Middle English
Middle English is the language spoken in England, Scotland, and Ireland during the Middle Ages. The marker of the beginning of the Middle English era is The Battle of Hastings and the marker of the end of it is the Great Vowel Shift.
Stages
English has had 4 primary stages:
- Anglo-Saxon also known as Old English
- Middle English
- Early Modern English
- Modern English
The separation of Anglo-Saxon from Middle English is marked by The Battle of Hastings in 1066. The separation of Middle English and the Modern English stages is the Great Vowel Shift.
Modern English words have many different origins, but a majority come from Anglo-Saxon, Old Norman French, and a little Old Norse. However in the global world today, many words from many other languages have entered the English language.
Middle English also has different stages, with earlier texts such as Brut, which has a heavy Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, to Geoffrey Chaucer, who helped to standardise English (do to the early printers such as William Caxton).
Dialects
For more, try Middle English Dialects.
There are five major dialects of Middle English. Those are:
West Midlands
East Midlands
Northern Middle English
Southern Middle English
Kentish Middle English
Often the West Midlands and East Midlands dialects are put together and are called Midlands. The Northern dialect is often called Northumbrian dialect.
The most famous Middle English writer, Geoffrey Chaucer wrote in the London dialect, which was a part of the Midlands dialect.
The Northern Dialect has a heavy influence from Old Norse. The two primary texts in which dialect appears are the Reeve's Tale and The Second Shepard's Play. In the Reeve's Tale, by Geoffrey Chaucer, two Northern students have a run-in with a Midlands Miller. Chaucer uses the dialect for humourous effect. In the Second Shepard's Play which is written in the Northern dialect, a messenger tries to trick the shepards by using a Midlands or Southern accent, to no avail.
