This is the second in a series of articles on the history of the English language. The previous article can be read by clicking on this link or just going to this URL, https://englishmadesimple.org/the-origin-of-the-english-language-part-1/
The history of the English language part 2
So in our previous article we had a brief overview of the history of the English language, that it is a west Germanic language within the Germanic language family which in itself is a subset of the Indo-European language family.
Proto Indo-European > Indo-European > Proto-German > Germanic > West Germanic > Ingvaeonic
The Ingvaeonic languages or also “North sea Germanic” languages are the languages that were spoken by the various Danish and Germanic tribes that invaded and settled in ancient England from the 5th century and are now known as the “Anglo-Saxons” and after whom the English language and the name of the country, ‘England’ is named after. Though these tribes spoke different variants of North sea Germanic languages there was a process of homogenization and standardisation that took place even then in terms of creating a more standardised written version of the English language as was mentioned in the previous article in the form of the West Saxon dialect being chosen by Alfred the Great as the form of English to be used in writing.
We also had a look at “Beowulf” and saw that the language which it was written in, and actually more frequently recited in as this was a tale which was related to listeners in a pre-industrial age where little entertainment existed in the night time and what little did exist included the oral recitation of tales by skilled story-tellers or bards, can be argued to be a different language in practical terms to modern English.
One of the key criteria which we use to decide if different dialects or forms of a language are sub-sets of one super-dialect or “standard language” is that of mutual intelligibility or to be put it in more simple layman’s terms, “Would you be able to understand, or would you need to take a course in the grammar and vocabulary of this dialect/language in order to understand?”
However “genetically” in terms of the history, development and evolution of the English language, modern English did actually originate from ancient old English (Anglo-Saxon), but so did French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan, Galician and of course Italian originate from Latin, but no one would say that French is the same language as Latin though it is a derivative. This is however more of an academic topic and has no real impact on every day people or for example on methods of teaching, delivering courses and so forth, something which the aptly named branch of linguistics, “applied linguistics” is focused on for instance.
From old English onwards, “Middle English”.
Now, having had a brief recap of what we’ve already covered in the previous article let’s proceed and have a look at what happened to English after “Old English” or “Anglo-Saxon”.
“Middle English” is the term used by linguists to designate the type of English which emerged after the Norman conquest in 1066 by a coalition of northern French warriors, which included not just French warriors from Normandy but also Bretons and Flemish. The fact that this was a pan-northern French coalition and not exclusively Norman knights of Scandinavian/Norwegian ancestry is useful to point out because it reinforces the importance of the French language in that the Celtic-speaking Bretons, Scandinavian-origin Normans and Flemish-origin knights would all have been required to use a type of northern French as their common language of communication. That this was a pan-French coalition and not just a Norman coalition. This would also help us to understand that the fact that though the Norman knights may have had some very distant kinship with the Germano-Danish Anglo-Saxons due to their Norwegian roots they were very much French, culturally, linguistically and also in terms of identity and politics.
The importance of the French language.
The Normans considered themselves more cultured than the native English and thus did not attempt to learn English at first. The French tongue or its dialects were also closer to Latin which was then the most prestigious language in Europe and one which had a status as a “holy” language as it was the language of the Catholic church which prior to the reformation held sway over the whole of modern Europe excluding its eastern regions.
‘French’ as we now perceive it did not exist as it had not yet evolved in to the Paris-based form that we have today but instead in that period, 1066 onwards we had ‘old French’, the various Gallo-Romance dialects of northern France, as opposed to the Occitano-Romance languages of southern France and even parts of Spain (in fact it can be said that the Occitano-Romance language family up till the modern period covered the majority of the Spanish east coast in the form of Catalan and Valencian, virtually identical to the former). Modern French is said to have come in to existence centuries after the Norman conquest and is based as mentioned before on the dialect of Paris, a common occurrence whereby the dialect of the capital becomes the “prestige dialect” of a new state and then naturally evolves in to become the reference point or standard for how the language “ought” to be spoken.
With the Norman conquest, a huge lexical change occurred in the development of English with the influx of countless words in to the language from words such as “beef”, “pork” and words to do with administrative and legal affairs as the French, Normans, were by that time masters of the land and used their language for affairs of the state.
The majority of English vocabulary today is either Latin or French (the latter being a derivative of Latin anyway) with English being termed the most “Latinized” Germanic language in existence.
The Creole thesis and the influence of Old Norse and a Celtic “Vulgar English (Anglo-Saxon)”
There has been widespread debate on whether middle English was a ‘creole’. To understand what a ‘creole’ is we need to understand what a ‘pidgin’ is. A pidgin language is a form of language used to enable basic communication between two different language groups and it is often simplified both grammatically and lexically in order to optimise communication. If this sounds technical, well let’s think of ‘Tarzan’ or actually let me rephrase that and call him by his full title, “Tarzan, lord of the apes”.
One could be forgiven for wondering how “Tarzan”, could be brought in to a discussion regarding language. Well think about it. Tarzan is a supreme example of having to be resourceful when trying to ensure communication. His Tarzan English features phrases like:
“Me Tarzan, you Jane.”
Tarzan would not say “I am Tarzan, you are Jane.”
The auxiliary verb “be” and its derivates, “am” and “are” would be stripped and only the bare essentials would remain.
Though this may be a silly (and fictitious) example, it does provide us with an understanding of how the non-essential components of a language can be trimmed and simplified (though at times more crude) sentences can emerge.
If Tarzan’s new simplified form of ‘pidgin’ English was then learnt as their mother-tongue by his progeny this would then become a ‘Creole’ language. A Creole is what was once a pidgin language learnt from birth by others.
Though there has undoubtedly been a lot of Norse influence on the English language including:
- The pronoun, “them” emanating from the Norse tongue.
- Key words like “give”, “get”, “take”
- Certain features of syntax e.g.
Most scholars do not adopt the position that middle English is a creole for a number of reasons, which include.
- The presence of lots of irregular verbs and other irregular types of words in English, contrary to a simplified, regularised type of pidgeon language.
- The ‘simplification’ of English including the huge decrease of inflections had already been occuring even prior to the Norman invasion and was a natural process being caused by the symbiosis of old English and old Norse speakers on the island of Britain.
One work on this topic is, “The construction of a modern myth: Middle English as a creole” by Richard J Watts.
Here is a description of the book:
“One recently constructed myth—which has now gone beyond the confines of academia—is the English‐as‐a‐creole myth, which assumes that Middle English is best looked at as a creole created by intensive language contact between speakers of Anglo‐Norman and Central French and speakers of English. The chapter surveys the arguments for and against this hypothesis, which extends further back in time to include language contact between Anglo‐Saxon and various forms of Old Norse. The central argument is that the language contact situations in which early forms of English were involved represent koinëisation and new dialect (or variety) formation rather than creole formation. To support this argument data are provided from texts originating in the Danelaw part of England which reveal gradual changes in English since the time of Old English/Old Norse contact in the ninth century till the late thirteenth century, all of which argues against the English‐as‐a‐creole hypothesis.“
The fact that English is said by most academics on this topic to not be a ‘Creole’ does not negate the importance of old Norse on the development of English both lexically and grammatically. But the pre-Anglo-Saxon Celtic languages of Britain also had an impact on the evolution of English e.g. the auxiliary verb “do” and the present participle, “…ing” verb forms e.g. “I am doing”, “I am walking”, which are a result of Celtic influence. However we cannot deny that old English is a “synthetic” language full of inflections and middle English is an “analytic” language absent of a lot of inflections with meaning heavily determined by syntax and prepositions. This grammatical simplification of a language including the decrease and removal of certain inflectional endings, cases, moods and so forth are not unique to English but have been observed in many languages around the world where ironically older forms or ancestors of a certain language spoken in technologically more primitive times are more complex and sophisticated than their modern day versions in the technologically more developed modern era.
“Vulgar English/Anglo-Saxon”
One other reason submitted to explain why middle English is a an ‘analytic’ language devoid of many inflections apart from the Danes/Scandinavians of northern England trying to speak with Anglo-Saxons of the south is speculation that after the Anglo-Saxon conquest of Britain, there were still large parts of the country which were Celtic or where a huge portion of the population, if not the majority were Celts and had to try and speak a form of ‘vulgar English/Anglo-Saxon’ which did conform to the grammatical norms of more ‘standard’ old English spoken by the ruling class. So these Celto-English, if we can call them, may have been Celtic biologically fully or partially but lived in an enviroment which was a hybrid, Celto-English one were one community was Celtic the other was Anglo-Saxon and a type of intermediary vernacular emerged to bridge the divide, as was the case of the ‘Vulgar Latin’ of Roman legions and the conquered populations of Gallia (France), Hispania (Spain) and other Roman imperial territories, and this vernacular itself did not have the inflections and grammatical complexities as seen in the old English of the Anglo-Saxon warrior class or their literature.
If this were to hold some truth then logically the French-speaking Normans who had little interest in old English or Anglo-Saxon from a literary viewpoint may have just been interested in communicating with their subjects in the vernacular form of “English” (heavily influenced by Celtic and devoid of a lot of grammatical complexity) in order to attend to their basic every day needs of governance, managing property, collecting tax and so forth.
One thing the ‘vulgar Celto-English” thesis, as this writer terms it, does highlight however is the very simplification of British history, whereby supposedly the native English prior to the Norman conquest were all the sons of Germano-Danish warriors, the Anglo-Saxons, and all the pre-Anglo-Saxon Celts moved away en masse and disappeared in to places such as Wales and Cornwall. In fact modern genetic studies have shown that there is a huge amount of Celtic blood in the English population so this in parallel to this genetic mixture there could well have been a linguistic mixture of Celtic dialects and Germanic dialects whereby Celtic tongues influenced Anglo-Saxon English particularly the spoken vernacular form of the peasantry who were engaged in a daily struggle for agrarian survival, which entailed effective communication with local neighbours, rather than a desire to preserve linguistic ‘purity’ (that being fallacious too, considering virtually all languages are evolved forms of older predecessors and might be viewed by the ancestors of the speakers of these languages to be speaking a ‘corrupted’, ‘bastardized’ form of the original language, something that can even apply to renowned languages such as Latin, Sanskrit, Greek etc).
Quasi-Germanized Celts or Celto-Germans?
- Ethnically cleansed Celts? The older version of English history which depicts the Anglo-Saxons as the original English and founders of the state but the Norman French as always a foreign invading force, despite the fact that both conquered the land has often attempted to provide a narrative of some sort of racial displacement. That the Anglo-Saxons came, the Celts fled and the land belonged to Anglo-Saxons only. As alluded to before modern studies have shown that the English are by and large majority Celtic genetically even to this day.
- Germanized/ Anglicized Celts? Let’s say we disregard the theory of an England ethnically cleansed of Celts excluding Cornwall and the west (western England and Wales) then does it mean that magically all the Celts started to speak Anglo-Saxon and in a manner as ‘pristine’ and ‘unblemished’ as those who spoke it in northern Germany/Denmark? Well even during the four century long Roman occupation of Britain, the Celtic language was not replaced on a vernacular level by the far more sophisticated Romans with their literature, and powerful administrative system though the nobility of Roman Britain were Latinized or knew how to speak the language. So what about the Anglo-Saxons who were culturally less sophisticated than the Romans and administratively less powerful? There would have been no schools to teach pure ‘Anglo-Saxon’ (a term referring to a group of various dialects and not a single language, with there still being huge phonological differences between modern English dialects today e.g. Geordie and Cockney).
- Quasi-Germanized Celts? What may have taken place is akin to what happened in neighbouring France. The native Celts of northern France did not adopt Roman Latin and speak it but spoke a ‘vulgar Latin’ used to enable communication between Roman soldiers and conquered Celtic natives which then evolved in to modern French. The Gallic peoples of France never spoke Latin in general but spoke a hybrid Gallo-Roman, a form of Latin heavily influenced by the pre-existing Celtic tongues of Gaul (northern France). So the Celts of Anglo-Saxon Britain may have spoken Celtic at home amongst themselves and a ‘pidgin’ Celto-English hybrid between the Anglo-Saxon ruling class and the Celtic peasantry. This may have varied from place to place. In Cornwall and Wales the local Britons retained their Celtic tongue and the latter does fully today, in other places prior to 1066 it may have been a Celtic heavily influenced by old English and old Norse lexically and in other places it may have been a sort of hybrid Celto-Germanic or Celto-English (old English) tongue. Whether we want to call the native Britons of pre-1066 England as semi-Germanized Celts or quasi-Germanized Celts is subjective, but it would be wrong to view the pre-1066 England as solely populated by old English speaking Anglo-Saxons as per the traditional narrative and possibly more of a land inhabited by primarily semi or quasi-Germanized Celts. Whether we call them semi-Germanized Celts or quasi Germanized Celts depends on a variety of factors:a: How much intermarriage was there between the two? In traditional patriarchal societies of the past it was fine for a conquering nobleman to marry a woman of the conquered race and not vice versa as their progeny would identify with their father’s lineage, tribe and nation. Evidence tends to point to the Anglo-Saxon invaders mainly being male warriors who came and conquered, without wives and children, and then intermarried with local Celtic women, thus the children were naturally bi-lingual or at the least influenced by their mother’s lack of full native speaker proficiency in old English.
b: How much social interaction was there between the two? The Romans were fairly flexible, most people regardless of racial background could become a Roman citizen be they British, Libyan, Palestinian, German. Would the Anglo-Saxons have interacted frequently with the Celts thus increasing the reciprocal linguistic influence on each other? Or would they have kept a sort of distance, a sort of quasi-apartheid as a ruling elite as has happened in other parts of the world? From what we do know, though the Anglo-Saxons maintained knowledge of their lineage and ancestral identity they did interact with the Celts, to what degree we are not fully sure, plus it could vary from one particular locality to another.
Despite this theory of a majority semi/quasi-Germanized Celtic population, there has been no huge Celtic influence on old English lexicallly, though there is some influence e.g. the use of “..ing” in the present continuous and ‘do’ as an auxiliary verb. History is often about finding out what we do not know and then subsequently presenting that ‘gap’ as an area for further exploration and study, rather than just talking about what everyone already knows.
Linguist John McWhorter has written about what he believes is the important Celtic influence on old English in his work, “Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue”.
You can also read this blog article for more technical analysis of this topic: https://andrsei.wordpress.com/2010/10/14/what-really-happened-to-english-examining-the-celtic-hypothesis/, or click on this link.
For those interested in the aspects of British Celtic history, this video might be useful.
Another video exploring how much Celtic influence there may have been on old English.
Norman rule.
So Norman knights conquered a population of what may have been 1.5 million according to some sources. They created a strong centralised state with a network of castles (essentially a military base/police station of that period) within a day’s riding distance from each other, a system of documenting the population, income and property of the land (Domesday book) and other reforms. They spoke their version of French but they did intermarry with the Anglo-Saxon nobility of that time and were surrounded by Anglo-Saxons everywhere and were far, far outnumbered by them. Tens of thousands of French knights in a land with over a million Anglo-Saxons, the ratio could have been 1:100, and it is in this metaphorical ocean of ‘Anglo-Saxonness’ that the northern French knights and aristocracy melted into, albeit by injecting their strong influence e.g. the massive injection of French vocabulary into English. What happened to South America with conquered lands adopting Spanish wholesale never happened in England, nor did England become another country speaking a derivative of Latin as had happened in France, Spain, Portugal, Romania etc. Neither did the French Normans decrease the use of English in the way that the later English themselves did with Ireland with Ireland now becoming an overwhelmingly English-speaking country.
By the 12th century, around a hundred years after the battle of Hastings we read of the English wife of a knight urging caution over something to her husband in English rather than in Norman French, so even by then in actual spoken use amongst the elite French or its Norman variant had decreased, albeit French and Latin were both being used in legal, administrative and religious contexts and were more prestigious than the vernacular English, much in the same way that Arabic would have been more prestigious in north Africa despite the Amazigh (Berber) majority or Latin being more prestigious than the Celtic languages of Gallic France during the Roman period. The legacy of French being the language of the ruling elite is still visible today where we can witness words such as “purchase” that are of French origin sounding more formal than their Anglo-Saxon equivalents such as “buy”. More formal vocabulary in English is heavily French or Latin including words to do with food consumed at the dinner table such as ‘beef’ and ‘pork’, whereas English words are used for the same animals however when being herded by “lowly”, “Anglo-Saxon” peasants.
However despite being considered inferior, the English language never died away though it changed fundamentally and eventually reclaimed its position as the language of the land and of the state in subsequent centuries, something accelerated by events such as King John I losing Normandy and rather than focusing on pretensions on French territory and possible claims on the throne, to focus more on England and all that it entailed which included the English language.
Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales’ of the 14th century are probably the most famous work of that error and display a form of English which can be recognised by modern day English-speakers as being the same language despite some differences as compared to Beowulf which is totally different. Contemporaneous with Chaucer’s works are written in a Kentish dialect which is totally different and hard to understand. Chaucer’s form of English was that of the London dialect which had become the prestige dialect of that era.
It is important to note there was an abundance of regional dialects in that era even in written form and the standardisation of written English happened later including in the ‘Early Modern English’ period (1500-1700)
Let us wrap up this short article with a few ‘goodies’ or ‘treats’
To know what Chaucer’s middle English may have sounded like, listen to this video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFMcFaSc7JM
To listen to an interesting presentation on why Old English and Middle English are possibly so different, you can listen to this.
Tell us what you think in the comments section below!
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