000 Englaland (land of the Angles) begins to take its place. The name
English is thus older than the name England . It is not easy to say why
England should have taken its name from the Angles. Possibly a desire
to avoid confusion with the Saxons who remained on the continent and
the early supremacy of the Anglian kingdoms were the predominant
factors in determining usage.
The English language of today is the language that has resulted
from the history of the dialects spoken by the Germanic tribes who came
to England in the manner described. It is impossible to say how much the
speech of the Angles differed from that of the Saxons or that of the
Jutes. The differences were certainly slight.

3.1.iii. Some Characteristics of Old English.

The English language has undergone such change in the course of time
that one cannot read Old English without special study. In general the
differences that one notices between Old and Modern English concern
spelling and pronunciation, the lexicon, and the grammar. This section
focuses on few examples of these differences.

A. Old English Grammar

The most fundamental feature that distinguishes Old English from the
language of today is its grammar. Inflectional languages fall into two
classes: synthetic and analytic. A synthetic language is one that
indicates the relation of words in a sentence largely by means of
inflections. In the case of the Indo-European languages these most
commonly take the form of endings on the noun and pronoun, the

40
adjective and the verb.
Examples:
(for the student’s information, NOT for memorization):
! In Latin the nominative murus (wall) is distinguished from the

genitive muri (of the wall), dative muro (to the wall), accusative
murum, etc.
[ Nominative= subject of the verb, genitive= possession or close
association, dative=indirect object or recipient, accusative=the object of
an action or the goal of motion]
! A single verb form like laudaverunt (they have praised) conveys

the idea of person, number, and tense along with the meaning of
the root, a conception that we require three words for in English.
! The Latin sentence Nero interfecit Agrippinam means “Nero killed

Agrippina.” It would mean the same thing if the words were

arranged in any other order, such as Agrippinam interfecit Nero,
because Nero is the form of the nominative case and the ending
-am of Agrippinam marks the noun as accusative no matter where
it stands.
In Modern English, however, the subject and the object do not have
distinctive forms, nor do we have, except in the possessive case and in
pronouns, inflectional endings to indicate the other relations marked by
case endings in Latin. Instead, we make use of a fixed order of words. It
makes a great deal of difference in English whether we say Nero killed
Agrippina or Agrippina killed Nero . Languages that make extensive use
of prepositions and auxiliary verbs and depend upon word order to show
other relationships are known as analytic languages. Modern English
is an analytic, Old English a synthetic language. In its grammar Old

41
English resembles modern German.

B. Old English Vocabulary

The vocabulary of Old English is almost purely Germanic. A large part of
this vocabulary, moreover, has disappeared from the language. When
the Norman Conquest brought French into England as the language of
the higher classes, much of the Old English vocabulary appropriate to
literature and learning died out and was replaced later by words
borrowed from French and Latin. An examination of the words in an Old
English dictionary shows that about 85 percent of them are no longer in
use. Those that survive, to be sure, are basic elements of our vocabulary
and by the frequency with which they recur make up a large part of any
English sentence. Apart from pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions,
auxiliary verbs, and the like, they express fundamental concepts like
mann (man), wīf (wife, woman), cild (child), hūs (house), weall (wall),
mete (meat, food), goers (grass), lēaf (leaf), fugol (fowl, bird), gōd
(good), hēah (high), strang (strong), etan (eat), drincan (drink), slǣpan
(sleep), libban (live), feohtan (fight). The everyday conversation is still
founded on and funded by Old English. All of the following are Old
English: is, you, man, son, daughter, friend, house, drink, here, there,
the, in, on, into, by, from, come, go, sheep, shepherd, ox, earth, home,
horse, ground, plough, swine, mouse, dog, wood, field, work, eyes, ears,
mouth, nose — “my dog has no nose” — broth, fish, fowl, herring, love,
lust, like, sing, glee, mirth, laughter, night, day, sun, word — “come hell
or high water.” These words are the foundation of English. One can have
intelligent conversations in Old English and only rarely do s/he need to
swerve away from it. Almost all of the hundred most common words in

42
modern English language worldwide, wherever it is spoken, come from
Old English.
Names of places: We can see it most plainly in many places in England
today. The “-ing” ending in modern place names means “the people of”
and “-ing” is all about us - Ealing, Dorking, Worthing, Reading, Hastings;
“-ton” means enclosure or village, as in my own home town of Wigton,
and as in Wilton, Taunton, Bridlington, Ashton, Burton, Crediton, Luton;
“-ham” means farm - Birmingham, Chippenham, Grantham, Fulham,
Tottenham, Nottingham. There are hundreds of examples. These were
straightforward territorial claims. The language said: We are here to stay,
we name and we own this.
Self-explaining Compounds: Old English has a considerable number
of self-explaining compounds. These are compounds of two or more
native words whose meaning in combination is either self-evident or has
been rendered clear by association and usage. In Modern English
greenhouse, railway, sewing machine, one-way street, and coffee-table
book are examples of such words. Words of this character are found in
most languages, but the type is particularly prevalent in Old English.
Examples:
! ban-hus: bone-house, for ‛body’
! gleo-beam : glee-wood, for ‛harp’
! wig-bord: war-board, for ‛shield’
! whale’s-way, for ‛sea’
! wave-steed, for ‛boat’
! lēohtfæt: light-vessel, for ‘lamp’,

! fisc-dēag: fish-dye, for ‘purple’

! doegred: (day-red), for ‘dawn’

43
 ! fōtādl: foot-disease, for ‘gout’

! gimm-wyrhta: gem-worker, for ‘jeweller’

3.1.iv. Old English Literature

It is in literature that a language displays its full power, its ability to
convey in vivid and memorable form the thoughts and emotions of a
people. The literature of the Anglo-Saxons is fortunately one of the
richest and most significant of any preserved among the early Germanic
peoples.
The greatest single work of Old English literature is Beowulf. It is a
poem of some 3,000 lines belonging to the type known as the folk epic,
that is to say, a poem which, whatever it may owe to the individual poet
who gave it final form, embodies material long current among the people.
It is a narrative of heroic adventure relating how a young warrior,
Beowulf, fought the monster Grendel, which was ravaging the land of
King Hrothgar, slew it and its mother, and years later met his death while
ridding his own country of an equally destructive foe, a fire-breathing
dragon. The theme seems somewhat fanciful to a modern reader, but the
character of the hero, the social conditions pictured, and the portrayal of
the motives and ideals that animated people in early Germanic times
make the poem one of the most vivid records we have of life in the heroic
age. It is not an easy life. It is a life that calls for physical endurance,
unflinching courage, and a fine sense of duty, loyalty, and honor. A
stirring expression of the heroic ideal is in the words that Beowulf
addresses to Hrothgar before going to his dangerous encounter with
Grendel’s mother:
“Sorrow not…. Better is it for every man that he avenge his friend

44
 than that he mourn greatly. Each of us must abide the end of this
world’s life; let him who may, work mighty deeds ere he die, for
afterwards, when he lies lifeless, that is best for the warrior.”
Besides Beowulf, there were other Old English literary texts, for example
the book of riddles. It is from the sole remaining manuscript, in the
library of Exeter Cathedral, which contains ninety-four riddles.
The Anchor Riddle... c 8th Century
Modern English Old English
Often I must war against the Oft ic sceal wiþ wæge winnan
wave and fight against the ond wiþ winde feohtan,
wind. I strive against them somod wið þam sæcce,
together when, shrouded by þonne ic secan gewite
the sea, I go to seek the eorþan yþum þeaht; me biþ
earth. My homeland is se eþel fremde.
strange to me. If I become Ic beom trong þæs gewinnes,
still, I am mighty in the gif ic stille weorþe;
conflict. If I do not succeed in gif me þæs tosæleð, hi beoð
that, because they are swiþran þonne ic,
stronger than me, at once ond mec slitende sona
with rending they will put me flymað,
to flight. They want to carry willað oþfergan þæt ic riþian
off what I must keep safe. I sceal.
defeat them in that, if my tail Ic him þæt forstonde, gif min
endures and the stones are steort þolað
able to hold fast against me in ond mec stiþne wiþ stanas
my strength. Ask what is my moton
name. fæste gehabban. Frige hwæt

45
 ic hatte.

Did you know....?

The Anglo-Saxons were a pagan race and traces still remain in the
names of four days of the week: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and
Friday. They commemorate the gods Tiw, Woden, Thor and Woden's
wife, Frig.

3.2. The Coming of Christianity and Literacy

Rome came back, not with a sword but with a cross. In 597 St.
Augustine and his 40 missionaries arrived in Kent, sent from Holy Rome
with all its authority by Pope Gregory. The Anglo-Saxons of were
pagans. After the conversion of the influential King Ethelbert of Kent,
Christianity spread rapidly through the land, carrying literacy and
European culture in it wake. Augustine was made Archbishop of
Canterbury in 601 AD and several great monasteries and centres of
learning were established particularly in Northumbria (e.g. Jarrow,
Lindisfarne).
The Celts and the early Anglo-Saxons used an alphabet of runes,
angular characters originally developed for scratching onto wood or
stone. The first known written English sentence, which reads "This she-
wolf is a reward to my kinsman", is an Anglo-Saxon runic inscription on a
gold medallion found in Suffolk, and has been dated to about 450-480
AD. The early Christian missionaries introduced the more rounded
Roman alphabet (much as we use today), which was easier to read and
more suited for writing on vellum or parchment. The Anglo-Saxons quite
rapidly adopted the new Roman alphabet, but with the addition of letters

46
"Cædmon's Hymn", composed between 658 and 680. Northumbrian
culture and language dominated England in the 7th and 8th Centuries,
until the coming of the Vikings, after which only Wessex, under Alfred the
Great, remained as an independent kingdom. By the 10th Century, the
West Saxon dialect had become the dominant, and effectively the
official, language of Britain (sometimes referred to as the koiné, or
common dialect). The different dialects often had their own preferred
spellings as well as distinctive vocabulary (e.g. the word evil was spelled
feel in the south-east, and yfel elsewhere; land would be land in West
Saxon and Kentish, but lond further north; etc).

3.3. The Vikings (or The Danes)

(The Anglo-Norse or the Anglo-Scandinavian period)
By the late 8th Century, the Vikings (or Danes) began to make
sporadic raids on the east cost of Britain. They came from Denmark,
Norway and Sweden, although it was the Danes who came with the
greatest force. Notorious for their ferocity, ruthlessness and callousness,
the Vikings pillaged and plundered the towns and monasteries of
northern England - in 793, they sacked and looted the wealthy
monastery at Lindisfarne in Northumbria - before turning their attentions
further south. By about 850, the raiders had started to over-winter in
southern England and, in 865, there followed a full-scale invasion and
on-going battles for the possession of the country.

Viking expansion was finally checked by Alfred the Great and, in

878, a treaty between the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings established the
Danelaw, splitting the country along a line roughly from London to

48
Chester, giving the Norsemen control over the north and east and the
Anglo-Saxons the south and west.

Although the Danelaw lasted less than a century, its influence can be
seen today in the number of place names of Norse origin in northern
England (over 1,500), including many place names ending in “-by”, “-
gate”, “-stoke”, “-kirk”, “-thorpe”, “-thwaite”, “-toft” and other suffixes (e.g.
Whitby, Grimsby, Ormskirk, Scunthorpe, Stoke Newington, Huthwaite,
Lowestoft, etc), as well as the “-son” ending on family names (e.g.
Johnson, Harrison, Gibson, Stevenson, etc) as opposed to the Anglo-
Saxon equivalent “-ing” (e.g. Manning, Harding, etc). The Vikings spoke
Old Norse, an early North Germanic language not that dissimilar to
Anglo-Saxon and roughly similar to modern Icelandic (the word viking
actually means “a pirate raid” in Old Norse). Accents and pronunciations
in northern England even today are heavily influenced by Old Norse, to
the extent that they are largely intelligible in Iceland.

49
 Over time, Old Norse was gradually merged into the English
language, and many Scandinavian terms were introduced. In actual fact,
only around 150 Norse words appear in Old English manuscripts of the
period, but many more became assimilated into the language and
gradually began to appear in texts over the next few centuries. In all, up
to 1,000 Norse words were permanently added to the English lexicon,
among them, some of the most common and fundamental in the
language, including skull, skin, leg, neck, freckle, sister, husband, fellow,
wing, bull, score, seat, root, bloom, bag, gap, knife, dirt, kid, link, gate,
sky, egg, cake, skirt, band, bank, birth, scrap, skill, thrift, window, gasp,
gap, law, anger, trust, silver, clasp, call, crawl, dazzle, scream, screech,
race, lift, get, give, are, take, mistake, rid, seem, want, thrust, hit, guess,
kick, kill, rake, raise, smile, hug, call, cast, clip, die, flat, meek, rotten,
tight, odd, rugged, ugly, ill, sly, wrong, loose, happy, awkward, weak,
worse, low, both, same, together, again, until, etc.

Old Norse often provided direct alternatives or synonyms for Anglo-

Saxon words, both of which have been carried on (e.g. Anglo-Saxon
craft and Norse skill, wish and want, dike and ditch, sick and ill, whole
and hale, raise and rear, wrath and anger, hide and skin, etc). Unusually
for language development, English also adopted some Norse
grammatical forms, such as the pronouns they, them and their, although
these words did not enter the dialects of London and southern England
until as late as the 15th Century. Under the influence of the Danes,
Anglo-Saxon word endings and inflections started to fall away during the
time of the Danelaw, and prepositions like to, with, by, etc became more
important to make meanings clear, although many inflections continued

50
into Middle English, particularly in the south and west (the areas furthest
from Viking influence).

3.4. Old English after the Vikings

By the time Alfred the Great came to the throne in 871, most of the great
monasteries of Northumbria and Mercia lay in ruins and only Wessex
remained as an independent kingdom. But Alfred, from his capital town
of Winchester, set about rebuilding and fostering the revival of learning,
law and religion. Crucially, he believed in educating the people in the
vernacular English language, not Latin, and he himself made several
translations of important works into English, include Bede’s
“Ecclesiastical History of the English People”. He also began the
“Anglo-Saxon Chronicle”, which recounted the history of England from
the time of Caesar's invasion, and which continued until 1154.

Alfred is revered by many as having single-handedly saved English

from the destruction of the Vikings, and by the time of his death in 899 he
had raised the prestige and scope of English to a level higher than that of
any other vernacular language in Europe. The West Saxon dialect of
Wessex became the standard English of the day (although the other
dialects continued nontheless), and for this reason the great bulk of the
surviving documents from the Anglo-Saxon period are written in the
dialect of Wessex.

The following paragraph from Aelfrich’s 10th Century “Homily on

St. Gregory the Great” gives an idea of what Old English of the time
looked like (even if not how it sounded):

51
 Eft he axode, hu ðære ðeode nama wære þe hi of comon. Him
wæs geandwyrd, þæt hi Angle genemnode wæron. þa cwæð he,
"Rihtlice hi sind Angle gehatene, for ðan ðe hi engla wlite habbað,
and swilcum gedafenað þæt hi on heofonum engla geferan beon."

A few words stand out immediately as being identical to their modern

equivalents (he, of, him, for, and, on) and a few more may be reasonably
easily guessed (nama became the modern name, comon became come,
wære became were, wæs became was). But several more have survived
in altered form, including axode (asked), hu (how), rihtlice (rightly), engla
(angels), habbað(have), swilcum (such), heofonum (heaven), and beon
(be), and many more have disappeared completely from the language,
including eft (again), ðeode (people, nation), cwæð (said, spoke),
gehatene (called, named), wlite(appearance, beauty) and geferan
(companions), as have special characters like þ (“thorn”) and ð (“edh” or
“eth”) which served in Old English to represent the sounds now spelled
with “th”.

Among the literary works representative of this later period of Old

English may be listed the “Battle of Maldon”, an Old English poem
relating the events of the Battle of Maldon of 991 (the poem is thought to
have been written not long after) and the “Old English Hexateuch”, a
richly illustrated Old English translation of the first six books of the Bible,
probably compiled in Canterbury in the second quarter of the 11th
Century. Ælfric of Eynsham, who wrote in the late 10th and early 11th
Century and is best known for his “Colloquy”, was the greatest and most
prolific writer of Anglo-Saxon sermons, many of which were copied and
adapted for use well into the 13th Century. A number of other Christian,

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heroic and elegiac poems, secular and Christian prose, as well as
riddles, short verses, gnomes and mnemonic poems for remembering
long lists of names, have also come down to us more or less intact.
Chapter 4
Middle English
(1066–1500 A.D.)
Important Note:

The beginning and ending dates of the Middle English period, though
somewhat arbitrary, are two points in time when ongoing language
changes became particularly noticeable:
! grammatical changes about 1100
! pronunciation changes about 1500.
The term middle indicates that the period was a transition between Old
English (which was grammatically very different from the language that
followed) and early Modern English (which in pronunciation was
different from what had come before but was much the same as our
own). The two dates also coincide approximately with some events in
English history that had profound effects on the language.

Some Key Events in the Middle English Period

The following events during the Middle English period significantly
influenced the development of the English language.
• 1066 The Normans conquered England, replacing the native English
nobility with Anglo-Normans and introducing Norman French as the
language of government in England. They also introduced the Feudal
System.
• 1204 King John lost Normandy to the French, beginning the loosening

53
of ties between England and the Continent.
• 1258 King Henry III issued the first English-language royal
proclamation since the Conquest, having been forced by his barons to
accept the Provisions of Oxford, establishing a Privy Council to oversee
the administration of the government, so beginning the growth of the
English constitution and parliament.
• 1337 The Hundred Years’ War began and lasted until 1453,
promoting English nationalism.
• 1348– 50 The Black Death killed an estimated one-third of England’ s
population and continued to plague the country for much of the rest of
the century.
• 1362 The Statute of Pleadings was enacted, requiring all court
proceedings to be conducted in English.
1381 The Peasants’ Revolt led by Wat Tyler was the first rebellion of
working-class people against their exploitation. Although it failed in most
of its immediate aims, it marks the beginning of popular protest.
• 1384 John Wycliffe died, having promoted the first complete translation
of scripture into the English language (the Wycliffite Bible).
• 1400 Geoffrey Chaucer died, having produced a highly influential body
of English poetry.
• 1430 The Chancery office (where legal records were deposited) began
recordkeeping in a form of East Midland English, which became the
written standard of English.
• 1476 William Caxton brought printing to England, thus promoting
literacy throughout the population.
• 1485 Henry Tudor became king of England, ending thirty years of civil
strife, called the War of the Roses, and introducing 118 years of the

54
Tudor dynasty.

The Middle English period can be divided into two phases (stages): a
collapse of English language use followed by a re-establishment or
resurgence of English.

4.1. The Collapse of English 1066-1200

! The Norman Conquest.

Toward the close of the Old English period an event occurred that had a
greater effect on the English language than any other in the course of its
history. This event was the Norman Conquest in 1066. What the
language would have been like if William the Conqueror had not
succeeded in making good his claim to the English throne can only be a
matter of conjecture. It would probably have pursued much the same
course as the other Germanic languages, retaining perhaps more of its
inflections and preserving a predominantly Germanic vocabulary, adding
to its word-stock by the characteristic methods of word formation already
explained, and incorporating words from other languages much less
freely. In particular it would have lacked the greater part of that
enormous number of French words that today make English seem, on
the side of vocabulary, almost as much a Romance as a Germanic
language. The Norman Conquest changed the whole course of the
English language. An event of such far-reaching consequences must be
considered in some detail.

! The Origin of Normandy.

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 On the northern coast of France directly across from England is a
district extending some seventy-five miles back from the Channel and
known as Normandy. It derives its name from the bands of Northmen
who settled there in the ninth and tenth centuries, at the same time that
similar bands were settling in the north and east of England. The Seine
offered a convenient channel for penetration into the country, and the
settlements of Danes in this region furnish a close parallel to those
around the Humber. A generation after Alfred reached an agreement
with the North-men in England, a somewhat similar understanding was
reached between Rollo, the leader of the Danes in Normandy, and
Charles the Simple, king of France. In 912 the right of the Northmen to
occupy this part of France was recognized; Rollo acknowledged the
French king as his overlord and became the first duke of the Normans. In
the following century and a half a succession of masterful dukes raised
the dukedom to a position of great influence, over-shadowing at times
the power of the king of France.
The adaptability of the Scandinavian, always a marked
characteristic of this people, nowhere showed itself more quickly. Readily
adopting the ideas and customs of those among whom they came to live,
the Normans had soon absorbed the most important elements of French
civilization. Moreover they injected fresh vigor into what they borrowed.
They profited from their contact with French military forces and, adding
French tactics to their own impetuous courage, soon had one of the best
armies, if we may use the term, in Europe. They took important features
of Frankish law, including the idea of the jury and, with a genius for
organization that shows up as clearly in the Norman kingdom of Sicily as
in Normandy and later in England, made it one of the outstanding legal

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systems of the world. They accepted Christianity and began the
construction of those great Norman cathedrals that are still marvels to
the modern architect. But most important of all, for us, they soon gave up
their own language and learned French. So rapidly did the old
Scandinavian tongue disappear in the Norman capital that the second
duke was forced to send his son to Bayeux so that he might learn
something of the speech of his forefathers. In the eleventh century, at the
time of the Norman Conquest, the civilization of Normandy was
essentially French, and the Normans were among the most advanced
and progressive of the peoples of Europe.
For some years before the Norman Conquest the relations
between England and Normandy had been fairly close. In 1002 Æthelred
the Unready had married a Norman wife and, when driven into exile by
the Danes, took refuge with his brother-in-law, the duke of Normandy.
His son Edward, who had thus been brought up in France, was almost
more French than English. At all events, when in 1042 the Danish line
died out and Edward, known as the Confessor, was restored to the
throne from which his father had been driven, he brought with him a
number of his Norman friends, enriched them, and gave them important
places in the government. A strong French atmosphere pervaded the
English court during the twenty-four years of his reign.

! The year 1066

When in January 1066, after a reign of twenty-four years, Edward the
Confessor died childless, England was again faced with the choice of a
successor. At his succession Edward had found England divided into a
few large districts, each under the control of a powerful earl. The most

57
influential of these nobles was Harold son of Godwin, earl of the West
Saxon, who had a firm and capable influence over national affairs. The
day after Edward’s death Harold was elected king.
His election did not long go unchallenged. William, the duke of
Normandy at this time, was a second cousin to the late king. Although
this relationship did not give him any right of inheritance to the English
throne, he had nevertheless been living in expectation of becoming
Edward’s successor. Edward seems to have encouraged him in this
hope. While William had been on a brief visit in England, Edward had
assured him that he should succeed him. Even Harold had been led,
though unwillingly, to acknowledge his claim. Having on one occasion
fallen into William’s hands, it seems he had been forced to swear, as the
price of his freedom, not to become a candidate or oppose William’s
election. But the English had had enough of French favorites, and when
the time came Harold did not consider himself bound by his former
pledge.
William decided to obtain the crown by force. He appealed to the
pope for the sanction of his enterprise and received the blessing of the
Church in Rome. In September he landed at Pevensey, on the south
coast of England, with a formidable force. Harold and William and their
armies gave battle at Hastings. Harold and his two brothers were killed
during the battle and the English army became deprived of their leaders.
Although William had won the battle of Hastings and eliminated his rival,
he had not yet attained the English crown. It was only after he had burnt
and pillaged the southeast of England that the citizens of London
decided that further resistance would be useless. Accordingly they
capitulated, and on Christmas Day 1066, William was crowned king of

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England.

! England during the Norman period

William settled in his new acquisition along with his nobles and
court. William crushed the opposition with a brutal hand and deprived the
Anglo-Saxon earls of their property, distributing it to Normans (and some
English) who supported him. 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). While Anglo-Norman
French 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. For example, the “Domesday Book”, in
which William the Conqueror took stock of his new kingdom, was written
in Latin to emphasize its legal authority.
However, the peasantry and lower classes (the vast majority of the
population, an estimated 95%) continued to speak English - considered
by the Normans a low-class, vulgar tongue - and the two languages
developed in parallel, only gradually merging as Normans and Anglo-
Saxons began to intermarry. The longer Norman French dominated all
the heights of communication, the weaker English would become. It is
this mixture of Old English and Anglo-Norman that is usually
referred to as Middle English.
In the first hundred fifty years or so, the system of feudalism,
introduced by William, defined all economic and social relations,
expressed in French words like “villein” and “vassal,” “labourer” and
“bailiff.” Feudalism was the dominant social system in medieval Europe.

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In this system, the nobility held lands from the Crown in exchange for
military service, and vassals were in turn tenants of the nobles, while the
peasants (villeins or serfs) were obliged to live on their lord's land and
give him homage, labour, and a share of the produce, notionally in
exchange for military protection.
In the countryside, where ninety-five percent of the population lived
in the Middle Ages, still speaking in a language oppressed or ignored,
the English were essentially “serfs,” another French word, not technically
slaves but tied for life to their lord’s estate, which they worked for him
and, at subsistence level, for themselves. While the English-speaking
peasants lived in small, often one-roomed mud and wattle cottages, or
huts, their French-speaking masters lived in high stone castles. Many
aspects of our modern vocabulary reflect the distinctions between them.
English speakers tended the living cattle, for instance, which we still call
by the Old English words “ox” or, more usually today, “cow.” French
speakers ate prepared meat which came to the table, which we call by
the French word “beef.” In the same way the English “sheep” became the
French “mutton,” “calf” became “veal,” “deer” became “venison,” “pig”
“pork,” English animal, French meat in every case. The English
laboured, the French feasted.
This cut-off, though, may well have worked to English’s advantage.
The English people held on to their own language for identity, for secret
communication, out of love and certainly out of stubbornness. The feudal
system caused division between classes, social gaps which were very
rarely bridged. Conquered English knelt down, suffered from the iniquity
of the French and the injustices of the world; however, they protected
their English language as the one true mark of identity and dignity.

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 ! The Influence of Norman French on English

French influence on English in terms of vocabulary was unmatched by

any other language. Yet they soon became “English” in pronunciation, in
their eventual common use. 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-”. Perhaps predictably,
many of them related to matters of crown and nobility (e.g. crown, castle,
prince, count, duke, viscount, baron, noble, sovereign, heraldry); of
government and administration (e.g. parliament, government, governor,
city); of court and law (e.g. court, judge, justice, accuse, arrest, sentence,
appeal, condemn, plaintiff, bailiff, jury, felony, verdict, traitor, contract,
damage, prison); of war and combat (e.g. army, armour, archer, battle,
soldier, guard, courage, peace, enemy, destroy); of authority and control
(e.g. authority, obedience, servant, peasant, vassal, serf, labourer,
charity); of fashion and high living (e.g. mansion, money, gown, boot,
beauty, mirror, jewel, appetite, banquet, herb, spice, sauce, roast,
biscuit); and of art and literature (e.g. art, colour, language, literature,
poet, chapter, question). Curiously, though, the Anglo-Saxon words
cyning (king), cwene (queen), erl (earl), cniht (knight), ladi (lady) and lord
persisted.
While humble trades retained their Anglo-Saxon names (e.g. baker,
miller, shoemaker, etc), the more skilled trades adopted French names
(e.g. mason, painter, tailor, merchant, etc). While the animals in the field
generally kept their English names (e.g. sheep, cow, ox, calf, swine,

61
deer), once cooked and served their names often became French (e.g.
beef, mutton, pork, bacon, veal, venison, etc). Sometimes a French word
completely replaced an Old English word (e.g. crime replaced firen,
place replaced stow, people replaced leod, beautiful replaced wlitig,
uncle replaced eam, etc). 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
(e.g. the Old English doom and French judgement, hearty and cordial,
house and mansion, etc). The French also replaced English words —
“fruit” for instance replaces Old English “wæstm.” But often enough
English words stand side by side with them - Old English “æppel” used to
mean any kind of fruit. It narrowed down its meaning to refer to one fruit
in particular, the apple itself.

But, often, 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, infant to child, amity to friendship, battle to fight, liberty to
freedom, labour to work, desire to wish, commence to start, conceal to
hide, divide to cleave, close to shut, demand to ask, chamber to room,
forest to wood, power to might, annual to yearly, odour to smell, pardon
to forgive, aid to help, etc). Over time, many near synonyms acquired
subtle differences in meaning (with the French alternative often
suggesting a higher level of refinement than the Old English), 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, lord and master, love and cherish,

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ways and means, etc). Bilingual word lists were being compiled as early
as the 13th Century.
The pronunciation differences between the harsher, more guttural
Anglo-Norman and the softer Francien dialect of Paris were also carried
over into English pronunciations. For instance, words like quit, question,
quarter, etc, were pronounced with the familiar “kw” sound in Anglo-
Norman (and, subsequently, English) rather than the “k” sound of
Parisian French. The Normans tended to use a hard “c” sound instead of
the softer Francien “ch”, so that charrier became carry, chaudron
became cauldron, 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. 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).
French scribes changed the common Old English letter pattern
"hw" to "wh", largely out of a desire for consistency with "ch" and "th",
and despite the actual aspirated pronunciation, so that hwaer became
where, hwaenne became when and hwil became while. A "w" was even
added, for no apparent reason, to some words that only began with "h"
(e.g. hal became whole). Another oddity occurred when hwo became
who, but the pronunciation changed so that the "w" sound was omitted
completely. There are just some of the kinds of inconsistencies that
became ingrained in the English language during this period.
During the reign of the Norman King Henry II and his queen
Eleanor of Aquitaine in the second half of the 12th Century, many more
Francien words from central France were imported in addition to their

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Anglo-Norman counterparts (e.g. the Francien chase and the Anglo-
Norman catch; royal and real; regard and reward; gauge and wage; guile
and wile; guardian and warden; guarantee and warrant). Regarded as
the most cultured woman in Europe, Eleanor also championed many
terms of romance and chivalry (e.g. romance, courtesy, honour,
damsel, tournament, virtue, music, desire, passion, etc).

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, including scripture,
collect, meditation, immortal, oriental, client, adjacent, combine,
expedition, moderate, nervous, private, popular, picture, legal, legitimate,
testimony, prosecute, pauper, contradiction, history, library, comet, solar,
recipe, scribe, scripture, tolerance, imaginary, infinite, index, intellect,
magnify and genius. But 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, words like abbey, alliance, attire, defend, navy, march, dine,
marriage, figure, plea, sacrifice, scarlet, spy, stable, virtue, marshal,
esquire, retreat, park, reign, beauty, clergy, cloak, country, fool, coast,
magic, etc.

A handful of French loanwords established themselves only in

Scotland (which had become increasingly English in character during the
early Middle English period, with Gaelic pushed further and further into
the Highlands and Islands), including bonnie and fash. Distinctive
spellings like "quh-" for "wh-" took hold (e.g. quhan and quhile for whan
and while), and the Scottish accent gradually became more and more
pronounced, particularly after Edward I's inconclusive attempts at

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annexation. Scottish English's radically distinct evolution only petered out
in the 17th Century after King James united the crowns of Scotland and
England (1603), and the influence of a strongly emerging Standard
English came to bear during the Early Modern period.

! 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

65
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

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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.

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 napron
became an apron, a nauger became an auger, etc, as well as the
reverse case of an ekename becoming a nickname.

Although Old English had no distinction between the formal and

informal second person singular, which was always expressed as thou,
the words ye or you (previously the second person plural) were
introduced in the 13th Century as the formal singular version (used with
superiors or non-intimates), with thou remaining as the familiar, informal
form.

4.2. The Resurgence of English 1200-1400

Shortly after 1200 conditions changed. England lost an important part of
its possessions abroad. The nobility gradually relinquished their
continental estates. A feeling of rivalry developed between the two

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countries, accompanied by an antiforeign movement in England and
culminating in the Hundred Years’ War. During the century and a half
following the Norman Conquest, French had been not only natural but
more or less necessary to the English upper class; in the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries its maintenance became increasingly artificial. For a
time certain new factors helped it to hold its ground, socially and
officially. Meanwhile, however, social and economic changes affecting
the English-speaking part of the population were taking place, and in the
end numbers told. In the fourteenth century English won its way back
into universal use, and in the fifteenth century French all but
disappeared. We must now examine in detail the steps by which this
situation came about.

! The Loss of Normandy.

The first link in the chain binding England to the continent was broken in
1204 when King John lost Normandy. John, seeing the beautiful Isabel of
Angouleme, fell violently in love with her and, no doubt having certain
political advantages in mind, married her in great haste (1200),
notwithstanding the fact that she was at the time formally betrothed to
Hugh of Lusignan, the head of a powerful and ambitious family. To make
matters worse, John, anticipating hostility from the Lusignans, took the
initiative and wantonly attacked them. They appealed for redress to their
common overlord, the king of France. Philip saw in the situation an
opportunity to embarrass his most irritating vassal. He summoned John
(1202) to appear before his court at Paris, answer the charges against
him, and submit to the judgment of his peers. John maintained that as
king of England he was not subject to the jurisdiction of the French court;

68
Philip replied that as duke of Normandy he was. John demanded a safe
conduct, which Philip offered to grant only on conditions that John could
not accept. Consequently, on the day of the trial the English king did not
appear, and the court declared his territory confiscated according to
feudal law. Philip proceeded at once to carry out the decision of the
court and invaded Normandy. A succession of victories soon put the
greater part of the duchy in his control. One after another of John’s
supporters deserted him. His unpopularity was increased by the news of
the death of the young prince Arthur, John’s nephew and captive, who
was married to Philip’s daughter and who, it was firmly believed, had
been murdered. In 1204 Rouen surrendered, and Normandy was lost to
the English crown.
So far as it affected the English language, as in other respects as
well, the loss of Normandy was wholly advantageous. King and nobles
were now forced to look upon England as their first concern. Although
England still retained large continental possessions, they were in the
south of France and had never been so intimately connected by ties of
language, blood, and property interests as had Normandy. It gradually
became apparent that the island kingdom had its own political and
economic ends and that these were not the same as those of France.
England was on the way to becoming not merely a geographical term but
once more a nation.
One of the important consequences of the event just described was
that it brought to a head the question of whether many of the nobility
owed their allegiance to England or to France. After the Norman
Conquest a large number held lands in both countries. A kind of
interlocking aristocracy existed, so that it might be difficult for some of

69
the English nobility to say whether they belonged more to England or to
the continent. The loss of Normandy led to the separation of the French
and English Nobility. We may be sure that after 1250 there was no
reason for the nobility of England to consider itself anything but English.
The most valid reason for its use of French was gone.

! The Hundred Years’ War.

In the course of the centuries following the Norman Conquest the
connection of England with the continent, as we have seen, had been
broken. It was succeeded by a conflict of interests and a growing feeling
of antagonism that culminated in a long period of open hostility with
France (1337–1453). The causes of this struggle are too complex to be
entered into here, but the active interference of France in England’s
efforts to control Scotland led Edward III finally to put forth a claim to the
French throne and to invade France. The great victories of the English at
Crécy (1346) and Poitiers (1356) fanned English patriotism to a white
heat, though this auspicious beginning of the struggle was followed by a
depressing period of reverses and though the contest was interrupted by
long periods of truce. In the reign of Henry V England again enjoyed a
brief period of success, notably in the victory against great odds at
Agincourt (1415). But the success did not continue after the young
king’s death, and the exploits of Joan of Arc (1429) marked the
beginning of the end.
Although this protracted war again turned people’s attention to the
continent, and the various expeditions might have tended to keep the
French language in use, it seems to have had no such effect, but rather
the opposite. Probably the intervals between the periods of actual

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fighting were too long and the hindrances to trade and other intercourse
too discouraging. The feeling that remained uppermost in the minds of
most people was one of animosity, coupled with a sense of the
inevitability of renewed hostilities. During all this time it was impossible to
forget that French was the language of an enemy country, and the
Hundred Years’ War is probably to be reckoned as one of the causes
contributing to the disuse of French.

The Rise of the Middle Class in England

A feature of some importance in helping English to recover its former
prestige is the improvement in the condition of the mass of the people
and the rise of a substantial middle class. As we have seen, the
importance of a language is largely determined by the importance of the
people who speak it. During the latter part of the Middle English period
the condition of the laboring classes was rapidly improving. Among the
rural population villeinage was dying out. Fixed money payments were
gradually substituted for the days’ work due the lord of the manor, and
the status of the villein more nearly resembled that of the free tenants.
The latter class was itself increasing; there was more incentive to
individual effort and more opportunity for a person to reap the rewards of
enterprise. The process by which these changes were being brought
about was greatly accelerated by an event that occurred in the year
1349.
In the summer of 1348 there appeared in the southwest of England
the first cases of a disease that in its contagiousness and fatality
exceeded anything previously known. It spread rapidly over the rest of
the country, reaching its height in 1349 but continuing in the north into

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the early months of 1350. The illness, once contracted, ran a very rapid
course. In two or three days the victims either died or showed signs of
recovery. Generally they died. Immunity was slight, and in the absence
of any system of quarantine the disease spread unimpeded through a
community. The mortality was unbelievably high, though it has often
been exaggerated. We can no more believe the statement that scarcely
one-tenth of the people were left alive than we can the assertion of the
same chronicler that all those born after the pestilence had two “cheek-
teeth in their head less than they had afore.” Careful modern studies
based on the data contained in episcopal registers show that 40 percent
of the parish clergy died of the plague, and while this is apparently higher
than for the population at large, the death rate during the plague
approximated 30 percent. It is quite sufficient to justify the name “The
Black Death.”
The effects of so great a calamity were naturally serious, and in
one direction at least are fully demonstrable. As in most epidemics, the
rich suffered less than the poor. The poor could not shut themselves up
in their castles or retreat to a secluded manor. The mortality was
accordingly greatest among the lower social orders, and the result was a
serious shortage of labor. This is evident in the immediate rise in wages,
a rise which the Statute of Laborers was insufficient to control or prevent.
Nor was this result merely temporary if we may judge from the thirteen
reenactments of the statute in the course of the next hundred years.
Villeins frequently made their escape, and many cotters left the land in
search of the high wages commanded by independent workers. Those
who were left behind felt more acutely the burden of their condition, and
a general spirit of discontent arose, which culminated in the Peasants’

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Revolt of 1381. During the revolt, English was the language of protest
and protesting its right to be heard and taken account of before the
Norman rulers. And the Norman rulers had to use to calm down the
revolt of the thousands of English peasants.
By and large, the effect of the Black Death was to increase the economic
importance of the laboring class and with it the importance of the English
language which they spoke.
We may also note at this time the rise of another important group—
the craftsmen and the merchant class. By 1250 there had grown up in
England about two hundred towns with populations of from 1,000 to
5,000; some, like London or York, were larger. These towns became
free, self-governing communities, electing their own officers, assessing
taxes in their own way, collecting them and paying them to the king in a
lump sum, trying their own cases, and regulating their commercial affairs
as they saw fit. The townsfolk were engaged for the most part in trade or
in the manufacturing crafts and banded together into commercial
fraternities or guilds for their mutual protection and advantage. In such
an environment there arose in each town an independent, sometimes a
wealthy and powerful class, standing halfway between the rural peasant
and the hereditary aristocracy.
Such changes in the social and economic life benefited particularly
the English speaking part of the population, and enable us better to
understand the final triumph of English in the century in which these
changes largely occur.

! The Rise of English in the Fourteenth Century.

At the beginning of the fourteenth century English was once more

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known by everyone. English replaced French in the schoolrooms, As
education and literacy (the ability to read and write) spread, so did the
demand for books in English. In 1362, for the first time in almost three
centuries, English was acknowledged as a language of official business.
Since the Conquest, court cases had been heard in French. Now the law
recognised that too few people understood that language, perhaps
because many of the educated lawyers, like the clergy, had died in the
plague. From now on, it was declared, cases could be pleaded,
defended, debated and judged in English. In that same year, Parliament
was opened in the hammer-beamed Great Hall in the Palace of
Westminster. For the first time ever, the Chancellor addressed the
assembly not in French but in English.
The last step that the English language had to make in its gradual
ascent was its employment in writing. For here it had to meet the
competition of Latin as well as French. In private and semi-official
correspondence French is at its height at about 1350; the earliest English
letters appear in the latter part of the century, but there are few before
1400. After 1450 English letters are everywhere the rule.102 It is rather
similar with wills. The wills of many 14th century kings, such as: Henry
IV, Henry V, and Henry VI are all in English. The fifteenth century also
saw the adoption of English for the records of towns and guilds and in a
number of branches of the central government. It is so likewise with the
guilds and the records of Parliament tell a similar story.

! Middle English Literature: Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer, the greatest poet of Middle English times and one of
themgreatest of all times in any language, wrote in both French and

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English, but his significant work is in English. By the time Chaucer died in
1400, English was well established as the language of England in literary
and other uses. Chaucer was the first writer of the newly emerged
England. He told us what English people were.
In The Canterbury Tales in particular he describes characters we
can still see around us today and he writes of them in the English
language. Here, at the end of the fourteenth century, English speakers
talk directly to us, through skilful stories told by a group of pilgrims to
ease the time as they ride from Southwark in London to Canterbury
Cathedral. Most importantly of all, he decided to write not in Latin —
which he knew well — not in the French from which he translated and
which might have given him greater prestige, but in English, his own
English, London based English.
Chaucer was a Londoner, born in the mid 1340s, son of a London
vintner, John Chaucer. In his adolescence, he became a page in the
service of the Duke of Clarence and later served in the household of
Edward III. Chaucer lived in London and chose to write his poetry in the
London dialect. Middle English had a diversity of dialects. In the 14th
century, London speech became a standard for all of England. London
had for centuries been a large (by medieval standards), prosperous, and
hence important city. Power had moved out of Wessex away from
Winchester and it was now London, together with the twin universities of
Oxford and Cambridge, which increasingly would set the Standard
English. Chaucer was not alone, many other writers chose to write in the
London dialect, There is Langland’s Piers Plowman, there is Sir Gawain
and the Green Knight, there are homilies, sermons, rhymes and verses
bursting out all over England. This considerable amount of literature

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written in the London dialect led to the rise of a London Standard
English.
Even though about twenty to twenty-five percent of the vocabulary
used by Chaucer is from the French, Chaucer planted English deeply in
the country which bore its name, with a brilliance and a confidence that
meant that there was no looking back: Confidence in England and
English was growing.Before the fifteenth century was out, William Caxton
had printed two editions of The Canterbury Tales and they have never
been out of print since. They have been enjoyed, imitated, copied, re-
translated, put on stage, screen and radio, and generations have rightly
regarded Chaucer as the father and founding genius of English literature.

! English and Religion: John Wycliffe

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the movement was under way to
force English into a central and commanding place in the society. The
state had to be challenged, and the Church. It was with the Church
that English had its most violent struggle.

! Conditions of the Church in medieval England

The brutalities involved beggar belief. Later medieval Britain was a
religious society. The Roman Catholic Church controlled and pervaded
all aspects of earthly life including the intimately sexual. It also held the
keys to a heaven and hell which were very real in the minds of most who
were fed ceaselessly and cleverly with priestly persuasions, stories of
miracles, promises of eternal happiness and threats of eternal torture
and damnation. You challenged the might of the Church only if you were
extremely powerful and even the powerful would quail and crack when

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the full range of the Church’s instruments of power and conviction were
brought to bear. But there were those in England, men of faith, totally
committed to the idea that English should become the language of God
and in a series of heroic efforts they set out to make that happen even
though it would invoke the fearsome wrath of the Holy Roman Catholic
Church.
The central power of words in fourteenth-century England lay in the
Bible. There was no Bible in English. There had been some piecemeal
translations of the Gospels and parts of the Old Testament in Old English
and there were Middle English versions of the Psalms. In formal terms,
God spoke to the people in Latin. Latin, though not the monopoly of the
clergy, was certainly fortressed by it. The proper relationship between
the believer and the Bible was one mediated by the priest in Latin. He
would interpret scripture for the common people. It was not unlike a
single party state with a single party line on everything. The Bible was in
Latin — a language wholly inaccessible to the vast majority — and Bibles
were few. The justification was that this was the word of God and to
know God was a blessing and a richness beyond all understanding. The
priest, it was argued, being ordained a true man of God, would avoid
sinful misinterpretation and heresy. He would make sure the devil was
shut out.
This meant that it was impossible for most English people to know
the Bible for themselves. If you wanted to communicate with God in
English, you might be lucky with an idealistic local priest who would
preach a sermon on a biblical text — but his starting point and his
finishing point would be in Latin: “In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus
Sancti. Amen.” There were other ways. Most notably there were the

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Mystery Plays such as those which began to be performed in York
outside the cathedral, the minster, a building every bit as big and
daunting as its twin, the Norman castle on the other side of the city.
These Mystery Plays tell the Christian story from the creation of God to
the birth, death and resurrection of Christ. They are religious plays but
they are not, nor were they allowed to be, the scriptures. They could be
called a biblical soap opera. Every year, even today, one of the dozen
plays, each originally put on by an often appropriate guild (the carpenters
took care of the Crucifixion), is given in the English of the fourteenth
century.
There can be little doubt of the fear and love most of the population
had for their religion and for their Church, and their reliance on it for
comfort, for hope and for everyday pleasures, feast days, saints’ days,
grand processionals. But the common people were on the outside, as
can still graphically be seen in York every year as the Mystery Players
circle the town and perform in the shadow of the minster, but are not
allowed through its doors.

When they went into the minster to stand or kneel respectfully at the
back — and everyone had to go, church attendance was compulsory —
the service was a remote affair. The whole emphasis was on the mystery
of it, the priests like a secret society, the Latin words so awesome in their
ancient verity that, although some phrases would have stuck over the
years, the whole intention was to impress and to subdue and not to
enlighten. People were at the mercy of the priests. Only they were
allowed to read the word of God and they did even that silently. A bell
was rung to let the congregation know when the priest had reached the

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important bits. The priest stood not as a guide to the Bible but as its
guardian and as a guardian against common believers. They would not
be allowed to enter into the Book. It would be a formidable struggle to
wrench that power from the priests, to replace that Latin with English. It
is an inspiring passage in the adventure of English, a time of martyrdom
and high risk, of daring, scholarship and above all a generous and
inclusive belief that the word of God should be in the language of the
people. The battle would eventually tear the Church in two, an
inconceivable outcome when the first rumblings began in the second half
of the fourteenth century. It would claim many lives. But many were
ready to die for it, to make English the language of their faith.

! John Wycliffe and the Lollards

The prime mover in the fourteenth century was a scholar, John
Wycliffe, probably born near Richmond in Yorkshire, admitted to Merton
College, Oxford, when he was seventeen, charismatic, we are told, and a
fluent Latinist. He was a major philosopher and theologian who believed
passionately that his knowledge should be shared by everyone. From
within the sanctioned, clerical, deeply traditionalist honeyed walls of
Oxford, Wycliffe the scholar launched a furious attack on the power and
wealth of the Church, an attack which prefigured that of Martin Luther
more than a hundred years later.
His main argument was to distinguish the eternal, ideal Church of
God from the material one of Rome. In short, he maintained that if
something is not in the Bible there is no truth in it, whatever the Pope
says — and, incidentally, the Bible says nothing at all about having a
Pope. When men speak of the Church, he said, they usually mean

79
priests, monks, canons and friars. But it should not be so. “Were there a
hundred popes,” he wrote, “and all the friars turned to cardinals, their
opinions on faith should not be accepted except in so far as they are
founded on scripture itself.”
This was inflammatory and cut away the roots of all established
authority, especially as he and his followers like John Ball coupled this
with a demand that the Church give away all its worldly wealth to the
poor. The Church saw no option but to crush him. For Wycliffe went even
further. He and his followers attacked transubstantiation, the belief that,
administered by the clergy, the wine and bread turn miraculously into the
blood and body of Christ; he attacked clerical celibacy, which he thought
of as an institutional control system over the army of the clergy; he
attacked enforced confession, the method, Wycliffe argued, by which the
clergy could trap dissidents and check errors in thought; and
indulgences, the purchase of which were said to bring relief from
purgatory but also brought wealth to the Church; pilgrimages, as a form
of idolatry; and Mystery Plays, because they were not the word of God.
Wycliffe took no prisoners.
His prime and revolutionary argument, one which, if accepted in
any shape or form, would have toppled the Church entirely, was that the
Bible was the sole authority for religious faith and practice and that
everyone had the right to read and interpret scripture for himself. This
would have changed
the world, and those who ruled the world knew it. He was to become
their prime enemy. It is ironic that his main arguments had to be written
in Latin — the international language of scholarship and theology —
though there are English sermons by him and his followers.

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 It is remarkable enough that a young man in a quiet clerical college
in a country long thought by Rome as on the “outermost edges of the
known world” should raise up his fist against the greatest authority on the
earth. He must have been fully aware of the risk he was taking. It is even
more remarkable that he went on and did something, did so much, to put
his ideas into practice and to enlist so much help from other scholars
who also must have seen their whole life and life’s work imperilled by this
breathtaking venture.
What sustained them, I think, was the state of the Church as they
saw it every day. It was intolerable to these Christian scholars. It was
often lazy and corrupt. Bible reading even among the clergy appears to
have been surprisingly rare, for often they did not have the Latin. When,
for example, the Bishop of Gloucester surveyed three hundred eleven
deacons, archdeacons and priests in his diocese, he discovered that a
hundred sixty-eight were unable to repeat the Ten Commandments,
thirty-one did not know where to find those Commandments in the Bible
and forty could not repeat the Lord’s Prayer. To men of true conscience,
integrity and faith, men like Wycliffe and his followers, this state of decay
and lack of care in what mattered most, this debilitated belief and
betrayal of vocation, had to be got rid of and defeated. The chief
weapon, the natural weapon for a scholar, was a book: the
Bible, in English.
A full Bible in English was unauthorised by the Church and
potentially heretical, even seditious, with all the savage penalties
including death which such crimes against the one true Church exacted.
Any translation was very high risk and had to be done in secrecy.
Wycliffe inspired two biblical translations and rightly they bear his

81
name. Both versions are made from the Latin Vulgate version and follow
it so closely that it can be incomprehensible. Wycliffe prepared the first
translation but the burden of it was undertaken by Nicholas Hereford of
Queen’s College, Oxford. He would have needed the help of many
friends as well as recourse to a great number of books. It was not only
the translation itself, a mammoth task, which faced them: the Bible had
to be disseminated too. Rooms in quiet Oxford colleges were turned into
revolutionary cells, scriptoria, production lines were established turning
out these holy manuscripts, and from the number that remain we can tell
that a great many were made. One hundred seventy survive, a huge
number for a six-hundred-year-old manuscript, which tells us that there
must have been effective groups of people secretly translating it, copying
it, passing it on. Later, hundreds would be martyred, dying the most
horrible deaths, for their part in creating and distributing to the people the
first English Bible.
It is difficult to appreciate the extent and the audacity of this
enterprise. Wycliffe was leading them into the cannon’s mouth. All of
them knew it and yet behind the obedient honey-coloured Latinate walls
of Oxford colleges, the medieval equivalent of the subversive samizdat
press which bypassed Stalin’s controls in Russia was organised, and
effectively. The operation is a long way from the image of medieval
Oxford as a cloistered community of rather quaint time-serving scholarly
clerks. Oxford was then the most dangerous place in England, leading
the fight in an underground movement which challenged the biggest
single force in the land and called into the public court the authority of the
revealed language of God. Yet Wycliffe and his men believed they were
to change the world and for a brief moment, it seemed, they had. The

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Wycliffe English Bible was completed.
Wycliffe widened the ecclesiastical vocabulary — “graven,”
“Philistine,” “schism”. However, the criticism of his Bible is that it is too
Latinate. So in awe were they of the authority of the Latin version that
they translated word for word, even keeping the Latin word order, as in
“Lord, go from me for I am a man sinner” and “I forsoothe am the Lord
thy God full jealous.” Another result was that the text itself is shot through
with Latinate words, some directly imported, some of which came
through the French, such as “mandement,” “descrive,” “cratch.” There
are over one thousand Latin words that turn up for the first time in
English whose use in England is first recorded in Wycliffe’s Bible, words
such as “profession,” “multitude” and “glory” — a good word for this
Bible.
By the standards of the day it was a bestseller and at first the
Church merely condemned Wycliffe. They complained that he had made
the scriptures “more open to the teachings of laymen and women. Thus
the jewel of the clerics is turned to the sport of the laity and the pearl of
the gospel is scattered abroad and trodden underfoot by swine.”
The swine were to be fed by Wycliffe and, zealous, alight with his
mission, he began to organise and train what amounted to a new
religious order of itinerant preachers whom he despatched around
England. Their typical garb was a russet-coloured woollen robe. They
carried a long staff. Initially most were those fearless Oxford scholars,
though they were quickly joined by “the low born” in extraordinary
numbers. Their avowed inspiration, through Wycliffe, were the seventy
evangelists whom Jesus had sent out to convert the world. Their purpose
was to spread the Word, literally, in English.

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 It had the characteristics of a guerrilla campaign. They were out to
bring God back to the people through the language of the land. We read
that they were in the highways, byways, taverns and inns, on village
greens and in open fields preaching against the Church’s wealth and
corruption and proclaiming Wycliffe’s anti-clerical ideas. They were spied
on, they were observed. They were taking their lives in their hands, but
Wycliffe drove them on. They became known as the Lollards, the name
deriving from “lollaerd,” mumbler, from “lollen,” to mutter or mumble.
They called themselves Christian Brethren.
Here is part of Wycliffe’s version of the Beatitudes:
Blessed be poor men in spirit, for the Kingdom of heaven is theirs.
Blessed be mild men for they shall wield the earth.
Blessed be they that mourn for they shall be comforted.
Blessed be they that hunger and thirst rightwise, for they shall be
fulfilled.
Blessed be the merciful men, for they shall get mercy.
...
You are the salt of the earth.

The Bible, through English, now called out directly to the people.
This could not be tolerated. On May 17, 1382, in Blackfriars in London,
on a site now boasting a Victorian public house whose tiled decor
remembers Wycliffe’s time, a synod of the Church met to examine
Wycliffe’s works. There were eight bishops, various masters of theology,
doctors of common and civil law and fifteen friars. It was a show trial.
Their conclusions were preordained and on the second day of their
meeting they drafted a statement condemning Wycliffe’s
pronouncements as outright heresies. Wycliffe’s followers were also
condemned. The synod ordered the arrest and prosecution of itinerant
preachers throughout the land. Many of those caught were tortured and

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killed. Perhaps most significantly of all as far as the English language is
concerned, the synod led, later, to a parliamentary ban on all English-
language Bibles and they had the powers to make this effective.
Wycliffe’s great effort was routed. He had taken on the power of the
Church and he had been defeated. His Bibles were outlawed. The doors
of the Church, from the greatest cathedrals to the lowliest parish
churches, were still the monopoly of Latin. On 30 May, every diocese in
the land was instructed to publish the verdict. Wycliffe became ill. He
was paralysed by a stroke. Two years later he died on the last day of
1384. In 1399, Henry IV was to accept the crown in English. Chaucer
delighted readers and appreciators of English everywhere with The
Canterbury Tales. But the Church slammed the door.
Yet the Lollards risked their lives and carried on, meeting in hidden
places, we are told, especially in Herefordshire and Monmouthshire. One
contemporary chronicler wrote that “every second man” he met was a
Lollard and they “went all over England luring great nobles and lords to
their fold.” It is very unlikely they were so numerous or so influential
among the nobility although, in a different context, in the Peasants’
Revolt in 1381, English was proving its worth as a language of protest
against central authority and certain restless nobles and lords might well
have welcomed that.
William Langland was a Lollard and his religious poem, Piers
Plowman, was published in 1390. It was the most popular poem of its
day, and it shows how deeply Wycliffe’s ideas had bitten in. Langland
wrote in the West Midlands dialect and while Chaucer’s base was
London and the cognoscenti, Piers Plowman gathered in the provincial
and the strongly religious-minded rural population with whose often

85
desperate plight he sympathised wholly.
After Wycliffe’s death and despite the condemnation and
harshness of the Church, copies of Wycliffe’s Bible continued to be
produced and circulated — even when it became a mortal crime to own
any of Wycliffe’s works. With astonishing courage, Catholics who spread
the English language were prepared to defy the Pope and take a chance
with their lives and their eternal souls in order to read the word of God to
the English in their own language.
But the hierarchy could not bear it. In 1412, twenty-eight years after
Wycliffe’s death, the Archbishop of Canterbury ordered all of Wycliffe’s
works to be burned and in a letter to the Pope entered a list of two
hundred sixty-seven heresies “worthy of the fire” which he claimed to
have culled from the pages of Wycliffe’s Bible. He is quoted as having
said, “That wretched and pestilent fellow, son of the Serpent, herald and
child of Antichrist, John Wycliffe, filled up the measure of his malice by
divining the expedient of a new translation of Scripture in the mother
tongue.”
Today, in a much more secular age, the question arises — why all
this fury? What had he done? Perhaps he would have been pardoned if
he had been the Oxford classical scholar content to concentrate solely
on translating the Bible? Perhaps if he had not gone for the Church’s
throat, challenged its worldly existence, stirred his theological criticisms
into the social upheaval which followed the Black Death? Then would he
have managed to slip English through the west door, down the nave and
on to the imperial lectern holding the Bible? It is doubtful. For reasons
sincere and cynical, Latin was held to be the language of the Holy Book
and ever more must be kept inviolate.

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 Wycliffe had threatened the very voice of the Universal Church of
the One Invisible God. It is a terrible example of the power in language.
The Church was not finished with him yet. The Emperor Sigismund, King
of Hungary, called together the Council of Constance in 1414. It was the
most imposing council ever called by the Catholic Church. In 1415
Wycliffe was condemned as a heretic and in the spring of 1428 it was
commanded that his bones be exhumed and removed from consecrated
ground. With the Primate of England looking on, Wycliffe’s remains were
disinterred and burned, thus presumably, it was thought, depriving him of
any possibility of eternal life. For when the Last Judgement came and the
bodies of the dead rose up to meet those souls chosen to live with God,
Wycliffe would be unable to reunite body and soul and so, if he had not
already perished in hell, as they prayed for and hoped, he would
certainly perish at the last.
The Bible remained in Latin and Wycliffe’s failed attempt was an
implacable and damning lesson to anyone foolish enough to attempt to
mount another unholy attack on the side of English. Wycliffe’s remains
were burned on a little bridge that spanned the River Swift, which was a
tributary of the Avon. His ashes were thrown into the stream. Soon
afterwards a Lollard prophecy appeared:
The Avon to the Severn runs,
The Severn to the sea.
And Wycliffe’s dust shall spread abroad
Wide as the waters be.

! English and the Language of the State: William Caxton

The invention of the process of printing from movable type, which
occurred in Germany about the middle of the fifteenth century, was

87
destined to exercise a far reaching influence on all the vernacular
languages of Europe. Introduced into England about 1476 by William
Caxton, who had learned the art on the continent, printing made such
rapid progress that a scant century later it was observed that manuscript
books were seldom to be seen and almost never used. Some idea of the
rapidity with which the new process swept forward may be had from the
fact that in Europe the number of books printed before the year 1500
reaches the surprising figure of 35,000. The majority of these, it is true,
were in Latin, whereas it is in the modern languages that the effect of the
printing press was chiefly to be felt. But in England over 20,000 titles in
English had appeared by 1640, ranging all the way from mere pamphlets
to massive folios. The result was to bring books, which had formerly
been the expensive luxury of the few, within the reach of many. More
important, however, was the fact, so obvious today, that it was possible
to reproduce a book in a thousand copies or a hundred thousand, every
one exactly like the other. A powerful force thus existed for promoting a
standard, uniform language, and the means were now available for
spreading that language throughout the territory in which it was
understood.
Caxton was a businessman who operated for a long time from
Bruges, in modern Belgium. At that time the Low Countries were ruled by
Burgundy, and Caxton's Burgundian contacts put him in a good position
to exploit the aristocratic book market. When he transferred his printing
press to England, he set it up in Westminster, which was not only close
to the Chancery, but also the ideal place for him to contact his
aristocratic customers. With the benefit of hindsight we know he was
successful. But in the 1470s it must have been far from obvious that

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publishing in the vernacular was going to succeed at all. Publishing in
Latin for an international readership might have looked more promising,
but Caxton's competitors in this area failed. Nor was the aristocratic
market promising, for England was at the time embroiled in the internal
dynastic struggles known as the Wars of the Roses. The fall of an
aristocratic patron could have serious consequences for a businessman
who was dependent on him to determine what was fashionable, and thus
for the credibility of his literary publications.
Aristocratic taste determined what Caxton decided to publish. He
published the works of Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate rather than
Langland and the northern poets (Blake, 1969: 70-1). In 1485 he
published Malory's Le morte d'Arthur. Some 28 of his 106 publications
were translations from other languages (Blake, 1969: 150). However,
taste determined not only what to publish, but the kind of English used.
With the introduction of printing influenced the variety of English
used in documents of the national bureaucracy as written by the clerks of
the Court of Chancery (a division of the High Court of Justice). The
regularization of spellings in this written standard can be seen as early
as the mid fifteenth century in the official documents of Chancery. This
office wrote personal letters on behalf of the monarch, which carried the
royal seal. But which English was it to be? Across the country a great
number of dialects were spoken and people would still have had trouble
understanding each other.

Examples: (for your knowledge NOT for memorization)

The word “stone” in the south was “ston,” not “stane” as in the north.
“Running” was spoken in the north as “runnand.” It appears as

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“runnende” in the East Midlands and as “runninde” in the West Midlands.
Runnand, runnende and runninde: add the singular twang of a local
accent and it is possible to imagine even words as close as this coming
out confusingly different.
But the pronunciation was nothing compared with the variety of
spelling in use. If you look at a spelling map of the day it reads — spell
as you speak. Because England had used Latin traditionally and French
for over three hundred years as the written languages, there had never
been any need to agree on a common linguistic standard for its native
tongue or even how to spell particular words.
The variety was profligate. Take the word “church” for instance,
one of the most common in the language. In the north of England at that
time it was commonly called a “kirk” while the south used “church.”
However, according to the Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English,
“kirk” could be spelled “kyrk,” “kyrke,” “kirke,” “kerk,” “kirc,” “kric,” “kyrck,”
“kirche” and “kerke”; “church” was variously “churche,” “cherche,”
“chirche,” “cherch,” “chyrch,” “cherge,” “chyrche,” “chorche,” “chrch,”
“churiche,” “cirche.” And then there were “schyrche,” “scherch,”
“scherche,” “schirche,” “schorche,” “schurch,” “schurche,” “sscherch.”
This magnificent fertility of English spelling was everywhere. There were
over five hundred ways of spelling the word “through” and over sixty of
the pronoun “she,” which is quite hard to imagine. A common written
language was needed and Chancery was well equipped to provide one.

Important Note:
Yet just because the spelling was being regularised did not always mean
that it was being simplified or made to follow rules of common sense.

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This reflects the survival of old plural forms (ox, oxen), historical sound
changes in Old English words (foot, feet), and loan words adopting “s”
as a plural (vows). Broadly, there were reformers who wanted to spell
words according to the way they were pronounced and traditionalists
who wanted to spell them in one of the ways they always had been.

The King had set an example; Chancery followed; the printing press
reinforced the importance of a common written language. By the end of
the fifteenth century, English was the language of the state and equipped
to carry messages of state in an increasingly uniform spelling north,
south, east and west, its manuscripts and later its books rolling over the
old dialects which nevertheless stayed stoutly on the tongue.

! English and Politics: Henry Tudor

Henry VII or Henry Tudor (the grandfather of Queen Elizabeth I)
ascended the throne of England after a long period of civil wars. His
victory at the the Battle of Bosworth brought an end to The War of
Roses (1455–1487; it is the name given to a series of battles for the
English crown in the 15th century. The two sides were the Dukes of
York, represented by a white rose, and the Dukes of Lancaster, whose
emblem was a red rose.

(For your knowledge)

KING Edward III had a son named Edmund of Langley, Duke of York,
and another named John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. Their
descendants Richard, Duke of York, and King Henry VI, of the House of
Lancaster, were rivals for the throne of England.

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Mental illness made Henry weak, and Richard asserted the right to
govern as Lord Protector at the Battle of St Albans in 1455. Henry’s
Queen, Margaret, fought him tooth and nail, but in 1461 Richard’s son
Edward overcame Henry at Towton, becoming King Edward IV.

Henry had to be defeated again at Tewkesbury in 1471, and this time

Edward thought he had eliminated all his rivals. But Henry’s distant
relative, Henry Tudor, had escaped. He returned in 1485 to take the
crown from Edward’s brother, Richard III, at the Battle of Bosworth.

With careful diplomacy, Henry Tudor married Margaret of York, and

named himself King Henry VII of the House of Tudor, bringing the Wars
of the Roses to an end.

Henry Tudor restoring faith and strength in the monarchy. He also had to
deal with other claimants, with some of them having a far stronger claim
than his own. To deal with this, Henry Tudor strengthened the
government and his own power, at the expense of the nobles. Henry
Tudor also had to deal with a treasury that was nearly bankrupt. The
English monarchy had never been one of the wealthiest of Europe and
even more so after the War of the Roses. Through his monetary
strategy, Henry Tudor managed to steadily accumulate wealth during
his reign, so that by the time he died, he left a considerable fortune to his
heir.

All Henry Tudor's work in the years of his reign had the underlying
factor of his determination to make his position, and that of his heirs,
secure. At home he built up a strong government, based on financial
solvency and popular support; abroad, he sought recognition of his

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position from his fellow-monarchs and a prestige among them which
would impress his own subjects. Henry’s efforts gave England a time to
prosper and become stronger nation. He paved the way for his
successors (his son Henry VIII, and his grand-daughter Elizabeth I) to
turn England into a powerful nation, and consequently to make English a
more prestigious language.

By the year 1500, English was the language of literature, the

language of politics, and the language of the state. Yet, it failed to be the
language of religion. There was only one more kingdom for English to
conquer. The keepers of this eternal kingdom, the Roman Catholic
hierarchy, were being threatened by popular movements, like that of
Wycliffe, all over Europe and their reaction was to dig in deeper and fight
with all the natural and supernatural means they thought and were
thought to have at their command. Latin was their armour, believed to be
blessed and made invulnerable by God Himself. Any assault on the Latin
Bible was an assault on the spirit, meaning and purpose of the Church.
In the early modern period (1500-1800), English would continue its fight
and would dominate and become the language of all aspects of culture in
England. And, in the late modern period (1800-present), English would
invade the world and become an international language,

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 Chapter 5
The Early Modern Period
The early Modern period was transformative for both England and the
language. The sixteenth to eighteenth centuries were a time of
revolutionary development, opening the way for English to become a
world language.

Some Key Events in the Early Modern Period

The following events during the early Modern English period significantly
influenced the development of the English language.

! 1517 The Protestant Reformation in Europe started with Martin

Luther
! 1534 The Act of Supremacy established Henry VIII as “ Supreme

Head of the Church of England,” and thus officially put civil

authority above Church authority in England.
! 1549 The Book of Common Prayer was adopted and became an

influence on English literary style.

! 1558 At the age of 25, Elizabeth I became queen of England and,

as a woman with a Renaissance education and a skill for

leadership, began a forty-five-year reign that promoted statecraft,
literature, science, exploration, and commerce.
! 1577– 80 Sir Francis Drake circumnavigated the globe, the first

Englishman to do so, and participated in the defeat of the Spanish

Armada in 1588, thus removing an obstacle to English expansion
overseas.
! 1590– 1611 William Shakespeare wrote the bulk of his plays, from

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 Henry VI to The Tempest.
! 1600 The East India Company was chartered to promote trade with

Asia, leading eventually to the establishment of the British Raj in

India.
! 1604 Robert Cawdrey published the first English dictionary, A

Table Alphabeticall .
! 1607 Jamestown, Virginia, was established as the first permanent
English settlement in America.
! 1611 The Authorized or King James Version of the Bible was

produced by a committee of scholars and became, with the Prayer

Book and the works of Shakespeare, a major influence on English
literary style.
! 1619 The first African slaves in North America arrived in Virginia.

! 1642– 48 The Puritan Revolution overthrew the monarchy and

established a military dictatorship, which lasted until the

Restoration of King Charles II in 1660.
! 1660 The Royal Society was founded as the first English

organization devoted to the promotion of scientific knowledge and

research.
! 1670 Hudson’ s Bay Company was chartered for promoting trade

and settlement in Canada.

! 1688 The Glorious Revolution was a bloodless coup in which

Parliament invited William of Orange and his wife, Mary (daughter

of the reigning English king), to assume the English throne,
resulting in the establishment of Parliament’ s power over that of
the monarchy.
! 1702 The first daily newspaper was published in London, resulting

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 in the expanding power of the press to disseminate information and
to form public opinion.
! 1719 Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe, sometimes

identified as the first modern novel in English.

! 1755 Samuel Johnson published his Dictionary of the English

Language .
! 1775– 83 The American Revolution resulted in the foundation of

the first independent nation of English speakers outside the British

Isles.
! 1788 The English first settled Australia near modern Sydney.

The Great Vowel Shift

The Great Vowel Shift can take a lifetime to investigate and another to
explain. The Great Vowel Shift was a major series of changes in the
pronunciation of the English language that took place, beginning in
southern England, primarily between 1350 and the 1600s and 1700s,
today influencing effectively all dialects of English. Through this vowel
shift, all Middle English long vowels changed their pronunciation.
English spelling was first becoming standardized in the 15th and 16th
centuries, and the Great Vowel Shift is responsible for the fact that
English spellings now often strongly deviate in their representation of
English pronunciations.

From Catholicism to Protestantism (The Reformation)

In the early sixteenth century, Europe witnessed a religious revolution to
correct the corruptions of the Catholic Church in Rome. The Reformation
became the basis for the founding of Protestantism, one of the major

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branches of Christianity. The revolution started in 1517, when Martin
Luther had shaken the Roman Catholic Church with the demands he had
nailed on the church door at Wittenberg in Germany. Few years later, in
1521, William Tyndale began his public preaching on St. Austen’s Green
and set out on the path which was to bring about a radical change both
in the English language and in English society.
A. the protestant reformation In Europe

Causes of the Reformation: during the middle Ages, the Church

established itself as the major political power of the time and as a result
their power went unchecked and corruption festered in the Church. By
the 1500s people began to question the Church along with the
questioning of traditional ideas that was started with the Renaissance. Of
these early reformers were John Wycliffe of England and Jan Hus of
Bohemia.

Problems with the Church: during the Renaissance the Church

began to envy the beauty of the Italian city-states. As a result, popes and
members of the clergy spent large sums of money on art and personal
pleasures. Critics of the Church accused the Pope of indulging in worldly
pleasures instead of living his life in religious purity. Lower ranked clergy
members lost their education and became unfit to teach others
themselves. They went against the Church’s teachings by drinking,
gamble, married, and extra-marital relationships. Simony (the buying or
selling of ecclesiastical privileges, for example pardons or benefices)
was also a growing problem in the Church. Lastly, priests exploited their
religious power by gambling away tithe (a tenth of an individual's income
pledged to the Church) and selling indulgences or pardons from sins.

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Martin Luther: Martin Luther was a monk and teacher from 1512 to his
death taught scripture at the University of Wittenberg in Germany. In
1517 Luther became angry at the actions of one of his fellow friars,
Johan Tetzel who was selling indulgences for money. As a result, Luther
wrote his 95 Theses on October 31, 1517 and posted them on the front
door of the caste church in Wittenberg. In it, Luther talks about 95
complaints he has against the Catholic Church including the selling of
indulgences and those complaints that early reformers advocated
against. He did not intend for his Theses to spark a religious
Reformation; however, they did after someone took it down, copied it
with the newly invented printing press, and distributed it to others who
would use the Theses to start a total reformation of the Church.

Luther’s Ideas vs. the Church’s Ideas: Within Luther’s 95 Theses, he

expressed three main disagreements with the Church’s policies,
principles, and teachings. They were:

Luther’s Ideas The Catholic Church’s ideas

1. People could win salvation (go to
Heaven) only by faith in God’s gifts
and forgiveness, and by following the By good works the Catholic Church
teachings of Christ.
2. All the Church’s teachings should
be clearly based on teachings from
the Bible.
3. All people were equal in God’s
1. The Church taught that salvation
was won with faith and “good works”.
refers to obeying the laws of the
Church like paying tithe, confession,
and other such “made-up” rules.
2. They taught things that were not
written in the Bible (Limbo,
confession, indulgences, etc.)
3. People were not equal under faith,

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eyes and in the faith and normal people needed priests to
interpret the Bible for them.

The Catholic Church did not agree with Luther’s teaching because it
weakened their power over the religion. If people didn’t need priests
anymore, then why come to church and follow its rules? If the Church
had to go by the Bible, they couldn’t make laws up anymore, and that too
lessened their power. Lastly, the “good works” of the Church was the
Church’s main source of income. Tithe and confession kept people
bound to the Church and gave the Church its power.

There was also John Calvin in France. He was a French young law
student and theologian and reformer. On becoming a Protestant he fled
to Switzerland, where he attempted to reorder society on reformed
Christian principles and established the first Presbyterian government, in
Geneva.

B. Reformation in England: The Church of England

England too, had its own Reformation. The reformation in England was
led by William Tyndale who born around 1494 in Gloucestershire and
educated at Oxford and Cambridge University where he became a
strong supporter of church reform. An English Bible

In 1523, Tyndale moved to London with the intention of translating the

New Testament into English, an act that was strictly forbidden. He
passionately believed that the Bible should determine the practice and
doctrine of the Church and that people should be able to read the Bible
in their own language. Tyndale was setting himself against the
established Church in England as these sorts of ideas were closely

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associated with Martin Luther and other controversial Protestant religious
reformers.

In 1524, Tyndale left England for Germany with the aid of London
merchants. He hoped to continue his translation work in greater safety
and sought out the help of Martin Luther at Wittenberg. Just one year
after his English New Testament was completed and printed in Cologne
in 1525, copies were being smuggled into England – the first ever Bibles
written in the English vernacular.

Tyndale’s Bible
It is impossible to over-praise the quality of Tyndale’s writing. Tyndale’s
“Bible” was much clearer and more poetic than Wycliffe’s early version.
Its rhythmical beauty, its simplicity of phrase, its crystal clarity have
penetrated deep into the bedrock of English today wherever it is spoken.
Tyndale’s words and phrases influenced between sixty and eighty
percent of the King James Bible of 1611 and in that second life his words
and phrases circled the globe.
We use them still: “scapegoat,” “let there be light,” “the powers that be,”
“my brother’s keeper,” “filthy lucre,” “fight the good fight,” “sick unto
death,” “flowing with milk and honey,” “the apple of his eye,” “a man after
his own heart,” “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak,” “signs of the
times,” “ye of little faith,” “eat, drink and be merry,” “broken-hearted,”
“clear-eyed.” And hundreds more: “fisherman,” “landlady,” “sea-shore,”
“stumbling-block,” “taskmaster,” “two-edged,” “viper,” “zealous” and even
“Jehovah” and “Passover” come into English through Tyndale.
“Beautiful,” a word which had meant only human beauty, was greatly
widened by Tyndale, as were many others.

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Tyndale’s bible was denounced by authorities of the Roman Catholic
Church and Tyndale himself was accused of heresy. He was arrested by
imperial authorities and imprisoned for over 500 days. On 6 October
1536, Tyndale was tried and convicted of heresy and treason and put to
death by being strangled and burned at the stake. By this time several
thousand copies of his New Testament had been printed.

However, unlike those Reformations in Geneva and Germany, the

Reformation in England was not started for religious reasons. Actually,
many rulers used the Reformation as an excuse to rid themselves of the
Church who threatened their power in their country. Of those leaders
were the House of Tudor which became one of the most successful royal
dynasties in British history, with a direct line passing from Henry Tudor to
his son Henry VIII and his three children Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth
I. The years between the crowning of Henry VII in 1485 and the death of
Elizabeth I in 1603 saw the old religious order swept away, the
establishment of the American colonies, the foundation of the Royal
Navy and the power of Europe challenged.

A Bad Marriage with Henry VIII: Henry VIII was king of England
from 1509 to 1547. He was a devout Catholic and actually spent the
beginning of his reign persecuting Protestants in England. At the time he
was married to Catherine of Aragon, the daughter of Ferdinand and
Isabella of Spain, and the aunt of Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire
and king of Spain. He had married Catherine to ally the two countries
and had a daughter with Catherine named Mary. However, Henry's
marriage with Catherine would not yield a son and since at the time, the

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line of succession went through the son, Henry had not successor. So,
blaming Catherine for the lack of a son, he asked the Pope to annul their
marriage on the excuse that his marriage to her was unholy since she
was married to his brother at first, but became his wife after he died.
Unfortunately, the Pope was being held hostage by Charles V and in an
effort not to anger him (since Catherine was his aunt), denied his
annulment. In 1527 Henry separated himself from the Church. In 1534,
he had the Parliament (known as the Reformation Parliament) pass the
Act of Supremacy, declaring him the head of the Church of England. The
pope, enraged, excommunicated him from the Church. Meanwhile,
Henry annulled his marriage with Catherine and married his mistress
Ann Boleyn. They had a daughter named Elizabeth, however when she
didn't produce a male heir he had her executed for treason (which she
may or may not have committed) and married Jane Seymour. With her
he had a son named Edward, but she died in child birth. He then married
Anne of Cleaves, but divorced her for Catherine Howard, then finally
Catherine of Parr. In 1547 he died, and in his sickly son ruled for six
years and died in 1553 and his older sister Mary took the throne.

Bloody Mary: after Edward VI died, his older sister Mary took the
throne. Mary was a fanatical Catholic since her mother raised her as one
and because her father abandoned Catholicism to divorce her mother.
As a result she started he own Inquisition in England against Protestants.
She returned England to the Catholic Church and burned Protestants at
the stake. However, she was highly resented by the general populace
who were Protestant. She died in 1558.

Elizabeth Returns the Reformation: following Mary's death, her

younger sister Elizabeth I took the throne. She returned England to the

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Protestant faith and in 1559, she established the Anglican Church in
England. Unlike the earlier Church of England, Elizabeth compromised
between the Catholic faith and the Protestant faith

She made services in English and priest was allowed to marry. Also, the
church did not believe in saints. However, priests did dress in elaborate
robes like Catholic priests. However, the Catholics still wanted more
Catholic practices included in the new Church, while Protestants wanted
less Catholic practices. The Puritans were a Calvinist derived religion
that sought to purify the Church of its Catholic traditions.

King James Bible

After Elizabeth’s death, by the beginning of the seventeenth century,

there were so many competing versions that seven hundred fifty
reformers from within the Church of England requested James VI of
Scotland, who had become James I of England, to authorise a new
translation. Fifty-four translators were chosen from the Church and the
universities to produce an edition which would be submitted to the
bishops. The work took about five years and it cannot go unremarked
that this tremendous endeavour makes the achievement of Tyndale
appear all but superhuman.

King James Bible appears to be deliberately conservative, even

backward-looking, both in its vocabulary and its grammar, and presents
many forms which had already largely fallen out of use, or were at least
in the process of dying out (e.g. digged for dug, gat and gotten for got,
bare for bore, spake for spoke, clave for cleft, holpen for helped, wist for
knew, etc), and several archaic forms such as brethren, kine and twain.
The "-eth" ending is used throughout for third person singular verbs,

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even though "-es" was becoming much more common by the early 17th
Century, and ye is used for the second person plural pronoun, rather
than the more common you.

(FOR YOUR KNOWLEDGE): The comparison below of the famous

Beatitudes from Chapter 5 of the Gospel According to St. Matthew gives
an idea of the way the language developed over the period:

Wycliffe Tyndale King James

1. And Jhesus, seynge 1. When he sawe the 1. And seeing the
the puple, wente vp in to people, he went vp into multitudes, he went vp
an hil; and whanne he a mountayne, and when into a mountaine: and
was set, hise disciplis he was set, his disciples when he was set, his
camen to hym. came to hym, disciples came vnto him.
2. And he openyde his 2. And he opened hys 2. And he opened his
mouth, and tauyte hem, mouthe, and taught mouth, and taught them,
and seide, them sayinge: saying:
3. Blessed ben pore men 3. Blessed are the povre 3. Blessed are the poore
in spirit, for the kyngdom in sprete: for theirs is in spirit: for theirs is the
of heuenes is herne. the kyngdome of heven. kingdome of heauen.
4. Blessid ben mylde 4. Blessed are they that 4. Blessed are they that
men, for thei schulen morne: for they shalbe mourne: for they shall be
welde the erthe. comforted. comforted.
5. Blessid ben thei that 5. Blessed are the 5. Blessed are the
mornen, for thei schulen meke: for they shall meeke: for they shall
be coumfortid. inheret the erth. inherit the earth.
6. Blessid ben thei that 6. Blessed are they 6. Blessed are they which
hungren and thristen which honger and thurst doe hunger and thirst
riytwisnesse, for thei for rightewesnes: for after righteousnesse: for
schulen be fulfillid. they shalbe filled. they shall be filled.
7. Blessid ben merciful 7. Blessed are the 7. Blessed are the
men, for thei schulen mercifull: for they shall mercifull: for they shall
gete merci. obteyne mercy. obtaine mercie.
8. Blessid ben thei that 8. Blessed are the pure 8. Blessed are the pure in
ben of clene herte, for in herte: for they shall se heart: for they shall see
thei schulen se God. God. God.
9. Blessid ben pesible 9. Blessed are the 9. Blessed are the
men, for thei schulen be peacemakers: for they peacemakers: for they

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clepid Goddis children. shalbe called the shall bee called the
10. Blessid ben thei that chyldren of God. children of God.
suffren persecusioun for 10. Blessed are they 10. Blessed are they
riytfulnesse, for the which suffre which are persecuted for
kingdam of heuenes is persecucion for righteousnesse sake: for
herne. rightwesnes sake: for theirs is the kingdome of
theirs ys the kyngdome heauen.
of heuen.

The English Renaissance

The next wave of innovation in English vocabulary came with the revival
of classical scholarship known as the Renaissance. The English
Renaissance roughly covers the 16th and early 17th Century (the
European Renaissance had begun in Italy as early as the 14th Century),
and is often referred to as the “Elizabethan Era” or the “Age of
Shakespeare” after the most important monarch and most famous writer
of the period. The additions to English vocabulary during this period were
deliberate borrowings, and not the result of any invasion or influx of new
nationalities or any top-down decrees.

Latin (and to a lesser extent Greek and French) was still very much
considered the language of education and scholarship at this time, and
the great enthusiasm for the classical languages during the English
Renaissance brought thousands of new words into the language,
peaking around 1600. A huge number of classical works were being
translated into English during the 16th Century, and many new terms
were introduced where a satisfactory English equivalent did not exist.

Words from Latin or Greek (often via Latin) were imported wholesale
during this period, either intact (e.g. genius, species, militia, radius,
specimen, criterion, squalor, apparatus, focus, tedium, lens, antenna,

105
paralysis, nausea, etc) or, more commonly, slightly altered (e.g. horrid,
pathetic, iilicit, pungent, frugal, anonymous, dislocate, explain, excavate,
meditate, adapt, enthusiasm, absurdity, area, complex, concept,
invention, technique, temperature, capsule, premium, system, expensive,
notorious, gradual, habitual, insane, ultimate, agile, fictitious, physician,
anatomy, skeleton, orbit, atmosphere, catastrophe, parasite, manuscript,
lexicon, comedy, tragedy, anthology, fact, biography, mythology,
sarcasm, paradox, chaos, crisis, climax, etc). A whole category of words
ending with the Greek-based suffixes “-ize” and “-ism” were also
introduced around this time.

Sometimes, Latin-based adjectives were introduced to plug "lexical gaps"

where no adjective was available for an existing Germanic noun (e.g.
marine for sea, pedestrian for walk), or where an existing adjective had
acquired unfortunate connotations (e.g. equine or equestrian for horsey,
aquatic for watery), or merely as an additional synonym (e.g. masculine
and feminine in addition to manly and womanly, paternal in addition to
fatherly, etc). Several rather ostentatious French phrases also became
naturalized in English at this juncture, including soi-disant, vis-à-vis,
sang-froid, etc, as well as more mundane French borrowings such as
crêpe, étiquette, etc.

Some scholars adopted Latin terms so excessively and awkwardly at this

time that the derogatory term “inkhorn” was coined to describe pedantic
writers who borrowed the classics to create obscure and opulent terms,
many of which have not survived. Examples of inkhorn terms include
revoluting, ingent, devulgate, attemptate, obtestate, fatigate, deruncinate,
subsecive, nidulate, abstergify, arreption, suppeditate, eximious,
illecebrous, cohibit, dispraise and other such inventions. Sydney Smith

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was one writer of the period with a particular penchant for such inkhorn
terms, including gems like frugiverous, mastigophorus, plumigerous,
suspirous, anserous and fugacious, The so-called Inkhorn Controversy
was the first of several such ongoing arguments over language use
which began to erupt in the salons of England (and, later, America).
Among those strongly in favour of the use of such "foreign" terms in
English were Thomas Elyot and George Pettie; just as strongly opposed
were Thomas Wilson and John Cheke.

However, it is interesting to note that some words initially branded as

inkhorn terms have stayed in the language and now remain in common
use (e.g. dismiss, disagree, celebrate, encyclopaedia, commit, industrial,
affability, dexterity, superiority, external, exaggerate, extol, necessitate,
expectation, mundane, capacity and ingenious). An indication of the
arbitrariness of this process is that impede survived while its opposite,
expede, did not; commit and transmit were allowed to continue, while
demit was not; and disabuse and disagree survived, while disaccustom
and disacquaint, which were coined around the same time, did not. It is
also sobering to realize that some of the greatest writers in the language
have suffered from the same vagaries of fashion and fate. Not all of
Shakespeare’s many creations have stood the test of time, including
barky, brisky, conflux, exsufflicate, ungenitured, unhair, questrist, cadent,
perisive, abruption, appertainments, implausive, vastidity and tortive.
Likewise, Ben Jonson’s ventositous and obstufact died a premature
death, and John Milton’s impressive inquisiturient has likewise not lasted.

There was even a self-conscious reaction to this perceived foreign

incursion into the English language, and some writers tried to
deliberately resurrect older English words (e.g. gleeman for musician,

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sicker for certainly, inwit for conscience, yblent for confused, etc), or to
create wholly new words from Germanic roots (e.g. endsay for
conclusion, yeartide for anniversary, foresayerfor prophet, forewitr for
prudence, loreless for ignorant, gainrising for resurrection, starlore for
astronomy, fleshstrings for muscles, grosswitted for stupid, speechcraft
for grammar, birdlore for ornithology, etc). Most of these were also short-
lived. John Cheke even made a valiant attempt to translate the entire
"New Testament" using only native English words.

The 17th Century penchant for classical language also influenced the
spelling of words like debt and doubt, which had a silent “b” added at this
time out of deference to their Latin roots (debitum and dubitare
respectively). For the same reason, island gained its silent “s”, scissors
its “c”, anchor, school and herb their “h”, people its “o” and victuals
gained both a “c” and a “u”. In the same way, Middle English perfet and
verdit became perfect and verdict (the added “c” at least being
pronounced in these cases), fauteand assaut became fault and assault,
and aventure became adventure. However, this perhaps laudable
attempt to bring logic and reason into the apparent chaos of the
language has actually had the effect of just adding to the chaos. Its
cause was not helped by examples such the “p” which was added to the
start of ptarmigan with no etymological justification whatsoever other
than the fact that the Greek word for feather, ptera, started with a "p".

Whichever side of the debate one favours, however, it is fair to say that,
by the end of the 16th Century, English had finally become widely
accepted as a language of learning, equal if not superior to the classical
languages. Vernacular language, once scorned as suitable for popular
literature and little else - and still criticized throughout much of Europe as

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crude, limited and immature - had become recognized for its inherent
qualities.

The Scientific Revolution

The Scientific Revolution was the period of scientific advancements

during the Renaissance period. It was partly because of the questioning
that started with the Renaissance. The Scientific Revolution featured
many renown scientists including Sir Isaac Newton and Galileo.

The Causes for the Scientific Revolution: The rise of universities

brought together educated minds together. Together, like during
Classical Greece, they discussed and tried to explain natural
phenomenon; going against traditional Greek views. However, what
distinguished the Scientific Revolution’s ideas from those of the Greek,
was that they back their hypothesis up with experimental proof. Prior to
the Scientific Revolution, many “discoveries” were entirely based off of
reason and logic. If an idea made sense, then it had to be true. Abstract
reasoning dictated science, making science more into philosophy. Other
causes of the Revolution were contact with non-Western societies and
the questioning tone of the Renaissance.

Rationalism vs. Empiricism: Two main methods for scientific reasoning

during the Scientific Revolution were Rationalism and Empiricism. The
former was thought of by the French philosopher and mathematician
Rene Descartes. One of his more famous quotes was, “I think therefore I
am”. According to Rationalism, reason was the source of all knowledge
and not tradition. What made Rationalism different than that of Greek
thinking was if advocated for the constant questioning of tradition views

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of the world. Though, these views were still based off of deductive
reasoning, they were still open for argument. Empiricism on the other
hand was first thought of by Francis Bacon was an English lawyer who
first developed the ideas of Empiricism. Empiricism was the belief that all
knowledge should be based off of experience and experimentation.
During the Scientific Revolution, ways of thinking began to shift towards
Empiricism rather than Rationalism. Apart of Empiricism is the scientific
method. The scientific method is a way by which hypotheses are tested
to determine their validity.

The influence of the scientific revolution on the English Language

The first English dictionary, “A Table Alphabeticall”, was published by
English schoolteacher Robert Cawdrey in 1604 (8 years before the first
Italian dictionary, and 35 years before the first French dictionary,
although admittedly some 800 years after the first Arabic dictionary and
nearly 1,000 after the first Sanskrit dictionary). Cawdrey’s little book
contained 2,543 of what he called “hard words”, especially those
borrowed from Hebrew, Greek, Latin and French, although it was not
actually a very reliable resource (even the word words was spelled in two
different ways on the title page alone, as wordes and words).

Several other dictionaries, as well as grammar, pronunciation and

spelling guides, followed during the 17th and 18th Century. The first
attempt to list ALL the words in the English language was “An Universall
Etymological English Dictionary”, compiled by Nathaniel Bailey in 1721
(the 1736 edition contained about 60,000 entries).

But the first dictionary considered anything like reliable was Samuel
Johnson’s “Dictionary of the English Language”, published in 1755, over

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150 years after Cawdrey’s. An impressive academic achievement in its
own right, Johnson’s 43,000 word dictionary remained the pre-eminent
English dictionary until the much more comprehensive “Oxford English
Dictionary” 150 more years later, although it was actually riddled with
inconsistencies in both spelling and definitions. Johnson’s dictionary
included many flagrant examples of inkhorn terms which have not
survived, including digladation, cubiculary, incompossibility, clancular,
denominable, opiniatry, ariolation, assation, ataraxy, deuteroscopy,
disubitary, esurine, estuation, indignate and others. Johnson also
deliberately omitted from his dictionary several words he disliked or
considered vulgar (including bang, budge, fuss, gambler, shabby and
touchy), but these useful words have clearly survived intact regardless of
his opinions. Several of his definitions appear deliberately jokey or
politically motivated.

Since the 16th Century, there had been calls for the regulation and
reform of what was increasingly seen as an unwieldy English language,
including John Cheke's 1569 proposal for the removal of all silent letters,
and William Bullokar's 1580 recommendation of a new 37-letter alphabet
(including 8 vowels, 4 "half-vowels" and 25 consonants) in order to aid
and simplify spelling. There were even attempts (similarly unsuccessful)
to ban certain words or phrases that were considered in some way
undesirable, words such as fib, banter, bigot, fop, flippant, flimsy,
workmanship, selfsame, despoil, nowadays, furthermore and
wherewithal, and phrases such as subject matter, drive a bargain, handle
a subject and bolster an argument.

But, by the early 18th Century, many more scholars had come to
believe that the English language was chaotic and in desperate need of

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some firm rules. Jonathan Swift, in his “Proposal for Correcting,
Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue” of 1712, decried the
“degeneration” of English and sought to “purify” it and fix it forever in
unchanging form, calling for the establishment of an Academy of the
English Language similar to the Académie Française. He was supported
in this by other important writers like John Dryden and Daniel Defoe, but
such an institution was never actually realized. (Interestingly, the only
country ever to set up an Academy for the English language was South
Africa, in 1961).

In the wake of Johnson’s “Dictionary”, a plethora (one could even

say a surfeit) of other dictionaries appeared, peaking in the period
between 1840 and 1860, as well as many specialized dictionaries and
glossaries. Thomas Sheridan attempted to tap into the zeitgeist, and
looked to regulate English pronunciation as well as its vocabulary and
spelling. His book “British Education”, published in 1756, and
unashamedly aimed at cultured British society, particularly cultured
Scottish society, purported to set the correct pronunciation of the English
language, and it was both influential and popular. His son, Richard
Brinsley Sheridan, later gave us the unforgettable language excesses of
Mrs. Malaprop.

In addition to dictionaries, many English grammars started to

appear in the 18th Century, the best-known and most influential of which
were Robert Lowth's “A Short Introduction to English Grammar” (1762)
and Lindley Murray's “English Grammar” (1794). In fact, some 200 works
on grammar and rhetoric were published between 1750 and 1800, and
no less than 800 during the 19th Century. Most of these works, Lowth’s
in particular, were extremely prescriptive, stating in no uncertain terms

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the “correct” way of using English. Lowth was the main source of such
"correct" grammar rules as a double negative always yields a positive,
never end a sentence with a preposition and never split an infinitive. A
refreshing exception to such prescriptivism was the “Rudiments of
English Grammar” by the scientist and polymath Joseph Priestley, which
was unusual in expressing the view that grammar is defined by common
usage and not prescribed by self-styled grammarians.

The first English newspaper was the “Courante” or “Weekly News”

(actually published in Amsterdam, due to the strict printing controls in
force in England at that time) arrived in 1622, and the first professional
newspaper of public record was the “London Gazette”, which began
publishing in 1665. The first daily, “The Daily Courant”, followed in 1702,
and “The Times” of London published its first edition in 1790, around the
same time as the influential periodicals “The Tatler” and “The Spectator”,
which between them did much to establish the style of English in this
period.

Golden Age of English Literature

All languages tend to go through phases of intense generative activity,

during which many new words are added to the language. One such
peak for the English language was the Early Modern period of the 16th to
18th Century, a period sometimes referred to as the Golden Age of
English Literature (other peaks include the Industrial Revolution of the
late 18th and early 19th Century, and the computer and digital age of the
late 20th Century, which is still continuing today). Between 1500 and
1650, an estimated 10,000-12,000 new words were coined, about half of
which are still in use today.

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Up until the 17th Century, English was rarely used for scholarly or
scientific works, as it was not considered to possess the precision or the
gravitas of Latin or French. Thomas More, Isaac Newton, William Harvey
and many other English scholars all wrote their works in Latin and, even
in the 18th Century, Edward Gibbon wrote his major works in French,
and only then translated them into English. Sir Francis Bacon, however,
hedged his bets and wrote many of his works in both Latin and English
and, taking his inspiration mainly from Greek, coined several scientific
words such as thermometer, pneumonia, skeleton and encyclopaedia. In
1704, Newton, having written in Latin until that time, chose to write his
“Opticks” in English, introducing in the process such words as lens,
refraction, etc. Over time, the rise of nationalism led to the increased use
of the native spoken language rather than Latin, even as the medium of
intellectual communication.

Thomas Wyatt’s experimentation with different poetical forms during the

early 16th Century, and particularly his introduction of the sonnet from
Europe, ensured that poetry would became the proving ground for
several generations of English writers during a golden age of English
literature, and Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Donne,
John Milton, John Dryden, Andrew Marvell, Alexander Pope and many
other rose to the challenge. Important English playwrights of the
Elizabethan era include Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John
Webster and of course Shakespeare.

The English scholar and classicist Sir Thomas Elyot went out of his way
to find new words, and gave us words like animate, describe, dedicate,
esteem, maturity, exhaust and modesty in the early 16th Century. His
near contemporary Sir Thomas More contributed absurdity, active,

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communicate, education, utopia, acceptance, exact, explain, exaggerate
and others, largely from Latin roots. Milton was responsible for an
estimated 630 word coinages, including lovelorn, fragrance and
pandemonium. Ben Jonson, a contemporary of Shakespeare, is also
credited with the introduction of many common words, including damp,
defunct, strenuous, clumsy and others; John Donne gave us self-
preservation, valediction and others; and to Sir Philip Sydney are
attributed bugbear, miniature, eye-pleasing, dumb-stricken, far-fetched
and conversation in its modern meaning.

It was really only in the 17th Century that dialects (or at least divergence
from the fashionable Standard English of Middlesex and Surrey) began
to be considered uncouth and an indication of inferior class. However,
such dialects provided good comic material for the burgeoning theatre
industry (a well-known example being the “rude mechanicals” of
Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”) and, paradoxically, many
dialect words were introduced into general usage in that way. The word
class itself only acquired its modern sociological meaning in the early
18th Century, but by the end of the century it had become all-pervasive,
to the extent that the mere sound of a Cockney accent was enough to
brand the speaker as a vagabond, thief or criminal (although in the 19th
Century, Charles Dickens was to produce great literature and sly humour
out of just such preconceptions, explicitly using speech, vocabulary and
accent for commic effect).

William Shakespeare
Whatever the merits of the other contributions to this golden age, though,
it is clear that one man, William Shakespeare, single-handedly changed

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the English language to a significant extent in the late 16th and early
17th Century. Skakespeare took advantage of the relative freedom and
flexibility and the protean nature of English at the time, and played free
and easy with the already liberal grammatical rules, for example in his
use nouns as verbs, adverbs, adjectives and substantives - an early
instance of the “verbification” of nouns which modern language purists
often decry - in phrases such as “he pageants us”, “it out-herods Herod”,
dog them at the heels, the good Brutus ghosted, “Lord Angelo dukes it
well”, “uncle me no uncle”, etc.

He had a vast vocabulary (34,000 words by some counts) and he

personally coined an estimated 2,000 neologisms or new words in his
many works, including, but by no means limited to, bare-faced, critical,
leapfrog, monumental, castigate, majestic, obscene, frugal, aerial,
gnarled, homicide, brittle, radiance, dwindle, puking, countless,
submerged, vast, lack-lustre, bump, cranny, fitful, premeditated,
assassination, courtship, eyeballs, ill-tuned, hot-blooded, laughable,
dislocate, accommodation, eventful, pell-mell, aggravate, excellent,
fretful, fragrant, gust, hint, hurry, lonely, summit, pedant, gloomy, and
hundreds of other terms still commonly used today. By some counts,
almost one in ten of the words used by Shakespeare were his own
invention, a truly remarkable achievement (it is the equivalent of a new
word here and then, after just a few short phrases, another other new
word here). However, not all of these were necessarily personally
invented by Shakespeare himself: they merely appear for the first time in
his published works, and he was more than happy to make use of other
people’s neologisms and local dialect words, and to mine the latest
fashions and fads for new ideas.

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He also introduced countless phrases in common use today, such as
one fell swoop, vanish into thin air, brave new world, in my mind’s eye,
laughing stock, love is blind, star-crossed lovers, as luck would have it,
fast and loose, once more into the breach, sea change, there’s the rub,
to the manner born, a foregone conclusion, beggars all description, it's
Greek to me, a tower of strength, make a virtue of necessity, brevity is
the soul of wit, with bated breath, more in sorrow than in anger, truth will
out, cold comfort, cruel only to be kind, fool’s paradise and flesh and
blood, among many others.

By the time of Shakespeare, word order had become more fixed in a

subject-verb-object pattern, and English had developed a complex
auxiliary verb system, although to be was still commonly used as the
auxiliary rather than the more modern to have (e.g. I am come rather
than I have come). Do was sometimes used as an auxiliary verb and
sometimes not (e.g. say you so? or do you say so?). Past tenses were
likewise still in a state of flux, and it was still acceptable to use clomb as
well as climbed, clew as well as clawed, shove as well as shaved, digged
as well as dug, etc. Plural noun endings had shrunk from the six of Old
English to just two, “-s” and “-en”, and again Shakespeare sometimes
used one and sometimes the other. The old verb ending “-en” had in
general been gradually replaced by “-eth” (e.g. loveth, doth, hath, etc),
although this was itself in the process of being replaced by the northern
English verb ending “-es”, and Shakespeare used both (e.g. loves and
loveth, but not the old loven). Even over the period of Shakespeare’s
output there was a noticeable change, with “-eth” endings outnumbering
“-es” by over 3 to 1 during the early period from 1591-1599, and “-es”
outnumbering “-eth” by over 6 to 1 during 1600-1613.

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Other than the spellings of words such as weild, libertie, valewed and
honor, the most obvious differences from modern-day spellings are the
continued transposition of of "u" and "v" in loue and vnable, and the
trailing silent "e" in lesse, Childe and poore, both hold-overs from Middle
English and both in the process of transition at this time. However, it
should be remembered that, just as with Chaucer, the Shakespeare
folios we have today were compiled by followers such as John Hemming,
Henry Condell and Richard Field, all of whom were not above making the
odd change or “improvement” to the text, and so we can never be sure
exactly what Shakespeare himself actually wrote.

Thee, thou and thy (signifying familiarity or social inferiority, as in most

European languages today) were still very prevalent in Shakespeare’s
time, and Shakespeare himself made good use of the subtle social
implications of using thou rather than thou. Thee and thou had
disapeared almost completely from standard usage by the middle of the
17th Century, paradoxically making English one of the least socially
conscious of languages. The commonplace letter “e” found at the end of
many medieval English words was also beginning its long decline by this
time, although it was retained in many words to indicate the lengthening
of the preceding vowel (e.g. name pronounced as “naim”, not as the Old
English “nam-a”). The effects of the Great Vowel Shift were underway,
but by no means complete, by the time of Shakespeare, as can be seen
in some of his rhyme schemes (e.g. tea and sea rhymed with say, die
rhymed with memory, etc).

The First Global Age

Also known as the Age of Exploration, the First Global Age featured the

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first time in human history where all the continents of the world
(excluding Antarctica and Australia) developed a system of trade and
communications with one and other, Mainly, the large spheres of
civilization at the time were China, the Ottoman Empire, Europe, and
Africa, as well as the growing civilization in the Americas.
The Causes of the First Global Age: the First Global Age saw large scale
global interaction, especially by trade. Trade, before this period was
usually limited by land (the Silk Road) and short distance sea trade. The
only trade route to the spice rich Far East was controlled by the Italians
and Ottomans who drove up the prices of those goods that travelled
through their domain. As a result other countries began looking for other
trade routes to the Far East, especially those by sea. In fact, the
Americas were first found by the Europeans after Columbus set off to
find a trade route to Asia via sailing west. The wave of exploration was
also caused by the growing imperialism of European rulers. They wished
to expand their land out of Europe, and instead spend their resources
trying to exploit those new lands found by explorers during this period.
Technological Advancement: the First Global Age was also caused by
the recent technological advancements that made sea travel and trade
easier. Of these advancements include:
D) Hartman Astrolabe
E) Mariner's Compass (came from China)
F) Sextant
G) Better cartography
H) Guns and gunpowder
I) Caravel (new type of sail powered ship)
While all these important developments were underway, British naval

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superiority was also growing. In the 16th and 17th Century, international
trade expanded immensely, and loanwords were absorbed from the
languages of many other countries throughout the world, including those
of other trading and imperial nations such as Spain, Portugal and the
Netherlands. Among these were:
! Italian (e.g. carnival, fiasco, arsenal, casino, miniature, design,

bankrupt, grotto, studio, umbrella, rocket, ballot, balcony, macaroni,

piano, opera, violin);

! Spanish (e.g. armada, bravado, cork, barricade, cannibal);

! Portuguese (e.g. breeze, tank, fetish, marmalade, molasses);

! Persian (e.g. shawl, lemon, caravan, bazaar, tambourine);

! Arabic (e.g. harem, jar, magazine, algebra, algorithm, almanac,

alchemy, zenith, admiral, sherbet, saffron, coffee, alcohol,

mattress, syrup, hazard, lute);

! Turkish (e.g. coffee, yoghurt, caviar, horde, chess, kiosk, tulip,

turban);

! Russian (e.g. sable, mammoth);

! Japanese (e.g. tycoon, geisha, karate, samurai);

! Malay (e.g. bamboo, amok, caddy, gong, ketchup);

! Chinese (e.g. tea, typhoon, kowtow).

These advancements in trade and travel were the basis upon which
England turned into a great empire and English turned into a global
language, as will be discuss in the next chapter.

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 Chapter 6
The Late Modern Period
The history of English since 1800 has been a story of expansion— in
geography, in speakers, and in the purposes for which English is used.
Geographically, English was spread around the world, first by British
colonization and empire-building, and more recently by American activities in
world affairs.

6.1. The Industrial and Scientific Revolution

The dates may be rather arbitrary, but the main distinction between
Early Modern and Late Modern English (or just Modern English as it is
sometimes referred to) lies in its vocabulary - pronunciation, grammar and
spelling remained largely unchanged. Late Modern English accumulated
many more words as a result of two main historical factors: the Industrial
Revolution, which necessitated new words for things and ideas that had not
previously existed; and the rise of the British Empire, during which time
English adopted many foreign words and made them its own. No single one
of the socio-cultural developments of the 19th Century could have established
English as a world language, but together they did just that.

Most of the innovations of the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and
early 19th Century were of British origin, including the harnessing of steam to
drive heavy machinery, the development of new materials, techniques and
equipment in a range of manufacturing industries, and the emergence of new
means of transportation (e.g. steamships, railways). At least half of the
influential scientific and technological output between 1750 and 1900 was
written in English. Another English speaking country, the USA, continued the
English language dominance of new technology and innovation with
inventions like electricity, the telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, the
sewing machine, the computer, etc.

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 The industrial and scientific advances of the Industrial Revolution
created a need for neologisms to describe the new creations and discoveries.
To a large extent, this relied on the classical languages, Latin and Greek, in
which scholars and scientists of the period were usually well versed. Although
words like oxygen, protein, nuclear and vaccine did not exist in the classical
languages, they could be (and were) created from Latin and Greek roots.
Lens, refraction, electron, chromosome, chloroform, caffeine, centigrade,
bacteria, chronometer and claustrophobia are just a few of the other science-
based words that were created during this period of scientific innovation,
along with a whole host of “-ologies” and “-onomies”, like biology, petrology,
morphology, histology, palaeontology, ethnology, entomology, taxonomy, etc.

Many more new words were coined for the new products, machines and
processes that were developed at this time (e.g. train, engine, reservoir,
pulley, combustion, piston, hydraulic, condenser, electricity, telephone,
telegraph, lithograph, camera, etc). In some cases, old words were given
entirely new meanings and connotation (e.g. vacuum, cylinder, apparatus,
pump, syphon, locomotive, factory, etc), and new words created by
amalgamating and fusing existing English words into a descriptive
combination were particularly popular (e.g. railway, horsepower, typewriter,
cityscape, airplane, etc).

6.2. Colonialism and the British Empire

British colonialism had begun as early as the 16th Century, but gathered
speed and momentum between the 18th and 20th Century. At the end of the
16th Century, mother-tongue English speakers numbered just 5-7 million,
almost all of them in the British Isles; over the next 350 years, this increased
almost 50-fold, 80% of them living outside of Britain. At the height of the
British Empire (in the late 19th and early 20th Century), Britain ruled almost
one quarter of the earth’s surface, from Canada to Australia to India to the

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Caribbean to Egypt to South Africa to Singapore.

Although the English language had barely penetrated into Wales, Ireland and
the Scottish Highlands by the time of Shakespeare, just two hundred years
later, in 1780, John Adams was confident enough to be able to claim (with a
certain amount of foresight, but quite reasonably) that English was “destined
to be in the next and succeeding centuries more generally the language of
the world than Latin was in the last or French is in the present age”. In 1852,
the German linguist, Jacob Grimm, called English "the language of the world",
and predicted it was "destined to reign in future with still more extensive sway
over all parts of the globe".

It was taken very much for granted by the British colonial mentality of the time
that extending the English language and culture to the undeveloped and
backward countries of Africa and Asia was a desirable thing. The profit motive
may have been foremost, but there was a certain amount of altruistic
motivation as well, and many saw it as a way of bringing order and political
unity to these chaotic and internecine regions (as well as binding them ever
more strongly to the Empire). To some extent, it is true that the colonies were
happy to learn the language in order to profit from British industrial and
technological advances.

But colonialism was a two-way phenomenon, and Britain’s dealings with

these exotic countries, as well as the increase in world trade in general during
this time, led to the introduction of many foreign loanwords into English. For
instance, Australia gave us a set of words (not particularly useful outside the
context of Australia itself) like boomerang, kangaroo, budgerigar, etc. But
India gave us such everyday words as pyjamas, thug, bungalow, cot, jungle,
loot, bangle, shampoo, candy, tank and many others.

The rise of so-called “New Englishes” (modern variants or dialects of the

language, such as Australian English, South African English, Caribbean

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English, South Asian English, etc) raised, for some, the spectre of the
possible fragmentation of the English language into mutually unintelligible
languages, much as occurred when Latin gave rise to the various Romance
languages (French, Spanish, Italian, etc) centuries ago. As early as 1789, for
example, Noah Webster had predicted “a language in North America as
different from the future language of England as the modern Dutch, Danish
and Swedish are from the German or from one another”. However, in
retrospect, this does not seem to have happened and, in the age of
instantaneous global communication, it now seems ever less likely to occur in
the future.

The New World

It was largely during the Late Modern period that the United States, newly
independent from Britain as of 1783, established its pervasive influence on
the world. The English colonization of North America had begun as early as
1600. Jamestown, Virginia was founded in 1607, and the Pilgrim Fathers
settled in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620. The first settlers were, then,
contemporaries of Shakespeare (1564-1616), Bacon (1561-1626) and Donne
(1572-1631), and would have spoken a similar dialect. The new land was
described by one settler as “a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild
beasts and wild men”, and half of the settlers were dead within weeks of their
arrival, unaccustomed to the harsh winter. In fact, the colony would probably
have gone the way of the earlier ill-fated Roanoke Island settlement attempt
of 1584 were it not for the help of an American native called Squanto, who
had learned English from English sailors.

Parts of the New World had already been long colonized by the French,
Spanish and Dutch, but English settlers like the Pilgrim Fathers (and those
who soon followed them) went there to stay, not just to search for riches or

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trading opportunities. They wanted to establish themselves permanently, to
work the land, and to preserve their culture, religion and language, and this
was a crucial factor in the survival and development of English in North
America. The German “Iron Chancellor” Otto van Bismarck would later
ruefully remark that “the most significant event of the 20th Century will be the
fact that the North Americans speak English”.

Interestingly, some English pronunciations and usages “froze” when they

arrived in America while they continued to evolve in Britain itself (sometimes
referred to as “colonial lag”), so that, in some respects, American English is
closer to the English of Shakespeare than modern British English is. Perhaps
the best-known example is the American use of gotten which has long since
faded from use in Britain (even though forgotten has survived). But the
American use of words like fall for the British autumn, trash for rubbish, hog
for pig, sick for ill, guess for think, and loan for lend are all examples of this
kind of anachronistic British word usage. America kept several words (such
as burly, greenhorn, talented and scant) that had been largely dropped in
Britain (although some have since been recovered), and words like lumber
and lot soon acquired their specific American meanings. Something
approaching Shakespearean speech can sometimes be encountered in
isolated valleys in the Appalachian or Ozarks, where words like afeard, yourn,
sassy and consarn, and old pronunciations like “jine” for join, can still
sometimes be heard.

The settlement of America served as the route of introduction for many Native
American words into the English language. Most of the early settlers were
austere Puritans and they were quite conservative in their adoption of native
words, which were largely restricted to terms for native animals and foods
(e.g. raccoon, opossum, moose, chipmunk, skunk, tomato, squash, hickory,
etc). In many cases, the original indigenous words were very difficult to

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render in English, and have often been mangled almost beyond recognition
(e.g. squash is from the native quonterquash or asquutasquash, depending
on the region; racoon is from raugraughcun or rahaugcum; hickory is from
pawcohiccora; etc). Some words needed to describe the Native American
lifestyle were also accepted (e.g. canoe, squaw, papoose, wigwam,
moccasin, tomahawk), although many other supposedly Native-derived words
and phrases (such as brave, peace-pipe, pale-face, war-path, etc) were
actually spurious and a product of the fertile imaginations of 19th Century
American romantic novelists. New words were also needed for some
geographical features which had no obvious English parallel in the limited
experience of the settlers (e.g. foothill, notch, bluff, gap, divide, watershed,
clearing, etc).

Immigration into America was not limited to English speakers, though. In the
second half of the 19th Century, in particular, over 30 million poured into the
country from all parts of the world. At the peak of immigration, from 1901 to
1905, America absorbed a million Italians, a million Austro-Hungarians, half a
million Russians and tens of thousands each from many other countries.
Many nationalities established their own centres: the Amish or Pennsylvania
Dutch (actually Germans, as in Deutsch) tended to stay in their isolated
communities, and developed a distinctive English with a strong German
accent and an idiosyncratic syntax; many Germans also settled in Wisconsin
and Indiana; Norwegians settled in Minnesota and the Dakotas; Swedes in
Nebraska; etc.

Often foreigners were despised or laughed at, and the newcomers found it in
their best interests to integrate well and to observe as much uniformity of
speech and language as possible. This, as well as the improvements in
transportation and communication, led to fewer, and less distinct, dialects
than in the much smaller area of Britain, although there are some noticeable

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(and apparently quite arbitrary) regional differences, even within some states.
A few isolated communities, like the so-called “Tidewater” communities
around Chesapeake Bay in Virginia (who were mainly descended from
settlers from Somerset and Gloucestershire in the West Country of England,
unlike the Massachusetts settlers who were largely from the eastern counties
of England), have managed to retain the distinctive burring West Country
accent of their forebears. But, by the 19th Century, a standard variety of
American English had developed in most of the country, based on the dialect
of the Mid-Atlantic states with its characteristic flat “a” and strong final “r”.
Today, Standard American English, also known as General American, is
based on a generalized Midwestern accent, and is familiar to us from
American films, radio and newscasters.

American language zealots like John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Noah
Webster revelled in the prospect of a plain English, free of the regional
dialects and class distinctions of Britain. Long before the Declaration of
Independence, British visitors to America often remarked that the average
American spoke much better English than the average Englishman. After the
American War of Independence of 1775 - 1783, there was some discussion
about whether English should remain the national language, but it was never
really in any doubt, and was not even mentioned in the new Constitution
(even today, the USA does not have an “official language”, as indeed neither
does Australia or Britain itself).

The colonization of Canada proceeded quite separately from that of America.

There had been British, French and Portuguese expeditions to the east coast
of Canada even before the end of the 15th Century, but the first permanent
European settlement was by France in 1608. British interests in Canada did
not coalesce until the early 18th Century but, after the Treaty of Paris of 1763,
Britain wrested control of most of eastern Canada from the French, and it

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became an important British colony. It was the War of 1812 against the
Americans, as much as Confederation and independence from Britain in
1867, that definitively cemented the separate identity of English Canada.

English in Canada has also been influenced by successive waves of

immigration, from the influx of Loyalists from the south fleeing the American
Revolution, to the British and Irish who were encouraged to settle the land in
the early 19th Century to the huge immigration from all over the world during
the 20th Century. But, more than anything, the speech of the Loyalists
arriving in southern Ontario from states like Pennsylvania and New York,
formed the basis of Canadian speech and its accent (including the distinctive
pronunciation of the “ou” in words like house and out, and the “i” in words like
light). Modern Canadian English tends to show very little regional diversity in
pronunciation, even compared to the United States, the Irish-tinged dialect of
Newfoundland being far and away the most distinctive dialect.

Canadian English today contains elements of British English and American

English in its vocabulary (it also uses a kind of hybrid of American and British
spelling), as well several distinctive “Canadianisms” (like hoser, hydro,
chesterfield, etc, and the ubiquitous eh? at the end of many sentences). Its
vocabulary has been influenced by loanwords from the native peoples of the
north (e.g. igloo, anorak, toboggan, canoe, kayak, parka, muskeg, caribou,
moose, etc), as well as the French influence (e.g. serviette, tuque) from
Lower Canada/Quebec.

American Dialect

In 1813, Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter: "The new circumstances under

which we are placed call for new words, new phrases, and for the transfer of
old words to new objects. An American dialect will therefore be formed". As
the settlers (including a good proportion of Irish and Scots, with their own

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distinctive accents and usages of English) pushed westward, new terms were
indeed introduced, and these pioneers were much less reticent to adopt
native words or, indeed, to make up their own. The journals of Lewis and
Clark, written as they explored routes to the west coast in 1804-6, contain
over 500 native words (mainly animals, plants and food). The wild “outlands”
west of the Mississippi River gave us the word outlandish to describe its
idiosyncratic characters.

John Adams’ much-vaunted “plain English” took a back seat in the hands of
colourful characters like Davy Crockett (who was himself of Scots-Irish
decent) and others, who saw western expansion as an excuse to expand the
language with new words and quirky Americanisms like skedaddle,
bamboozle, shebang, riff-raff, hunky-dory, lickety-split, rambunctious,
ripsnorter, humdinger, doozy, shenanigan, discombobulate, absquatulate,
splendiferous, etc, not to mention evocative phrases like fly off the handle, a
chip on the shoulder, no axe to grind, sitting on the fence, dodge the issue,
knuckle down, make the fur fly, go the whole hog, kick the bucket, face the
music, bite the dust, barking up the wrong tree, pass the buck, stack the deck,
poker face, in cahoots, pull up stakes, horse sense, two cents’ worth, stake a
claim, strike it rich, the real McCoy and even the phrase stiff upper lip (in
regard to their more hidebound British cousins). From the deliberately
misspelled and dialectical works of Artemus Ward and Josh Billings to
popular novels like Harriet Beecher Stowe's “Uncle Tom's Cabin” (1852) and
Mark Twain's “Huckleberry Finn” (1884), this American vernacular spread
rapidly, and became in the process more publicly acceptable both in everyday
speech and in literature.

Many Spanish words also made their way into American English during the
expansion and settlement of the Spanish-influenced American West,
including words like armadillo, alligator, canyon, cannibal, guitar, mosquito,

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mustang, ranch, rodeo, stampede, tobacco, tornado and vigilante (some of
which were also originally derived from native languages). To a lesser extent,
French words, from the French presence in the Louisiana area and in
Canada, contributed loanwords like gopher, prairie, depot, cache, cent and
dime, as well as French-derived place names like Detroit, Illinois, Des
Moines, etc.

The number of American coinings later exported back to the mother country
should not be underestimated. They include commonly used word like
commuter, bedrock, sag, snag, soggy, belittle, lengthy, striptease, gimmick,
jeans, teenager, hangover, teetotal, fudge, publicity, joyride, blizzard,
showdown, uplift, movie, obligate, stunt, notify, redneck, businessman,
cocktail, skyscraper, bootleg, highfalutin, guesstimate, raincoat, cloudburst,
nearby, worthwhile, smooch, genocide, hindsight and graveyard among many
others. Even the word roundabout originally came from America, even though
traffic circles hardly exist there. Perhaps the quintessential Americanism is
OK (okay), which has become one of the best known and most widespread
terms throughout the whole world. Its origins are somewhat obscure and still
hotly debated, but it seems to have come into common usage in America
during the 1830s. Many of these Americanisms were met with a certain
amount of snobbery in Britain, and many words thought to be American in
origin were vilified as uncouth and inferior by the British intelligentsia (even
though many of those denigrated actually turned out to be of older English
provenance in the first place).

Today, some 4,000 words are used differently in the USA and Britain
(lift/elevator, tap/faucet, bath/tub, curtains/drapes, biscuit/cookie and
boot/trunk are just some of the better known ones) and, increasingly,
American usage is driving out traditional words and phrases back in Britain
(e.g. truck for lorry, airplane for aeroplane, etc). American spelling is also

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becoming more commonplace in Britain (e.g. jail for gaol, wagon for waggon,
reflection for reflexion, etc), although some Americanized spelling changes
actually go back centuries (e.g. words like horror, terror, superior, emperor
and governor were originally spelled as horrour, terrour, superiour, emperour
and governour in Britain according to Johnson's 1755 "Dictionary", even if
other words like colour, humour and honour had resisted such changes).

Black English
The practice of transporting cheap black labour from western Africa to the
New World was begun by the Spaniards in the 16th Century, and it had been
also used by the Portuguese, Dutch and French, but it was adopted in
earnest by the British in the early 17th Century. The British had established
numerous outposts in the Caribbean (dubbed the “West Indies” by Columbus
out of the conviction that he had reached the spice islands of the Indies, or
Asia, by a western route), and had developed a whole trading empire to take
advantage of the tropical climate of the region. The labour-intensive work on
tobacco, cocoa, cotton and particularly sugar plantations required large
numbers of cheap workers, and the Atlantic slave trade triangle (Britain -
West Africa - Americas) was developed to supply it, although soon a demand
also grew for household servants.

The numbers of African slaves in the America alone grew from just twenty in
1619 to over 4 million at the time of the American abolition of slavery after the
Civil War in 1865 (the British had abolished the slave trade earlier, in 1807).
The slaves transported by the British to work in the plantations of the
American south and the islands of the West Indies were mainly from a region
of West Africa rich in hundreds of different languages, and most were superb
natural linguists, often speaking anywhere between three and six African
languages fluently. Due to the deliberate practice of shipping slaves of

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different language backgrounds together (in an attempt to avoid plots and
rebellions), the captives developed their own English-based pidgin language,
which they used to communicate with the largely English-speaking sailors
and landowners, and also between themselves.

A pidgin is a reduced language that results from extended contact between

people with no language in common. Verb forms in particular are simplified
(e.g. “me go run school”, “him done go”, etc), but adjectives are also often
used instead of adverbs, verbs instead of prepositions, pronouns are no
inflected, etc. The resulting stripped-down language may be crude but it is
usually serviceable and efficient.

Once established in the Americas, these pidgins developed into stable

creoles, forms of simplified English combined with many words from a variety
of African languages. Most of the African slaves made landfall at Sullivan
Island, near Charleston, South Carolina, and even today Gullah can be heard
in many of the Sea Islands off the coast of the Carolinas and Georgia. Gullah
is an English-African patois (the name is possibly derived from the word
Angola), thought to be remarkably unchanged from that spoken by African
slaves two or three centuries ago. Gullah and similar “plantation creoles”
provided the basis of much of modern Black American English, street slang
and hip-hop, but interestingly it also significantly influenced the language and
accent of the aristocratic white owners, and the modern English of the
southern states.

The popular Uncle Remus stories of the late 19th Century (many of them
based around the trickster character of Brer Rabbit and others like Brer Fox,
Brer Wolf, etc) are probably based on this kind of creole, mixed with native
Cherokee origins (although they were actually collections made by white

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Americans like Joel Chandler Harris). The following passage is from Charles
Colcock Jones Jr.’s 1888 story “Brer Lion an Brer Goat”:

Brer Lion bin a hunt, an eh spy Brer Goat duh leddown topper er big rock duh
wuk eh mout an der chaw. Eh creep up fuh ketch um. Wen eh git close ter
um eh notus um good. Brer Goat keep on chaw. Brer Lion try fuh fine out wuh
Brer Goat duh eat. Eh yent see nuttne nigh um ceptin de nekked rock wuh eh
duh led down on. Brer Lion stonish. Eh wait topper Brer Goat. Brer Goat keep
on chaw, an chaw, an chaw. Brer Lion cant mek de ting out, an eh come
close, an eh say: "Hay! Brer Goat, wuh you duh eat?" Brer Goat skade wen
Brer Lion rise up befo um, but eh keep er bole harte, an eh mek ansur: "Me
duh chaw dis rock, an ef you dont leff, wen me done long um me guine eat
you." Dis big wud sabe Brer Goat. Bole man git outer diffikelty way coward
man lose eh life.

Many of the words may look strange at first, but the meanings become quite
clear when spoken aloud, and the spellings give a good approximation of a
black/Caribbean accent (e.g. notus for notice, bole for bold, ansur for answer,
skade for scared, etc). Dis/dem/dey are used for this/them/they in order to
avoid the difficult English “th” sound, and many other usages are familiar from
modern Caribbean accents (e.g. mout for mouth, ting for thing, gwine for
going, etc). For simplicity, adjectives often stand in for adverbs (e.g. coward
man) and verbs may be simplified (e.g. Brer Lion bin a hunt) or left out
completely (e.g. Brer Lion stonish). Double adjectives (e.g. big big) are often
used as intensifiers, although not in this particular passage.

Jamaican creole (known locally as “Patwa”, for patois) was one of the
deepest in the Caribbean, partly because of the sheer numbers transported
there, and the accent there is still so thick as to be almost undecipherable.
Variations of English creoles gradually mixed with other creole forms based
on French, Spanish and Portuguese, leading to a diverse range of English

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varieties throughout the Caribbean islands, as well as adjacent areas of
Central and South America. Familiar words like buddy for brother, palaver for
trouble, and pikni for child, arose out of these creoles, and words like
barbecue, savvy, nitty-gritty, hammock, hurricane, savannah, canoe,
cannibal, potato, tobacco and maize were also early introductions into English
from the Caribbean, often via Spanish or Portuguese.

Britain’s Other Colonies

But North America was not the only “New World”. In 1788, less than twenty
years after James Cook’s initial landing, Britain established its first penal
colony in Sydney, Australia (once labelled merely as Terra Australis
Incognita, the Unknown Southern Land). About 130,000 prisoners were
transported there over the next 50 years, followed by other “free” settlers.
Most of the settlers were from London and Ireland, resulting in a very
distinctive and egalitarian accent and a basic English vocabulary
supplemented by some Aboriginal words and expressions (e.g. boomerang,
kangaroo, koala, wallaby, budgerigar, etc). The Australian Aborigines were
nomadic and reclusive, and their numbers relatively small (perhaps 200,000,
speaking over 200 separate languages), so the loanwords they contributed to
English were few and mainly limited to local plant and animal names.

Over time, the convicts who had served out their time became citizens of the
emerging country, and became euphemistically known as “government men”,
“legitimates”, “exiles” or “empire builders”. Some British slang words,
especially Cockney terms and words from the underground “Flash” language
of the criminal classes, became more commonly used in Australia than in
Britain (e.g. chum, swag, bash, cadge, grub, dollop, lark, crack, etc), and
some distinctively Australian terms were originally old English words which
largely died out outside of Australia (e.g. cobber, digger, pom, dinkum,
walkabout, tucker, dunny).

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New Zealand began to be settled by European whalers and missionaries in
the 1790s, although an official colony was not established there until 1840.
New Zealand was keen to emphasize its national identity (and particularly its
differences from neighbouring Australia), and this influenced its own version
of English, as did the incorporation of native Maori words into the language.

British settlement in South Africa began in earnest in 1820, and nearly half a
million English-speaking immigrants moved there during the last quarter of
the 19th Century, eager to take advantage of the discoveries of gold and
diamonds. The Dutch had been in South Africa since the 1650s, but the wave
of British settlers soon began to anglicize the Afrikaans (Dutch) and black
population. English was made the official language in 1822 and, as in
Australia, a distinctive homogeneous accent developed over time, drawing
from the various different groups of settlers. Although English was always -
and remains - a minority language, spoken by less than 10% of South
Africans, Afrikaans was seen by the 80% black majority as the language of
authority and repression (the word apartheid, in addition to trek, remains
South Africa's best known contribution to the English lexicon), and English
represented for them a means of achieving an international voice. In 1961,
South Africa became the only country ever to set up an official Academy to
promote the English language. The 1993 South African constitution named no
less than eleven official languages, of which English and Afrikaans are but
two, but English is increasingly recognized as the lingua franca.

In West Africa, the English trading influence began as early as the end of the
15th Century. In this language-rich and highly multilingual region, several
English-based pidgins and creoles arose, many of which (like Krio, the de
facto national language of Sierra Leone) still exist today. Sierra Leone,
Ghana, Gambia, Nigeria and Cameroon were all run as British Crown
Colonies in the 19th Century, and the influence of the English language

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remains of prime importance in the region. Liberia, founded in 1822 as a
homeland for former American slaves (similar to the way in which Sierra
Leone had been established by the British in the 1780s), is the only African
country with an American influence.

In East Africa, British trade began around the end of the 16th Century,
although systematic interest only started in the 1850s. Six modern East
African states with a history of 19th Century British imperial rule (Kenya,
Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe), gave English official
language status on achieving independence in the 1960s. English is widely
used in government, civil service, courts, schools, media, road signs, stores
and business correspondence in these countries, and, because more British
emigrants settled there than in the more difficult climate of West Africa, a
more educated and standard English-speaking population grew up there, and
there was less need for the development of pidgin languages.

The British East India Company established its first trading station in India
in 1612, and it expanded rapidly. At first, the British traders had to learn the
various languages of India in order to do business (Hindi, Bengali, Gujurati
and others). But soon, schools and Christian missions were set up, and
British officials began to impose English on the local populace. During the
period of British sovereignty in India (the “Raj”), from 1765 until partition and
independence in 1947, English became the medium of administration and
education throughout the Indian sub-continent, particularly following Thomas
Macaulay's famous (or infamous) "Minutes" of 1835. This was welcomed by
some (particularly in the Dravidian speaking areas of southern India, who
preferred English as a lingua franca to the Hindi alternative), but opposed and
derided by others. A particularly florid and ornate version of English,
incorporating an extreme formality and politeness, sometimes referred to as

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Babu English, grew up among Indian administrators, clerks and lawyers.

Although now just a “subsidiary official language” (one of 15 official

languages in a country which boasts 1,652 languages and dialects), and
much less important than Hindi, English continues to be used as the lingua
franca in the legal system, government administration, the army, business,
media and tourism. In addition to Britain’s contribution to the Indian language,
though, India’s many languages (particularly Hindi) gave back many words
such as pyjamas, bandanna, pundit, bungalow, veranda, dinghy, cot, divan,
ghoul, jungle, loot, cash, toddy, curry, candy, chit, thug, punch (the drink),
cushy, yoga, bangle, shampoo, khaki, turban, tank, juggernaut, etc.

English also became the language of power and elite education in South-East
Asia, initially though its trading territories in Penang, Singapore, Malacca and
Hong Kong. Papua New Guinea developed differently, developing a
pervasive English-based pidgin language known as Tok Pisin ("Talk Pidgin")
which is now its official language. The Philippines was an American colony for
the first half of the 20th Century and the influence of American English
remains strong there.

Language Reform

George Bernard Shaw (or possibly Oscar Wilde or Dylan Thomas or even
Winston Churchill, the attribution is unclear) once quipped that “England and
America are two countries separated by a common language”, and part of the
reason for the differences between the two versions of English lies in the
American proclivity for reform and simplification of the language. In the
1760s, Benjamin Franklin campaigned vigorously for the reform of spelling
(he advocated the discontinuation of the “unnecessary letters “c”, “w”, “y” and
“j” and the addition of six new letters), as later did Noah Webster and Mark
Twain. To be fair, there were also calls for reform in Britain, including from

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such literary luminaries as Alfred Lord Tennyson, Arthur Conan Doyle,
George Bernard Shaw and even Charles Darwin, although the British efforts
generally had little or no effect.

Both Thomas Jefferson and Noah Webster were totally convinced that
American English would evolve into a completely separate language.
Towards the end of the 19th Century, the English linguist Henry Sweet
predicted that, within a century, “England, America and Australia will be
speaking mutually unintelligible languages, owing to their independent
changes of pronunciation” (as it has turned out, with the development of
instantaneous global communications, the different dialects seem likely to
converge rather than diverge, and American economic and cultural
dominance is increasingly apparent in both British and, particularly. Australian
speech and usage).

Noah Webster is often credited with single-handedly changing American

spelling, particularly through his dictionaries: “The American Spelling Book”
(first published in 1788, although it ran to at least 300 editions over the period
between 1788 and 1829, and became probably the best selling book in
American history after “The Bible”), “The Compendious Dictionary of the
English Language” (1806), and “The American Dictionary of the English
Language” (1828). In fact, many of the changes he put forward in his
dictionaries were already underway in America (e.g. the spelling of theater
and center instead of theatre and centre) and many others may well have
happened anyway. But he was largely responsible for the revised spelling of
words like color and honor (instead of the British colour and honour), traveler
and jeweler (for traveller and jeweller), check and mask (for cheque and
masque), defense and offense (for defence and offence), plow for plough, as
well as the rather illogical adoption of aluminum instead of aluminium.

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Many of Webster’s more radical spelling recommendations (e.g. soop, groop,
bred, wimmen, fether, fugitiv, tuf, thum, hed, bilt, tung, fantom, croud, ile,
definit, examin, medicin, etc) were largely ignored, as were most of his
suggested pronunciation suggestions (e.g. “deef” for deaf, “booty” for beauty,
“nater” for nature, etc), although he was responsible for the current American
pronunciations of words like schedule and lieutenant. Webster also claimed to
have invented words such as demoralize, appreciation, accompaniment,
ascertainable and expenditure, even though these words had actually been in
use for some centuries.

For many Americans, like Webster, taking ownership of the language and
developing what would become known as American Standard English was
seen as a matter of honour (honor) for the newly independent nation. But
such reforms were fiercely criticized in Britain, and even in America a so-
called "Dictionary War" ensued between supporters of Webster's
Americanism and the more conservative British-influenced approach of
Joseph Worcester and others. When the Merriam brothers bought the rights
to Webster’s dictionaries and produced the first Merriam-Webster dictionary
in 1847, they actually expunged most of Webster’s more radical spelling and
pronunciation ideas, and the work (and its subsequent versions) became an
instant success. In 1906, the American philanthropist Andrew Carnegie tried
to resurrect some of Webster’s reforms. He contributed large sums of money
towards the Simplified Spelling Board, which resulted in the American
adoption of the simpler spellings of words such as ax, judgment, catalog,
program, etc. President Theodore Roosevelt agreed to use these spellings for
all federal publications and they quickly caught on, although there was still
stiff resistance to such recommended changes as tuf, def, troble, yu, filosofy,
etc.

Literary Developments

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A vast number of novels (of varying quality and literary value) were published
in the 19th Century to satisfy the apparently insatiable appetite of Victorian
Britain for romantic stories, ranging from the sublimity of Jane Austen’s works
to the florid excesses and hackneyed phrasing typified by Edward Bulwer-
Lytton’s famous opening lines “It was a dark and stormy night...” Due to the
strictures of prudish Victorian society, an inventive list of euphemisms were
popularized for body parts and other unmentionable concepts, a prudery
perhaps epitomized by Thomas Bowdler’s “bowdlerization” of the works of
Shakespeare in which offending words like strumpet, whore, devil, etc, were
removed or toned down.

The early 19th century language of Jane Austen appears to all intents and
purposes to be quite modern in vocabulary, grammar and style, but it hides
some subtle distinctions in meaning which have since been lost (e.g.
complimentusually meant merely polite or conventional praise;
inmateconnoted an inhabitant of any sort rather than a prisoner; genius was a
general word for intelligence, and did not suggest exceptional prowess;
regard encompassed a feeling of genuine affection; irritation did not carry its
modern negative connotation, merely excitement; grateful could also mean
gratifying; to lounge meant to stroll rather than to sit or slouch; to essay mean
to attempt something; etc). To Austen, and other writers of her generation,
correct grammar and style (i.e. "correct" according to the dictates of Robert
Lowth's "Grammar") were important social markers, and the use of non-
standard vocabulary or grammar would have been seen as a mark of
vulgarity to be avoided at all costs.

New ideas, new concepts and new words were introduced in the early
science fiction and speculative fiction novels of Mary Shelley, Jules Verne
and H.G. Wells. Lewis Carroll began to experiment with invented words

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(particularly blended or "portmanteau" words) in poems like “Jabberwocky”
(1872). Chortle and galumph are two words from the poem that made the
jump to everyday English, but the work is jam-packed with nonsense words
as may be seen from its first few lines: “Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did
gyre and gimble in the wabe: / All mimsy were the borogoves, / And the
mome raths outgrabe”).

But some truly revolutionary works were just around the corner in the early
20th Century, from Virginia Woolf to T.S. Eliot to William Faulkner to Samuel
Beckett and, perhaps most emphatically, the innovations of the Irishman,
James Joyce, in “Ulysses”and “Finnegan’s Wake” (although, of the hundreds
of new words in these works, only monomyth and quark have enjoyed any
currency, and that rather limited). A single sentence from “Finnegan’s Wake”
(1939) may suffice to give a taste of the extent of Joyce’s neologistic
rampage:

The allwhite poors guardiant, pulpably of balltossic stummung, was literally

astundished over the painful sake, how he burstteself, which he was gone to,
where he intent to did he, whether you think will, wherend the whole current
of the afternoon whats the souch of a surch hads of hits of hims, urged and
staggered thereto in his countryports at the caledosian capacity for
Lieutuvisky of the caftan's wineskin and even more so, during, looking his
bigmost astonishments, it was said him, aschu, fun the concerned outgift of
the dead med dirt, how that, arrahbejibbers, conspuent to the dominical order
and exking noblish permish, he was namely coon at bringer at home two
gallonts, as per royal, full poultry till his murder.

Clearly, this is English taken to a whole new level, pushing the boundaries of
the language, and it is considered one of the most difficult works of fiction in
the English language. Although the basic English grammar and syntax is
more or less intact, it is written in an experimental stream-of-consciousness

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style, and contains masses of literary allusions, puns and dream-like word
associations. Almost half of the vocabulary consists of neologisms
(particularly compound words like allwhite, bigmost, countryports, outgift, etc,
and portmanteau, or blended words, like guardiant, wherend, conspuent, etc),
and many of the words that are recognizable are used in an idiosyncratic and
non-standard way. Some of Joyce's word inventions (not in this sample) are
100 letters long. Initial reception of the work lurched between rabid praise and
expressions of absolute incomprehension and disdain, and even today it
remains a polarizing issue. The book continues to be more written about than
read.

In the late 19th Century, the Scottish lexicographer James Murray was given
the job of compiling a “New English Dictionary on Historical Principles”. He
worked on this project for 36 years from 1879 until his death in 1915, and his
results were completed by others and published in 1928 as the “Oxford
English Dictionary”. It contained 415,000 entries supported by nearly 2 million
citations, and ran to over 15,000 pages in 12 volumes, and was immediately
accepted as the definitive guide to the English language. Interestingly, this
version used the American “-ize” ending for words such as characterize,
itemize, etc, rather than the British practice (both then and now) of spelling
them characterise, itemise, etc. Although supplements were issued in 1933
and 1972-6, it was not revised or added to until 1989, when the current
(second) edition was published, listing over 615,000 words in 20 huge
volumes, officially the world’s largest dictionary.

20th Century

By the end of the 19th Century, the USA had overtaken the UK as the world’s
fastest growing economy, and America’s “economic imperialism” continued
the momentum of the British Industrial Revolution into the 20th Century. The

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American dominance in economic and military power, as well as its
overwhelming influence in the media and popular culture has ensured that
English has remained the single most important language in the world and
the closest thing to a global language the world has ever seen.

Perhaps in reaction to the perceived appropriation or co-option of English by

the United States, a certain amount of language snobbery continued to grow
in England. In 1917, Daniel Jones introduced the concept of Received
Pronunciation (sometimes called the Queen’s English, BBC English or Public
School English) to describe the variety of Standard English spoken by the
educated middle and upper classes, irrespective of what part of England they
may live in. The invention of radio in the 1920s, and then television in the
1930s, disseminated this archetypal English accent to the masses and further
entrenched its position, despite the fact that it was only spoken by about 1 in
50 in the general population. At the same time, regional accents were further
denigrated and marginalized. However, since the Second World War, a
greater permissiveness towards regional English varieties has taken hold in
England, both in education and in the media.

There was a mid-century reaction within Britain against what George Orwell
described as the “ugly and inaccurate” contemporary English of the time. In
Orwell's dystopic novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four", words like doublethink,
thoughtcrime, newspeak and blackwhitegive a nightmarish vision of where he
saw the language going. The “Plain English” movement, which emphased
clarity, brevity and the avoidance of technical language, was bolstered by Sir
Ernest Gowers’ “The Complete Plain Words”, published in the early 1950s,
and the trend towards plainer language, appropriate to the target audience,
continued in official and legal communications, and was followed by a similar
movement in the United Sates during the 1970s. Gowers himself thought that
legal language was a case apart, being more of a science than an art, and

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could not be subject to Plain English rules, but in more recent years there has
been a trend toward plainer language in legal documents too.

The 20th Century was, among other things, a century of world wars,
technological transformation, and globalization, and each has provided a
source of new additions to the lexicon. For example, words like blockbuster,
nose-dive, shell-shocked, camouflage, radar , barrage, boondocks, roadblock,
snafu, boffin, brainwashing, spearhead, etc, are all military terms which have
made their way into standard English during the World Wars. As an
interesting aside, in 1941, when Sir Winston Churchill wanted to plumb the
depths of the English soul at a particularly crucial and difficult time in the
Second World War, almost all of the words in the main part of his famous
speech ("we shall fight on the beaches... we shall never surrender") were of
Anglo-Saxon origin, with the significant exception of surrender (a French
loanword). The speech is also a good example of what was considered
Received Pronunciation at the time.

The push for political correctness and inclusiveness in the last third of the
20th Century, particularly by homosexuals, feminists and visible minority
groups, led to a reassessment of the popular usage of many words. Feminists
called into question the underlying sexism in language (e.g. mankind,
chairman, mailman, etc) and some have even gone to the lengths of positing
her story as an alternative to history. For a time, stong objections were voiced
at the inherent racism underlying words like blacklist, blackguard, blackmail,
even blackboard, and at the supposedly disparaging and dismissive nature of
terms like mentally handicapped, disabled, Third World, etc. But there has
also been a certain amount of positive re-branding and reclamation (also
known as re-appropriation) of many pejorative words, such as nigger, etc, by
those very same marginalized segments of society.

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The explosion in electronic and computer terminology in the latter part of the
20th Century (e.g. byte, cyberspace, software, hacker, laptop, hard-drive,
database, online, hi-tech, microchip, etc) was just one element driving the
dramatic increase in new English terms, particularly due to the dominance of
the USA in the development of computer technology, from IBM to Apple to
Microsoft. Parallel to this, science fiction literature has contributed it own
vocabulary to the common word-stock, including terms such as robotics,
hyperspace, warp-speed, cyberpunk, droid, nanotech, nanobot, etc.

Later, the Internet it gave rise to (the word Internet itself is derived form Latin,
as are audio, video, quantum, etc) generated its own set of neologisms (e.g.
online, noob, flamer, spam, phishing, larping, whitelist, download, blog, vblog,
blogosphere, emoticon, podcast, warez, trolling, hashtag, wifi, bitcoin, selfie,
etc). In addition, a whole body of acronyms, contractions and shorthands for
use in email, social networking and cellphone texting has grown up,
particularly among the young, including the relatively well-known lol, ttfn, btw,
omg, plz, thx, ur, l8ter, etc. The debate (db8) continues as to whether texting
is killing or enriching the English language.

Present Day
The language continues to change and develop and to grow apace,
expanding to incorporate new jargons, slangs, technologies, toys, foods and
gadgets. In the current digital age, English is going though a new linguistic
peak in terms of word acquisition, as it peaked before during Shakespeare’s
time, and then again during the Industrial Revolution, and at the height of the
British Empire. According to one recent estimate, it is expanding by over
8,500 words a year (other estimates are significantly higher), compared to an
estimated annual increase of around 1,000 words at the beginning of the 20th
Century, and has almost doubled in size in the last century.

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Neologisms are being added all the time, including recent inclusions such as
fashionista, metrosexual, McJob, McMansion, wussy, bling, nerd, pear-
shaped, unplugged, fracking, truthiness, locavore, parkour, sexting,
crowdsourcing, regift, meme, selfie, earworm, meh, diss, suss, emo, twerk,
schmeat, chav, ladette, punked, vaping, etc, etc.

In recent years, there has been an increasing trend towards using an existing
words as a different part of speech, especially the “verbification” of nouns
(e.g. the word verbify is itself a prime example; others include to thumb, to
parrot, to email, to text, to google, to medal, to critique, to leverage, to
sequence, to interface, to tase, to speechify, to incentivize, etc), although
some modern-sounding verbs have surprisingly been in the language for
centuries (e.g. to author, to impact, to message, to parent, to channel, to
monetize, to mentor, etc). "Nounification" also occurs, particularly in business
contexts (e.g. an ask, a build, a solve, a fail, etc).

Compound or portmanteau words are an increasingly common source of new

vocabulary (e.g. stagflation, edutainment, flexitarian, Disneyfication, frenemy,
confuzzle, gastropub, bromance, hacktivist, chillax, infomercial, shareware,
dramedy, gaydar, wellderly, etc).

The meanings of words also continue to change, part of a process that has
been going on almost as long as the language itself. For instance, to the
disgust of many, alternate is now almost universally accepted in North
America as a replacement for alternative; momentarily has come to mean
"very soon" and not (or as well as) "for a very short period of time"; and the
use of the modifier literally to mean its exact opposite has recently found it
way into the Oxford English Dictionary (where one of its meanings is shown
as "used for emphasis rather than being actually true"). In some walks of life,
bad, sick, dope and wicked are all now different varieties of good.

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In our faddy, disposable, Internet-informed, digital age, there are even word
trends that appear to be custom-designed to be short-lived and epehemeral,
words and phrases that are considered no longer trendy once they reach
anything close to mainstream usage. Examples might be bae, on fleek, YOLO
(you only live once), fanute, etc. Resources like the Urban Dictionary exist for
the rest of us to keep track of such fleeting phenomena.

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 Chapter 7
Language and socio-cultural change

The previous chapters prove what Daniel Defoe (c. 1660 -1731)
famously wrote of the “Roman-Saxon-Danish-Norman English.”

The purpose of this concluding chapter is to raise some of the main issues
that are involved in the study of the history of the English language.

A. Language contact
The English language has not existed in isolation and has always been in
close contact with other European languages. The effect of contact may be to
determine which of several languages is used in particular social situations.
Conquest by foreign invaders is inevitably followed by the introduction of the
languages of the invaders, and this can take several forms. The new
language may take hold permanently, as in the case of Anglo-Saxon, or the
invaders may eventually give up their language, as in the case of the Danes
and the Normans. Where several languages are in use simultaneously, they
may have different functions: for example, after the Norman conquest English
and French were used as vernaculars, and Latin was used as the language of
record.

When a language is given up, its users may transfer some of its patterns into
the new language. In this way foreign influence has peaked when Danes
adopted Anglo-Saxon, when bureaucrats began to use English rather than
French, and when scholars began to write in English rather than Latin. The
process of adopting features of another language is known as borrowing, and
the most readily borrowed items are words. English has thousands of words
borrowed from Danish, French and Latin. In more recent centuries words

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have been borrowed from all over the globe as a result of mercantile contact
and imperial expansion.

Contact must be taken into account when we consider the origin of the
English language. It is self-evident that it is not a single object with a single
origin. English vocabulary, expressions and idioms come from a wide range
of sources, mainly Latin, French and Germanic, but also Hindi, Hungarian
and native American and Australian languages. English pronunciation is
largely Anglo-Saxon, but also in part Danish and French. English grammar is
basically Germanic, but it has been modified by French and Latin.

B. Language and power

Language is an important factor in the maintenance of power, and an
understanding of power relations is important in tracing the history of a
language. In the medieval period, the relevant power was possessed by the
church. The important language was Latin, and written English was moulded
according to the language practices of the church. Most of our modern
literacy practices were closely modelled on those originally developed for
Latin. When the power of the church was challenged by the growing power of
the state, the prestige of Latin was recreated in English, and the new
language of power was a Latinate form of English. For much of the modern
period, English was the language of the English national state, as it grew from
a small kingdom to a major empire. The growth of the nation state, the cult of
nationalism at the court of Elizabeth, the seventeenth-century revolutions,
and worldwide expansion are all reflected in the history of the language.
When English was an unimportant vernacular, it was associated with the
common people, but after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 it was the
language of the 'politest part of the nation'. Soon there was a widespread
belief that the common people did not speak proper English at all. Since the

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middle of the present century power has shifted away from Britain to the
United States, and new technologies are creating new relationships which will
affect the language in the next millennium in ways we cannot even guess.
A shift of power does not of itself bring about language change, and is
mediated by intellectual change, in that shifts of power can affect the basic
assumptions people make about their language. Some of the major changes
in English in the sixteenth century resulted from the belief of scholars that it
was desirable to use English in place of Latin, and from their deliberate efforts
to bring change about. The shift of power from the aristocracy to the middle
class is reflected in the eighteenth-century concept of politeness, which in
turn led to the 'fixing' of standard written English. The increasing economic
power of the working class led to the concept of the Queen's English and a
narrowed definition of acceptable pronunciation. In the late twentieth century
the assertion and recognition of the rights of women have led to a marked
change in the use of the pronouns he, she and they, and of nouns referring to
human beings, such as poetess and chairman.

C. Language and social prestige/fashion

In addition to changes which have an identifiable social origin, there is a large
mass of changes which have been the result of prestige and fashion.
Although we can never find out how or why some particular innovations occur
in the first place, we can nevertheless trace their spread over several
generations. For example, much of the current variation in English
pronunciation follows the loss of the [r]1 sound after a vowel in words such as
sure, square or cart. This can be traced back in some detail to the fourteenth
century. The nature of the evidence is such that we can infer that a new form
has emerged, but we are given no idea who started the new fashion or why.
For example, when the captain in Thackeray's Vanity fair says I'm show, we
can infer that he uses the new form of sure rhyming with law rather than the

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old form rhyming with bluer, but we do not know how this new form arose in
the first place. Innovations spread along lines of prestige. The capital imitates
the fashions of the court, and the provincial towns imitate the capital. The
farmer going to market comes into contact with the more prestigious speech
of the town. Of course not all innovations begin at court, and the farmer will
come across more local and regional changes. But these are unlikely to
spread against the tide of prestige, and will remain local dialect forms.
Innovations eventually spread to the limits of the sphere of influence of the
place in which they arise, and bring about within that area a greater degree of
linguistic conformity.

In addition to these geographical changes, we have to take into account age

differences and the effects of education. Young people adopt new styles of
speech for the same reasons as they adopt new styles of dress and other
social habits. Traditionally young people adopted the new forms as they came
into fashion in their locality, but this pattern began to change with the
introduction of mass education. Teachers have sought to teach children what
they regarded as the 'correct' forms of English, with the result that most
people are aware of a clash between the English that comes naturally and the
English they have been taught formally. The pattern is now changing again as
the 'younger generation' is constructed by the mass media as an identifiable
group. The long-term effects of this are still impossible to predict, but already
there has emerged a kind of speech which is neither localized nor based on
school norms, and called Estuary English. The domain within which patterns
of prestige occur has become global. Because language plays an important
role in English society, there have always been significant differences
between the language habits of people with power and prestige and the mass
of the population. Habits of language — such as dress, diet and gesture -
have themselves been categorized as prestigious or non-prestigious, and the

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prestigious habits of one generation have become the arbitrary conventions
of the next.

D. Language and technology

Language change is facilitated by the development of new technology, in
particular technology that leads to improved communications. The effect of
technology on language and society depends on who has the power to
control the direction of change. In this respect it is two-edged: in the short
term it reinforces existing authority, but in the longer term it can alter the
distribution of power. The introduction of printing made possible the
development of a written language which became the national standard for
England, and later the basis for the modern worldwide Standard English. At
first publishers worked for their ecclesiastical and aristocratic masters, but
within 50 years it was clear that the press had generated a new international
form of power beyond the control of church and state. Censorship in England
at the time of Henry VIII offered a business opportunity to foreign publishers.

Spoken language was deeply affected by the industrial revolution of the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The turnpikes, canals and railways
constructed for the transport of freight also brought people into contact, and
brought them to the industrial towns. The speech of most people in England
is now related to the dialect of one of the major conurbations rather than the
local village in which they live and the urban dialects of England are much
more homogeneous than the older rural dialects. Broadcasting and other
forms of mass communications developed in the early twentieth century had
an initial effect analogous to that of printing, particularly in the spread of
Received Pronunciation in Britain. This has brought about increasing
uniformity in speech in England during the present century, but already the
power to control pronunciation has passed from Britain to the United States. It

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is too early to predict the longer-term effects of computer-based speech
technology and the use of English on the Internet.

E. Language, evolution and progress

The major upheavals that punctuate the history of the language were brought
about by social events which were not themselves intrinsically involved with
language. Social unrest associated with the poll tax in the late fourteenth
century eventually brought about the prohibition of the use of English in the
area of religion. Caxton set up his printing press to make money, not to
contribute to the English language. The growth of urban dialects was a by-
product of the industrial revolution. It would be naive to imagine these events
as the unfolding of a master plan with the English society of the 1990s, or
perhaps the 1890s, as its ultimate goal. It would be naive a fortiori to imagine
a long-term plan guiding change in the language.

Nevertheless, the notion that sets of changes are connected is widespread,

and underlies many beliefs about change in language. It is often claimed, for
instance, that the language has in some way improved or deteriorated. This
idea can be traced to the sixteenth century, the fourteenth century and indeed
to the ancient world. Linguists today still talk about the 'development' of the
phonological system or the verbal system, as though sounds and verbs had a
sense of historical direction. This has a very real effect on the way they
interpret language change, such as sound changes.

F. Improvement and decay

It is important to realize that, before the middle of the nineteenth century,
assumptions about language change followed logically from conventional
religious and intellectual beliefs. As it was then understood, a major event in
the history of the world was the confusion of languages which followed the

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building of the tower of Babel by the sons of Noah, calculated to have been in
about 2218 BC (Genesis 11: 1-9). This gave a scale of roughly 4000 years for
the whole history of human language. The ancient world of Greece and
Rome, and for that matter the Old Testament, stretched at least half of the
way back. It is thus possible to understand why scholars had such respect for
the classical languages, and interpreted change as decay and corruption.
There was also a belief that Noah's third son, Japheth, was not involved in
Babel, and so his language, and the languages of his descendants, remained
pure and uncorrupted. Some linguists went on the trail of Japhetic, as it was
called. Van Gorp claimed in 1555 that German was spoken in the Garden of
Eden before the fall. Parson's Remains of Japhet appeared as late as 1767.
The default view that change is inherently bad is sometimes given an
apparently rational explanation, for example that people borrow too many
French or Latin words.

The Babel story does not of course explain the opposite belief, namely that
the language has improved, which typically coincides with social events
considered to be evidence of progress, such as the introduction of printing,
the Protestant Reformation, or the Restoration of the monarchy.
Commentators tend to look back, not to the immediately preceding years, but
to the last generation but one. Caxton, in his late middle age, comments on
the problems caused by change and looks back to the English 'whiche was
vsed and spoken when I was borne', and claims that the English he adopts
for his publication is 'lyghter to be vnderstonde than the olde and aucyent
englysshe'. Dryden looks back with satisfaction on the improvement in the
language since the time of Shakespeare. Swift, by contrast, is dismayed by
the deterioration in the language since the 'Great Rebellion of forty-two'. In
the 1990s it is sometimes alleged that the language has decayed with respect
to some time early in the century, as though language decline had somehow

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followed the decline of the British empire.

G. Language and myth

In view of the close connection between language and power, it is impossible
to treat the history of the language without reference to politics. That is not to
say that these things are party-political issues. When political parties
emerged in England after the Restoration, they shared fundamental beliefs
about language, and this has remained the case in Britain ever since. Since
language issues are not debated openly, views about language have been
passed on by default and unchallenged from one generation to the next.
When language has been used for the purposes of propaganda, the
propaganda too has been passed on. As a result, the historical facts about
the language have come down to us shrouded in myth. When people
(including linguists) make statements about language in areas which lie
beyond their immediate expertise, they are likely to fall back on the common-
sense ideas of the society to which they belong. This means giving voice to
prevailing myths. In the longer term it creates a problem in interpreting
statements about language made in previous centuries. If we are not aware
of the myths, we will probably take the statements at face value, and obtain a
distorted (if conventional) interpretation of historical events. In studying the
history of the English language it is important to strip away the layers of myth,
and examine the issues which lie beneath them.

A good sign of myth is when intelligent people put forward in all seriousness
linguistic ideas that are inherently absurd. These ideas are taken very
seriously while the political issues are still alive, and only afterwards are they
subject to ridicule. For example, there must be few people who now believe
that Adam and Eve spoke German, and this is now a ridiculous idea. On the
other hand, there are many people who seriously believe that the working

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classes do not speak a proper form of English. In dealing with myths, it is
important to recognize them for what they are in linguistic terms. In some
cases the very articulation of the ideas being expressed will reveal their
absurdity. It is difficult to take seriously the claim that English was not a fit
language for Scripture, that Charles I was a Norman, that Shakespeare had
an imperfect command of English or that English was declining because
people used too many monosyllables. But it is not enough to tackle the
problem at the logical level, and in order to understand the controversies we
have to dig deeper and find out what the real underlying issues were. In most
cases these have nothing to do with language at all. Language is used as an
argument in more general social debates and struggles, and we have to
understand these more general issues in order to make sense of what people
say about language.

H. Language and identity

In tracing the history of a language, it is important to distinguish the history of
the language itself from the history of the people who happen to speak it.
After a conquest, or under some other kind of social domination, a population
may be induced to give up its own language and adopt the language of the
dominant group. They do not at that point change their genetic make-up and
become ethnic members of the dominant group. They may eventually be
accepted as members of it, and be granted full citizenship, but that is a
different matter. Acceptance depends on social perception, and citizenship is
a political classification.

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 TIMELINE
Here is a list of important dates in the development of the English language.
The selection of events is my own, and the dates are approximate in some
cases, but it gives at least some idea of the time-scales involved, and puts
the developments into some sort of perspective.

Before English

c.6000 BC Britain cut off from continental Europe by English

Channel
c.5000 BC Proto-Indo-Europeans living in Eastern Europe and
Central Asia
c.1000 BC Germanic Indo-European tribes living in parts of modern-
day Germany
c.500 BC Celts inhabit much of Europe, and beginning to colonize
the British Isles
55 BC First Roman raids on Britain under Julius Caesar
43 AD Roman occupation of Britain under Emperor Claudius
(beginning of Roman rule of Britain)
410-436 Roman withdrawal from Britain

Old English

c.450 Anglo-Saxon settlement (Angles, Frisians, Saxons, Jutes)

of Britain begins
450-480 Earliest Old English inscriptions
597 St. Augustine arrives in Britain (beginning of Christian
conversion of the Anglo-Saxons)
c.600 Anglo-Saxon language covers most of modern-day
England
c.660 “Cædmon's Hymn” composed in Old English

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731 The Venerable Bede writes “The Ecclesiastical History of
the English People” (in Latin)
792 Viking raids of Britain begin
c.800 Old English epic poem “Beowulf” composed
865 The Danes launch full-scale invasion and occupy
Northumbria
871 Alfred the Great becomes king of Wessex, encourages
English prose and translation of Latin works
871 “The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle” is begun
878 Danelaw established, dividing Britain into Anglo-Saxon
south and Danish north
911 Charles II of France grants Normandy to the Viking chief
Hrolf the Ganger (the beginning of Norman French)
c.1000 The oldest surviving manuscript of “Beowulf” dates from
this period

Middle English

1066 The Norman conquest under William the Conqueror

1086 “Domesday Book” compiled
c.1100 London becomes de facto capital of England
c.1150 The oldest surviving manuscripts in Middle English date
from this period
1154 Eleanor of Aquitaine, French wife of Henry II, becomes
Queen Consort of England
1154 “The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle” discontinued
1167 Oxford University established
c.1180 The “Ormulum” text of the monk Orm completed
1204 King John loses the province of Normandy to France
1209 Cambridge University established
1349-50 The Black Death kills one third of the British population

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1362 The Statute of Pleading replaces French with English as
the language of law (although records continue to be kept
in Latin)
1362 English is used in English Parliament for the first time
c.1370 William Langland writes “Piers Plowman”
1384 John Wycliffe publishes his English translation of“The
Bible”
1385 English replaces Latin as main language in schools
(except Universities of Oxford and Cambridge)
c.1388 Chaucer begins “The Canterbury Tales”
1399 Henry IV becomes first English-speaking monarch since
before the Conquest

Early Modern English

c.1450 The Great Vowel Shift begins

1476 William Caxton establishes the first English printing press
c.1500 Start of English Renaissance
1526 William Tyndale prints his English translation of the New
Testament of “The Bible”
1539 “The Great Bible” published
1549 First version of “The Book of Common Prayer” published
c.1590 William Shakespeare writes his first plays
1604 Robert Cawdrey publishes the first English dictionary, “A
Table Alphabeticall”
1607 Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in the
New World, established
1611 The Authorized, or King James Version, of “The Bible” is
published
1616 Death of William Shakespeare
1622 Publication of the first English-language newspaper, the

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 “Courante” or “Weekly News”
1623 First Folio of Shakespeare’s works is published
1702 Publication of the first daily English-language newspaper,
“The Daily Courant”, in London
1755 Samuel Johnson publishes his “Dictionary of the English
Language”

Late Modern English

1763 Britain wrests control of Canada from the French

1777 Last native speaker of the Celtic Cornish language dies
1782 George Washington defeats Cornwallis at Yorktown and
Britain abandons its American colonies
1788 British penal colony established in Australia
1788 First publication of “The Times” newspaper in London
1788 Noah Webster publishes “The American Spelling Book”
1795 First English settlement at the Cape of Good Hope, South
Africa
1804 Lewis and Clark document exploration of routes to American
West
1828 Noah Webster publishes his “The American Dictionary of
the English Language”
1834 Abolition of slavery in the British Empire
1840 British colony established in new Zealand
1865 United States ends slavery after Civil War
1922 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) founded
1928 First edition of the “Oxford English Dictionary” is published
1947 India and Pakistan gain independence from Britain
1954 Sir Ernest Gowers’ “The Complete Plain Words” published
1989 Second edition of the “Oxford English Dictionary” is
published

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End of Text Book
Good Luck

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