I have posited this question before, but why didn't French or Anglo-Norman French become the dominant spoken language in England after the Norman Conquest and subsequent Plantagenet kings. With ties to the Continent, why didn't England and Scotland gradually become predominantly French-speaking? I understand that the Black Death and the Hundred Year's War had a lot to do with Middle English becoming more popular as a spoken language among the aristocracy. Nonetheless, why didn't these people just speak a variant of Anglo-Norman French with a strong English substrate with differing dialects across the island? What would the POD have to be to see the Anglic languages marginalized as spoken languages in England and Scotland? Was spoken English inevitable?
Discussion: Why didn't French win out over English in Britain
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Have the black death have a reverse effect on the Anglo-Normans, wherein the Anglo-Normans have better numbers in the end.
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Numbers basically. There were never enough French/Normans among all levels of administration to enable it to persist outside the upper aristocracy.
It's the same reason Normandy didn't end up speaking a Norse language.
And then the black death hit.
It's the same reason Normandy didn't end up speaking a Norse language.
And then the black death hit.
I think the best comparison may not be the Vikings in Normandy (who assimilated pretty quickly) but the Franks. They maintained Frankish as the court language for a few centuries but ultimately Romance (which had always been dominant among the population) prevailed.
I'd say it's the nature of medieval society. By its very nature most polities in Eurasia were multilingual and thus could easily get away with certain languages used for different purposes. This is the age of Galician poetry in Spain and Provencal-speaking trobadours elsewhere, of a Catholic Church that spoke in Latin, of a time where the King could speak in one language and the peasantry spoke another, though most early polities here were based more on loyalty to the monarch rather than anything else. Just as how in the modern UK you still have people who speak Celtic languages or Scots despite the huge all-pervasive presence of English (yes, I know!), then so too would it be in the case of French in England - which is not to say French did not have much of an impact, since artifacts were preserved both in Middle English and the traditional pronunciation of Latin in England (and hence how our original Latin, Norman French, and general Romance vocab is pronounced in English in a very Anglicized way) - with Celtic and Germanic languages still spoken by the people in much the same way. It's a bit similar to how we can approach Old English - we now know that Germanic tribes who migrated westward were few in demographic terms, but that early English society was a hybrid of a majority Celtic/Roman populace with the Germanic minority, and hence in this matter Old English could be viewed in the same way, IMO. It was a minority language much like Norman French in the post-Conquest period, but it did receive a lot of impact from the substrata - an early form of hybridity similar to the formation of Scottish Standard English, essentially. The spread of English in what would become the modern UK and, in part, Ireland was not so much an imposition from above but was a more informal, gradual approach based on trade, which is part of the reason why English is not uniform, alongside other reasons in other languages as to why regional, social, etc. variation exists in the first place.
There was a certain blending that occurred though in this respect. It is not as of the Franks are a sort of invading outsider, ala-Mongol Yuan Dynasty. Rather, the identity of the ‘Gallic’ lands became one with that of Francia, at least in the north. Same is said for most every realm/area in the Latin world for their particular Germanic overlord, aside from the Papacy and areas without said Germanic overlords, such as Hungary or Poland.
True - Old French did borrow a significant amount of Frankish vocabulary (some of which we no longer use in modern French) and Frankish probably influenced French pronunciation, considering that French contains several sounds that are found in Germanic languages but not in the neighboring Romance languages.
German won over British in England as it was not just the language of power but the incomers worked down to 'foremen' level as actual farmers and settlers so the common mass had to speak German to deal with them day to day and face to face.
The French came as a replacement aristocracy so operated at 'managerial' level so never had need to communicate with the workshop floor. Then followed a separation physically between England and France and Norman French became obsolete in France. It held on (just) into the 19th century in the form of 'court French' or 'legal French' which was unintelligible to anybody but legal officials.
The French came as a replacement aristocracy so operated at 'managerial' level so never had need to communicate with the workshop floor. Then followed a separation physically between England and France and Norman French became obsolete in France. It held on (just) into the 19th century in the form of 'court French' or 'legal French' which was unintelligible to anybody but legal officials.
Which monarchs courts first used 'English' over French, and which dialect of English did they use?
I'd always heard Edward III was the first to start at least promoting it as well as promoting English writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer, speaking of whom this would've been of course the Middle English which can be observed in works like The Canterbury Tales.
Zen9
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So the short answer is 'scale', Norman French was spoken in England by at best a few thousand people after 1066, while Anglo-Saxon was spoken by over a million maybe more.
Despite this the linguistic divide and exclusion of English from Court, and Church persisted for hundreds of years until reality had to be grudgingly accepted.
But even in this time Latin held a higher prestige and retained it even after the official version of the Bible in English.
To this day Latin and Greek hold sway among the upper class.
So the additional is not being the only prestige language in power. Thanks to the merger between Christianity and the Roman Empire, all of European languages are held beneath the 'god ordeined' superior languages of Latin and Greek.
English has lost a lot and had/imposed many French terms used instead.
Despite this the linguistic divide and exclusion of English from Court, and Church persisted for hundreds of years until reality had to be grudgingly accepted.
But even in this time Latin held a higher prestige and retained it even after the official version of the Bible in English.
To this day Latin and Greek hold sway among the upper class.
So the additional is not being the only prestige language in power. Thanks to the merger between Christianity and the Roman Empire, all of European languages are held beneath the 'god ordeined' superior languages of Latin and Greek.
English has lost a lot and had/imposed many French terms used instead.
Wonder what the Sillmarion, Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, ect... would look like translated into the English of Chauser or earlier?
A Middle English version would be rather difficult to read without having to sound out lots of words and would look kind of bizarre. Old English would be unreadable for anyone who isn't already a scholar of the language like Tolkien, although a lot of the lingo of Lord of the Rings is actually Old English words adapted with more modern spellings and grammar. The Rohirrim in the books have their language transcribed as Old English and in the extended cut of the film they have Eowyn singing a funeral song in that language.
EDIT: A transcription of Eowyn's song from the film:
Nú on théostrum licgeth Théodred se léofa
hæ´letha holdost.
ne sceal hearpan sweg wigend weccean;
ne winfæ´t gylden guma sceal healdan,
ne god hafoc geond sæ´l swingan,
ne se swifta mearh burhstede beatan.
Bealocwealm hafað fréone frecan forth onsended
giedd sculon singan gléomenn sorgiende
on Meduselde thæt he ma no wære
his dryhtne dyrest and maga deorost.
Now dear Théodred lies in darkness,
most loyal of fighters.
The sound of the harp shall not wake the warrior;
nor shall the man hold a golden wine-cup,
nor good hawk swing through the hall,
nor the swift horse stamp in the courtyard.
An evil death has set forth the noble warrior
A song shall sing the sorrowing minstrels of Meduseld
That noble cousin, who always held me dear
Now is held in darkness, enclosed.
most loyal of fighters.
The sound of the harp shall not wake the warrior;
nor shall the man hold a golden wine-cup,
nor good hawk swing through the hall,
nor the swift horse stamp in the courtyard.
An evil death has set forth the noble warrior
A song shall sing the sorrowing minstrels of Meduseld
That noble cousin, who always held me dear
Now is held in darkness, enclosed.
Some words you can puzzle out if you really think hard, but most of it is just too different.
According to the following exhaustive British documentary on the history of the English language it was Henry of Lancaster / King Henry IV who did first use English as an official court language again for the first time after 333 years. Their explanation for the decline of French / Anglo-Norman in England was among others also the loss of the continental possessions of the English crown. It contains some interesting samples of how middle English sounded, e.g. Henry of Lancaster's address before parliament with which he claimed the throne, starting at 34:05.
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Well, it extends even well beyond linguistic blends, but just societal lenses.
I remember memorizing the first lines of Canterbury tales for BritLit. Good times, “Wan that aprile with its showers soote, the draught of march has perced to the roote, and bathed every vein in swich liquor of which engendered is the floor.” The best part was the way that every e was pronounced
Norman influence did pervade English society from the little knowledge I have on this subject. IIRC, a lot of Norman loanwords entered English vocabulary, and I heard (could be wrong) that this is the reason English has a different cooked meat and raw meat (beef vs cow, pork vs pig, poultry vs chicken) rather than just having cooked cow to cow, for example. I also heard that those of Norman descent still occupy a higher social status on average than those without it.
I'm still wondering which dialect was used there, & if that were significant to the form of English development?