55. Me dialects.

Dialects of Middle English

Kentish

Southern

Northern

East-Midland and West-Midland

Kentish

Kentish was originally spoken over the whole southeastern part of England, including London and Essex, but during the ME period its area was steadily diminished by the encroachment of the East Midland dialect, especially after London became an East Midland-speaking city; in late ME the Kentish dialect was confined to Kent and Sussex. In the Early Modern period, after the London dialect had begun to replace the dialects of neighboring areas, Kentish died out, leaving no descendants.

Southern

The Southern dialect of ME was spoken in the area west of Sussex and south and southwest of the Thames. It was the direct descendant of the West Saxon dialect of OE, which was the colloquial basis for the Anglo-Saxon court dialect of OE. Southern ME is a conservative dialect, which shows little influence from other l-ges – most importantly, no Scandinavian influence. Descendants of Southern ME still survive in the working-class country dialects of the extreme southwest of England.

Northern

The inflectional systems of Northern ME nouns and verbs were already sharply reduced by 1300, and its syntax is also innovative. These developments were probably the result of Scandinavian influence. When the descendants of King Alfred the Great of Wessex reconquered those areas, the Scandinavian settlers, who spoke Old Norse, were obliged to learn Old English. But in some areas their settlements had so completely displaced the preexisting English settlements that they cannot have had sufficient contact with native speakers of OE to learn the l-ge well. They learned it badly, carrying over into their English various features of Norse, and also producing a simplified syntax that was neither good English nor good Norse.

East-Midland and West-Midland

The East-Midland and West-Midland dialects of ME are intermediate between the Northern and Southern/Kentish extremes. In the West Midlands there is a gradation of dialect peculiarities from Northern to Southern as one moves from Lancashire to Cheshire and then down the Severn valley. This dialect has left modern descendants in the working class country dialects of the area. The northern parts of its dialect area were also an area of heavy Scandinavian settlement, so that northern East-Midland ME shows the same kinds of rapid development as its Northern neighbor. In the 13th c. this part of England, especially Norfolk and Suffolk, began to outstrip the rest of the country in prosperity and population because of the excellence of its agriculture, and increasing numbers of well-to-do speakers of East-Midland began to move to London, bringing their dialect with them. Since the London dialect steadily gained in prestige from that time on and began to develop into a literary standard, the northern, Scandinavianized variety of East-Midland became the basis of standard ModE. For that reason, East-Midland is by far the most important dialect of ME for the subsequent development of the l-ge.