English language. This originated in the speech of small groups of Anglo-Saxon settlers in eastern Britain in the 5th and 6th cents. It is now not only the most widely spoken language in the world but also forms the basis for national and international communication between members of other speech communities.
The language of the Anglo-Saxon settlers and their pre-Norman successors is conventionally known as Old English. Closely related to Old Saxon and Old Frisian, it forms part of the Germanic grouping within the Indo-European language system. Little direct evidence of its nature survives from the 5th and 6th cents. but, as fuller records become available with the advent of Christian literacy, it emerges as a highly inflected language realized in four main dialectal varieties: Northumbrian, Mercian, West Saxon, and Kentish. Though Latin was inevitably the main language of learned communication, education, and the church, Old English was used as early as King
Ine (d. 726) as a language of law; King
Alfred's educational reforms of the late 9th cent. built on this precocious official usage and massively expanded its employment in literary and educational texts. As a result, by the 10th cent., the vernacular had acquired a literary prestige attained nowhere else in contemporary Europe.
The Anglo-Saxon period saw two major cultural revolutions: the conversion and the Scandinavian settlement. Both affected the development of the language. The linguistic impact of Christianity is probably exaggerated by the ecclesiastical nature of our sources but there is no doubt that it involved both borrowing from Latin and, more importantly, exploitation of the resources of English through compounding of, and semantic extension to, existing vocabulary to express the concepts of the new religion. The Scandinavian languages of the Viking settlers penetrated much more deeply into English vocabulary, syntax, morphology, and phonology. The influence of this cognate Germanic language clearly operated at the everyday level of communication and even included the transfer of the ancestral forms of the pronouns ‘they’, ‘them’, and ‘their’—items of a type rarely borrowed from one language to another. More indirectly, the Scandinavian settlement seems to have accelerated the progressive loss of inflexional complexity in English, for it is in the Viking-settled areas that these tendencies are most evident, encouraged no doubt by a desire to remove barriers to inter-intelligibility between the two related languages of Old English and Old Norse.
Paradoxically the extent of Scandinavian influence is not fully apparent until the post-Conquest period. The reason for this is that a standard written language had emerged in the late Anglo-Saxon period which was based upon the dialect of the politically dominant kingdom of Wessex, where also was the heartland of the
Benedictine reform movement. This conservative, southern-based language registered little of the more radical linguistic changes spreading southwards from the Anglo-Scandinavian north. Only with the Norman Conquest, when the introduction of Norman French scribes resulted in the disruption of West Saxon literary conventions, did these changes become apparent. Untrammelled by convention scribes began to write what they heard. As a result the ‘Early Middle English’ language of their manuscripts differs greatly from that of ‘Late Old English’ texts, yet all that had happened was that written forms had caught up with spoken developments—which had included simplification of many inflectional distinctions and the absorption of Scandinavian vocabulary.
Under pressure from Latin and French in the post-Conquest period, English lost literary prestige; the ‘Middle English’ stage of the language between the 12th and 14th cents. is thus a record of geographically limited dialects. By the 14th cent., however, English had risen once more in status though it was only in the late 14th and early 15th that a new standard written language emerged, based upon the language of the capital, London. This standard was later reinforced and spread by the introduction of printing. Linguistic variation in spelling and vocabulary, however, long persisted.
The 14th-cent. language of
Chaucer in the south and the Gawain poet in the north bears the marks of strong French influence in vocabulary and syntax. Detailed analysis of this French impact shows that it did not follow immediately upon the Norman Conquest but effectively began in the 13th cent. under the combined effects of the loss of Normandy in 1204 with a consequent identification of an Anglo-Norman nobility with England, and the European cultural ascendancy of French literary forms.
The flood of new ideas associated with the Renaissance and with Elizabethan and later exploration exposed the English speech community to languages and experience from most of the inhabited world. Terms to express the new concepts of religion, scholarship, and science invaded the language, not least from Latin and Greek; such ‘inkhorn terms’ were the subject of anguished debate and comedy among contemporary polemicists and satirists. The lack of fixed forms in English, particularly in contrast to the apparent stability of Latin, was also increasingly a matter of concern for those anxious to establish the vernacular as a language of learned discourse. This concern led to the eighteenth-century preoccupation with regularizing, fixing, and recording language of which
Johnson's Dictionary and the appearance of prescriptive grammar books represent two complementary facets.
By the 18th cent., however, English was no longer the language of a small part of Britain. In the preceding century settlers had taken it to North America and the West Indies; it was now to spread to Australasia, South Africa, and India. In all of these areas it developed its own forms which proceeded to interact with British English, the more so as communications became easier. The language in its various varieties has continued to evolve, with conservative and innovative forces continually at war within it. One extreme example can illustrate this conflict: alongside the host of new coinages, based on Latin and Greek roots, which have been adopted to express the technology and science of the 19th and 20th cents. there coexisted an extraordinarily archaic, yet highly influential, form of language in the world of religion where the Anglican church continued to use prayer books and bibles published in the period of Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles II which themselves drew heavily upon the language of
Tyndale (d. 1536),
Cranmer (d. 1556), and
Coverdale (d. 1569).
See also
dialects.
Richard N. Bailey
Bibliography
Barber, C. , The English Language: A Historical Introduction (Cambridge, 1993);
Freeborn, D. , From Old English to Standard English (1992);
Leith, R. , A Social History of English (1983);
Strang, B. , A History of English (1970).
