The origin of a standard English

In an article on standardisation in Middle English, Michael Benskin discusses different aspects of the nature and spread of the standardisation of English in the Middle Ages. One claim is that the development of standard written English came about in the fifteenth century – in earlier years, a scribe’s homestead could be rather accurately determined by looking at their written language while in the sixteenth century local forms of writing were as good as gone.

   The dialectal grouping of Middle English dialects were largely based on the Old English ones – and thereby the realms and political boundaries of the Anglo-Saxons. A person’s way of speaking was also seldom associated with her written language, the variations of which were as a rule not recognised. A large-scale study of late medieval English dialects did not begin until the mid-20^th century, but resulted in A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English in 1986. Benskin discusses sources – the importance of knowing the date and place of origin of a text and the possibility to compare texts without having to take deviations based on various literary themes into account. He points out that historical linguists have rarely looked much at administrative and legal writings and that the characteristics of “literary language” has been equalised to those of the language as a whole.

    Benskin moves on to the definition of a standard and says the claim whether a language form has become a standard can be defined in two ways: either by looking at the form’s internal consistency, or at to what extent the form has become “common property”. A more consistent language obviously has a higher likelihood of becoming a standard as more speakers will use the same forms. That Standard English was already fully developed when it started to spread outside London is a common assumption; it is necessary to look at the conditions of the time and how language moved. The leading view has also for a long time been that the standard did indeed originate in the capital, though whether it was in London or Westminster was disputed. Benskin brings up M.L. Samuels and his work on dialectology; Samuels’ research uncovered some new beliefs – first, that scribes actually translated between different English dialects when they copied texts and that these translations could prove valuable sources and tell us something about the dialect of the translator, and secondly a solely language-based method of determining the origin of a dialect.

   The discussion moves on to what is known as the “Chancery Standard” and what the Public Record Office can tell us about it now. Benskin cites B.M.H. Strang’s History of English, where it says that after 1430 the role of English as a written language changes and the Chancery Standard becomes the norm in which all official documents are written. Benskin calls this a “hopelessly mistaken” oversimplification. Samuels’ take is that English was only exceptionally used in administrative writing before 1430 and that it then due to an abrupt change almost entirely takes over from French and Latin writing. Benskin opposes this claim; the number of English documents admittedly increases, but the roles of English and Latin were not, as Samuels’ phrased it, “reversed”. Benskin calls “Chancery Standard” a misnomer; most of its documents were still written in Latin, and whatever English was written were often copies of other parties’ documentation. English started being used commonly by the government in 1417 already, when with Henry V’s second invasion of France the language of the royal missives changed to English.

   There is also the question of the standardisation process in the English provinces. Benskin refutes the idea that texts were written in a “solidly local dialect” before the arrival of a government standard. He emphasises that previous usage of non-local forms may have made people more accepting of a national standard, and brings in the term “colourless regional standard”. These variants were different from each other and not standard as such, but displaced more local options. Two examples of interference phenomena are brought up: one orthographical curiosity concerning the thorn and y and the effects of hypercorrection, and one morphological singularity – more specifically verb endings in different parts of England at the time. Finally, Benskin discusses that writers who were active in the provinces may not always have learnt the capital’s English from far away but might have educated quite many young men who later moved away and brought their writing and highly likely new southern speech with them.

   Benskin also points out that it has so far been assumed that a later medieval text will be assumed to be more standard and less dialectal than an earlier one, and that tendencies towards a weaker standard may be caused by a lack of enough sources. He returns to his earlier sentiment about how our idea of history is shaped only by existing sources – and that sometimes, surviving exceptions to a rule may give us the wrong ideas entirely.

When did English begin?

On the subject on the Norman Conquest, Angelika Lutz has written an interesting article on the transition from Old to Middle English. She argues that while Old French certainly made an impact on English lexically in the long run and the language as a whole is often strictly divided into Old and Middle English, its grammatical development had nothing to do with the invasion. Lutz emphasises that historical periods and linguistic periods rarely coincide – all aspects of English were not effectively “Normanised” right after the coronation of William I; a more Germanic English was in common use for centuries afterwards. 

   The English lexicon drastically changed after 1066 as a consequence of power shifting to foreigners. Examples from the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary and Advanced Learner’s Dictionary show that the number Germanic, French and Latin words is relatively even in Modern English, with other Romance languages, Celtic languages and Greek in the minority. Lutz believes that “ordinary borrowing” would not have affected a language so extensively; there is no doubt that the new rule and authorities eventually led to a push of Norman vocabulary into the “conquered” English. Many Old English terms pertaining to law and justice were successfully replaced, and those who survived (like áþ – oath, and þeóf – thief) may have done so because they existed as cognates in Old French. The Norman language acted as a superstratum for English and imposed many new words related to politics and warfare.

   Lutz goes on to compare vocabulary in William Tyndale’s and Martin Luther’s Bible translations, into English and German respectively. English and German in the 16^th century turn out to be very different – Luther used Germanic terms while Tyndale’s language has many loanwords and is quite obviously affected by a Romance lexicon. However, most terms seem to have French origin rather than Latin and entered English in the 13^th and 14^th century. Following the Conquest, England was a functional trilingual country for over two hundred years, until the 14^th century when the ruling classes switched to English but brought with them significant French vocabulary.

   However, the Old English grammar remained seemingly unaffected by lexical shift – Lutz suggests that the delay in Romance influence on English writing shows that for a long time England was governed by non-Englishmen. Anglo-Saxon is remembered in writing style and some vocabulary – an 1137 extract from the Peterborough Chronicle shows use of e.g. Germanic verbs that would have appeared as awkward to Tyndale and Chaucer as they do to a speaker of Modern English. The text can be considered Middle English based on lack of Old English inflection, but still Anglo-Saxon in that it preserves much Germanic vocabulary. The use of Germanic terms relating to law, rule and the military can also be found even later, in 1258 – a text relating to Henry III displays many “indigenous” English lexical items. Lutz considers these and other texts evidence that a more Germanic than Romance English was used for a long time after the Conquest.

   It seems therefore apparent that Henry Sweet’s division of the history of English into Old, Middle and Modern English does not relate to the development of its vocabulary. A lexicon timeline would rather separate the “Germanic” period from the “Romance” reign, with a ubiquitous transition around the 13^th-14^th century, and Lutz says that Modern English is rather a product of the High Middle Ages.