How English Has Changed from the Dark Ages until Today

 

Social class is often tied to the use of language. Using a particular sociolect and accent signals group membership; sometimes even dialects will differ between social classes.

            During the Dark Ages (up to 1066,) The common folk spoke Germanic English, heavily influenced by Danish and Viking incursions over the preceding centuries. Some sources estimate that in the middle of the 11^th century, as much as ¼ of the English had recent Viking or Danish ancestry due to war-briding and settlement. In fact, in the middle of the 8^th century, Alfred the Great of England turned away a Danish invasion that would have spelled the end of Anglo-Saxon rule on the island. English had also been influenced by Brythonic languages such as the Gaelics and Cornish, which still exist today despite English being the big fish in the British pond.

            In medieval times, the Norman Invasion was the watershed event in the evolution of English. Normans, (themselves only a few generations removed from their Viking forebears) brought their dialect of French to England. William the Conqueror, the Duke of Normandy, defeated Harold Godwinson’s mostly-mercenary army on the valor fields at Battle near Hastings on October 14, 1066. At this time, Harold had been significantly weakened militarily at Stamford Bridge in a bloody battle against Harald Hardrade of Norway and Harold’s own brother, Tostig.

            While Harold won the battle, it was Pyrrhic, destroying about 90% of his military capability. That which remained, plus whatever mercenaries he could lure in the precious weeks between the two invasions, were no match for the Norman war machine.

            Recall that military might was at this time synonymous with the right and agency to rule; the Norman nobility displaced the Anglo-Saxons. The Normans brought with them their languages and customs. Norman French became the language of the ruling class and of law, while English(es) was (were) the tongue of the common people. This is how we get pairs of words, such as beef and cattle, sheep and mutton, brace and deuce: one of each pair comes from each of the ancestors from this time.

            Over time, the languages intermingled and formed the bulk of what we know as Middle English circa 1350 and exemplified by Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

            Once the printing press came to England at William Caxton’s shop in London in 1476, spelling and grammar became standardized. The London Dialect overtook the Northern dialects and became the standard English of the time. There was a narrowing at this point, where the several creoles created through diaspora and contact with non-English-speaking British natives were suddenly constricted, like sand in an hourglass falling through the narrows.

            In subsequent years, through the blossoming of international trade, poetry and the performing arts in London, new words again flowed into the language after about 1550, completing the hourglass analogy. The language continues to grow, both in the fields of the several sciences and among laymen.

            In the times of Colonialism, when the White man selflessly burdened himself with the betterment of the rest of the world though knowledge, industry, trade, culture, and religion, there was both cultural and linguistic trade going on. It was in the 18^th century that Englishmen in Calcutta announced the scientific study of linguistics, when they discovered the common roots of Indian dialects and Germanic tongues in the person of Proto-Indo-European.

            And as the White man brought his bounty to the several peoples he colonized, so did he accept into English many words and ideas from the peoples of those lands. English grew at a tremendous rate. Jungle comes from Hindi. So does Pundit. Pajamas comes from Indian Muslim dialects. Indian gives us Beleaguer via Dutch traders. The now-endangered Boers of South Africa found Trek in the native tongues of the dark continent. Swastika comes from the Buddhist word for good health. Juggernaut comes from a Sanskrit word for “moving god.”

Oxbridge Takes the Reins

            In the 18^th century, the boffins at Cambridge and Oxford, having developed their own sociolect based on aristocratic language and pronunciations, dominated publishing. Their ideas about many things, including what language should look and sound like, filtered from the upper crust to the common folks, this time through literature. The King’s English, so-called, was prescriptive. That is, it was presented as and perceived to be the “correct” way to write and speak. As it happens, the “correct” way would change over time. Elizabeth I sounded similar to a country bumpkin would to our contemporary ears, rather than the effete and affected lilt of the Windsor family today.

            Throughout the late 1700s until very recently, this Prescribed Dialect of English paradigm would endure, regardless of which country and which ruling class was doing the prescribing. However, today, we are more interested in describing grammar, syntax and pronunciation in order to capture the way everyday people speak.

            Despite this change in academic and pedagogical focus, the concept of the sociolect, of an upper-class way of speaking, endures. As people are social and acutely aware of social queues, it is likely that the ruling classes will always hold some sway over the way we perceive sociolect.

The Digital Age

            And so we come to the present, which I will define as roughly 1969-, with the advent of the ARPAnet.

            Words move fast now. Written lead times are not weeks, or days, or even hours. In fact, I published an article based on this paper while I was writing it! It was that quick. With the advent of the walled-garden internet services such as AOL and CompuServe (those forerunners to TikTok and so on,) people could talk to many others from all over the world in real time via teletext. Instantly, we saw and continue to see language converge in some ways, but diverge in others. This means that there are strong sociolectic markers that can instantly differentiate between in-groups and out-groups. It means that pidgins will form very quickly. The prevalence of English on the Internet means that English learners become more numerous and in their numbers, a more powerful change agent to this new Global Online English.

            LOL, LMAO, even KYS supplant phrases and feelings. Emojis have given us a visual language unlike the highly iconographic alphabet and more like those marks which inspired the letters, at the dawn of written words. And as industrialization and relative economic advantage serve to spread wealth and technology to more and more peoples of the world, we will find English becoming both more diversified and also more powerful in terms of describing specific moods, emotions, and ideas.

            At the same time, governments throughout the world are moving quickly to impose the end of free speech online, hedging out any ideas and voices which run counter to the ruling class. There are dissident communities online, but even these will soon be either illegal or completely obliterated by a ramping up of policing and prosecution.

            Efforts to democratize and smooth out English will ultimately fail, for it is easier to destroy and undermine these intellectual prisons than it is to build them. Dissidents will stay a step ahead of the ruling class, but not without significant casualties.  

English Learners

            The greatest challenge for American, Canadian and British English is the vast number of English language learners besieging those countries’ borders. “Big Red Truck” is correct, but “Red Big Truck” is not. Why? It’s not something you can derive from a rule book; it just is.

            How do you teach a class where 20 children speak English at home, another 5 speak it at school, and 5 don’t speak it at all? What if each of those five speaks aa language different from all his fellows? It can be done, I am sure, but don’t ask me how to do it without lowering the quality of education for all of them – a huge cumulative problem we face and will face moving forward as the country becomes less European and more Global.

            Some places, even in the US, have developed creoles, or full but informal languages which incorporate two or more parent languages. As English was a creole in the 12^th century, so is French creole (from which we take the word) today in Louisiana. While creoles are legitimate languages in their own right, they can cause atomization in territories along the lines of race and culture, preventing a larger cultural synthesis which is helpful in uniting a country. In other words, Nations have a language; Empires have many languages (and creoles and pidgins), as we saw clearly with the British Empire of the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

            On the bright side, Spanish is now our second American language. Spanish has given us lots of loanwords, such as Breeze, Ranch, Guerilla, Patio, Stampede, Dogie, Macho, Cockroach, and of course Fiesta. After this, I’m going to go enjoy a cerveza and an early start on Cinco de Mayo.