Middle English: a Case of Hybridization

Generally speaking, creoles and hybrids took more from the dialects of their superstrata than from the standard languages. Hybridization took place in England, in the area called Danelaw (extended from London to Chester), between the10th and the 11th Century, when Danish was probably used for some time. This is testified by the fact that places still keep the names of Scandinavian origin. What seemed to happen was a contact, due to trade and commerce interests, between English and Old Norse that gave birth to a pidgin form (Anglo-Danish pidgin). In a second phase bilingualism receded, left space to Anglo-Norse creoles and finally restored all those grammatical elements it had lost in its pidgin phase.

The situation with Norman French was different, mostly because Normans in England held positions of power and secondly because their contacts with Normandy were still very close, at least until 1204. Nonetheless, an everyday life inter-language arose among people simplifying into a sort of Anglo-Norman pidgin. This is the reason why some researchers sustain Middle English being a creole that arose between the 8th and the 11th Century, first during the Scandinavian settlement and then under the influence of French after the Norman Conquest. The effect of this double influence was to deprive English of its homogeneous character. However, even if a scholar such as Manfred Gorlach in “Middle English: A Creole?” denies Middle English ever being a creole because of the lack of a real pidgin phase due to the fact that Norse and Anglo Saxon were too similar, it is a fact that the system of those languages affected by blending always changes. This happened at least three times in the history of English: the first, during the contact between Norse and Anglo Saxons (9th -11th Century); the second, with the influence of Norman French over vernacular English (11th -13th Century); the third when high English acquired Latin and Greek lexicon (16th – 19th Century). These phases created the current English through hybridization.

Among historical linguists there is a debate about whether or not a stage known as Middle English is to be considered a creole or not. Comparing definitions of the word “Creole” does not help: the term is quite flexible, depending on the perspective chosen by each linguist or anthropologist. An anthropologist would say that to be “creole speaking” a culture should be able to define itself so. On the contrary, a linguist would probably say that “creole” belongs to native speakers as opposed to “pidgin”. Of course, Middle English speakers could not define themselves as “creole speakers”, even if they were probably aware that something was happening to their language.

Most of the texts in the Middle English period were written in individual dialects; this could have caused much confusion among different readers. The dialects were so several in some cases that in one region they might think the other speaking another language. Many different writers from different regions used different spellings, depending on what orthography they based it on. If they used an Anglo-Saxon orthography, for example, one might see spellings such as with the Norman French spelling , which would later become the general spelling of (since this was the most common sort of replacement for this devoiced sound). As for what concerns languages themselves, it is obvious that Anglo-Saxon and Middle English were very different from each other. The three largest differences would be found in pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary. How much it would differ in the Middle English era would of course differ by dialect.

Among linguists, the argument in favour of calling Middle English a creole comes from the extreme reduction in inflected forms from Old English to Middle English: the system of declension of nouns was radically simplified and analogised. The verb system also lost many old patterns of conjugation; many strong verbs were re-analyzed as weak verbs; the subjunctive mood became much less distinct. Syntax was also simplified somewhat, with word order patterns becoming more rigid. These grammatical simplifications resemble those observed in pidgins, creoles, and other contact languages, which arise when speakers of two different languages need to communicate with one another. Such contact languages usually lack the inflections of either parent language, or drastically simplify them. It is certain that English underwent grammatical changes, i.e. the collapse of all cases into genitive and common. In any case, the reduction of unstressed vowels to “schwa”, contributed to this kind of process, common to many Germanic languages. The process of case collapse was also already active in Old English. For example, in strong masculine nouns, the nominative and accusative cases had become identical. Thus, the simplification of noun declension from Old English to Middle English may have had causes unrelated to creolization

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Tags: anthropology, creole, english, Etymology, linguists, pidgin

Category: Foreign Language