Introduction

Middle English

The period covered by this volume, conventionally Middle English, is of special importance for the history of the language – for precisely the reasons suggested by the adjective ‘middle’. It marks the transition between English as a typologically ‘Old Germanic’ language and English of the type now familiar to us. These four centuries are particularly rich in radical and system-transforming changes in both phonology and morphology; they also provide a much richer corpus of evidence than Old English, both in numbers of texts and regional spread.

During this time as well, linguistic (along with political) dominance shifted from Wessex in the south-west to the south-east and particularly the southeast midlands, and the roots of today's standard dialects were laid down. The wider regional variety of texts allows us to examine more specimens of more dialect types than we could earlier; this is made even more helpful by another general characteristic of the period: the profound isolation of regional writing traditions. There was not, until quite late, much in the way of strong influence from any regionally localised standard or Schriftsprache.

In later Old English times, even regions far from the political centre in Wessex often showed West Saxon influence; after the Conquest anyone who wrote in English normally wrote in his own regional dialect, according to more or less well-defined local conventions, some of them of great phonological informativeness. This lack of standardisation also encouraged orthographic experimentation; and we have some very useful ‘eccentric’ texts like the Ormulum (see 2.1.3), whose authors have to one degree or another ‘invented’ their spelling systems, and in the process told us a great deal about aspects of linguistic structure that tend to be invisible in less fluid traditions.