5. The Middle English Period (1066-1500)

The Middle English period is characterized by a great impact of the French language, which after the Norman Conquest, became the ruling language in the educational, administrative and religious aspects of life. Due to that, the early materials are quite infrequent, because they were written in Latin or French. Much of the earlier Middle English literature was of the unknown authorship, but to the end of the period the situation had changed. Among the prominent names of that time was Geoffrey Chaucer, the author of the famous ‘Canterbury Stories,’ and later on the poets who are collectively known as the ‘Scottish Chaucerians’. They all contributed greatly to the development of the language.

The language of this period is characterized by a great diversity in spelling, according to H. Jackson “ it was even greater than that found even in Old English. Even in an edited text, we still find variant spelling, e.g. naure, noeure, ner, neure, all standing for never (Jackson 2008, 30)”.

What is this period particularly characterized by is the massive borrowing from French, caused by French-English bilingualism, which was introduced by the Norman Conquest of 1066.

Today, when English is one of the major languages in the world, it requires an effort of imagination to realize that 400 years ago English was a despised language. Only a few million of rural people living on the British Isles used English as their mother tongue, and the rest of the population were speaking the French language, as they found it nobler, more attractive and more privileged. The effect of the borrowings on the balance of the vocabulary was enormous. According to D. Crystal, by the end of the thirteenth century, some 10,000 French words had come into English. These were mostly the words dealing with law and administration, but there were also borrowings from such fields as art, medicine and everyday life. D. Crystal concludes that three quarters of them are still in use today. Due to this fact English retains probably the richest vocabulary, and most diverse shading of meaning, of any language. As B. Bryson writes,” For almost every word we have a multiplicity of synonyms. Something is not just big; it is large, immense, vast, capacious, bulky, massive, whooping. No other language has so many words all saying the same thing. English is unique in possessing a synonym for each level of our culture: popular, literary, and scholarly – so that we can, according to our background and cerebral attainments, rise, mount, or ascend a stairway, shrink in fear, terror, or trepidation, and think, ponder, or cognate upon a problem” [B. Bryson. Mother Tongue, p.62]. However, borrowings were not the only way of increasing the vocabulary; the other processes of word formation, such as compounding and affixation, which were already established in Old English, continued to be used.