An Unauthorized Biography of the English Language, Part II

First of all, I apologize for the unexpected delay in getting to this next installment of the history of English. Everything from snowstorms to hospitalization (my father’s, not mine) to my laptop’s high-dive suicide has happened in the intervening weeks, but henceforth I hope I will be more reliable.

I left off just before the only date in British history that anybody remembers: 1066, when the Normans showed up. In my recent independent study I chronicled the influence of Norman French on English vocabulary and grammar, and I had hoped to borrow much of this entry from my final paper; all my research, however, is stored on my now-unresponsive laptop. Woe! I can’t go into as much detail as I’d like, but I’ll at least give a summary. (And if anyone is interested, I’d be happy to elaborate once I have my paper available. As I mentioned, I love nothing more than rambling on about Anglo-Norman.)

In 1066, English peasants and noblemen alike were still speaking the heavily Germanic Old English, with Scandinavian filtering in from the North. In The Story of English, Robert Crum, William Cran, and Robert MacNeil note the similarity of modern Frisian to Anglo-Saxon, and go on to say that “if that linguistic cataclysm, the Norman Conquest, had not occurred, the English today might speak a language not unlike modern Dutch.” But, of course, William the Conqueror did his thing at the Battle of Hastings, and by the time the Normans were done with the language, it had changed beyond recognition.

The Normans themselves had Germanic roots; they were descended from Vikings who had settled modern-day Normandy in (if memory serves) the 600s AD, but they had long since assimilated to the local culture and customs. Upon William the Conqueror’s installation as King of England, French became the official language of the court. There would not be another English-speaking king in England for three hundred years.

During those three hundred years, French loan words poured into English at a dizzying rate. The estimates I remember most clearly are that upwards of 10,000 French words were adopted into English by the end of the Middle English period. 40% of English vocabulary, some say, is French in origin, making English almost an adopted Romance language. One of the most fascinating things about this period of galloping linguistic expansion is the way the new vocabulary was divided along class lines, and the way these words preserve, even now, a slice of the organization of medieval society.

At first, the French loanwords were largely military (as one might expect from a conquering language): castle (from chastel), battle, soldier, army, and the like. The role of French, though, soon began to change. The new king appointed his Francophone friends and allies to high positions in the nobility, and by the 1100s, anybody who was anybody spoke French. Besides being the language of the court, it was the language of the law, of the schools, of the church (alongside Latin), and of the cultural elite. Art and music, cuisine and couture (two French words themselves), legal terms, florid prose, luxury goods, courtly love—all of these were the provenance of French. To name a very few, terms like art, oboe, priest, religion, court, crime, jail, fashion, fur, jewel, letter, literature, male, and female are all French in origin. Sometimes even the grammar remains with us—ever wonder why we say “attorneys general” rather than “general attorneys?” Legal terms like this preserve the French practice of placing the adjective before the noun, which caught on nowhere else in the language.

Beneath the Gallic frippery, though, English chugged along as the language of the peasants and the uneducated, and it never lost hold of the most fundamental of words. High terms such as prince, baron, duke, royal, and noble aside, the French roi and reine never supplanted the king and queen (OE cyninge and cwene), even when these same rulers spoke no English (and Richard the Lionheart spent only six months on English soil at all.) A much-cited illustration of this basic class difference is the contrast between names for animals and names for meat. The cow, sheep, and swine which were cultivated by the English-speaking peasants retain Anglo-Saxon names to this day; the beef, mutton, and pork they produced are known by their French terms. The poor do the work, and the rich do the eating? Perhaps.

Despite three hundred years of marginalization—enough to completely eradicate a language—English never succumbed. French evolved into Anglo-French, fell from favor, and eventually receded. English reestablished itself, a testament to its adaptability and resilience. Why did English survive? King John’s loss of Normandy to France in 1204 was certainly a critical blow to the supremacy of French—cut off from the mainland, even the Norman nobles developed a sense of Englishness. The intermarriage of Norman nobles with English-speaking natives would have kept English current even in the households of the elite. I believe that the plague had a good deal to do with it as well; with a third of England’s population dead and the infrastructure in chaos, the noble-born would have been confronted with the necessity of fending for themselves for the first time. I bet the language of the tradesmen and peasants would suddenly have become much more interesting to them. Or perhaps English was just too adaptable and too stubborn to die. At any rate, it emerged from French rule a markedly broader and grammatically simpler language—cases were lost, for instance—but still unmistakably English.

Perhaps it is a good thing that I can’t get to my paper, or this might have gone on for twenty pages. Tune in next week for Shakespeare, the printing press, and why English spelling is so messed up!