A history of

English
Míša Hejná
George Walkden

language
Textbooks in Language Sciences 9 science
press
Textbooks in Language Sciences

Editors: Stefan Müller, Martin Haspelmath

Editorial Board: Claude Hagège, Marianne Mithun, Anatol Stefanowitsch, Foong Ha Yap

In this series:

1. Müller, Stefan. Grammatical theory: From transformational grammar to constraint-based

approaches.

2. Schäfer, Roland. Einführung in die grammatische Beschreibung des Deutschen.

3. Freitas, Maria João & Ana Lúcia Santos (eds.). Aquisição de língua materna e não
materna: Questões gerais e dados do português.

4. Roussarie, Laurent. Sémantique formelle: Introduction à la grammaire de Montague.

5. Kroeger, Paul. Analyzing meaning: An introduction to semantics and pragmatics.

6. Ferreira, Marcelo. Curso de semântica formal.

7. Stefanowitsch, Anatol. Corpus linguistics: A guide to the methodology.

8. Müller, Stefan. 语法理论: 从转换语法到基于约束的理论.

9. Hejná, Míša & George Walkden. A history of English.

ISSN: 2364-6209
A history of
English
Míša Hejná
George Walkden

language
science
press
Míša Hejná & George Walkden. 2022. A history of English (Textbooks in
Language Sciences 9). Berlin: Language Science Press.

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Contents
About this book vii

Acknowledgements xi

Abbreviations xiii

The sounds of English xv

1 Introduction to language variation and change and history of the

English Language 1
1.1 The field of Language Variation and Change . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 What can vary and change in language? . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.2.1 Phonetics and phonology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.2.2 Morphology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.2.3 Syntax . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.2.4 Lexicon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
1.2.5 Pragmatics/discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
1.3 The field of History of the English Language . . . . . . . . . . . 11
1.4 Why study History of the English Language? . . . . . . . . . . . 13
1.4.1 Variation, variation everywhere . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
1.4.2 Irregularities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
1.4.3 Interpreting older literary and other texts written in
English . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
1.4.4 The social life of language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
1.4.5 Different linguistic levels can interact . . . . . . . . . . 17
1.4.6 Language change is inevitable (and perfectly normal) . . 18
1.5 Final note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Suggested exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

2 Change in English today 29

2.1 History and context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
2.1.1 What is English? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
2.1.2 English in Britain and Ireland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Contents

2.1.3 English in North America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

2.1.4 English in Australia and New Zealand . . . . . . . . . . 35
2.1.5 English in India and South Africa . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
2.1.6 Studying variation in contemporary English . . . . . . . 37
2.2 Sounds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
2.2.1 Glottalling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
2.2.2 Northern Cities Shift (and other shifts) . . . . . . . . . . 39
2.2.3 Uptalk and High Rising Terminals (HRTs) . . . . . . . . 42
2.2.4 Vocal fry and creaky voice/phonation . . . . . . . . . . 43
2.3 Morphology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
2.3.1 Absence of -s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
2.3.2 Verbal concord with collective nouns . . . . . . . . . . . 45
2.4 Syntax . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
2.4.1 Quotative BE like . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
2.4.2 GET passive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
2.5 Lexicon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
2.5.1 Global vocabulary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
2.5.2 Social media, instant messaging, and new expressions . 49
2.6 Final note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
Suggested exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Texts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54

3 Late Modern English (1700–1945) 59

3.1 History and context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
3.1.1 Prescriptivism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
3.1.2 Emergence of American English . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
3.2 Sounds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
3.2.1 /h/-dropping: to drop or not to drop? . . . . . . . . . . . 69
3.2.2 /r/ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
3.2.3 FOOT-STRUT split . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
3.3 Morphology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
3.3.1 Negative contraction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
3.3.2 The “subjunctive” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
3.4 Syntax . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
3.4.1 Progressive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
3.4.2 Semi-modals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
3.5 Lexicon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
3.5.1 Amelioration and pejoration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
3.5.2 As American as apple pie? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93

ii
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3.6 Final note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95

Suggested exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
Texts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104

4 Early Modern English (1500–1700) 121

4.1 History and context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
4.1.1 Standardization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
4.1.2 The Empire strikes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
4.2 Sounds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
4.2.1 The Great Vowel Shift . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130
4.3 Morphology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
4.3.1 Second person pronouns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
4.3.2 Other morphology to look out for . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140
4.4 Syntax . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
4.4.1 Verbs and DO-support . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
4.4.2 Preposition stranding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
4.5 Lexicon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
4.5.1 Conversion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
4.5.2 Colonial borrowings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
4.5.3 Latin and Greek borrowings: the inkhorn controversy . 151
4.6 Final note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
Suggested exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154

5 Middle English (1150–1500) 175

5.1 History and context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175
5.1.1 Dividing lines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175
5.1.2 The Norman Conquest and French influence . . . . . . . 177
5.1.3 Middle English texts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178
5.2 Sounds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182
5.2.1 General properties of Middle English phonology . . . . 182
5.2.2 Graphical features to look out for . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
5.2.3 /h/-clusters and /h/-dropping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
5.2.4 Reduction of vowels in unstressed syllables . . . . . . . 187
5.2.5 A note on vowel lengthening and shortening . . . . . . 188
5.3 Morphology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
5.3.1 Verbal endings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
5.3.2 Strong verbs vs. irregular verbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192
5.3.3 Pronouns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
5.3.4 Other morphology to look out for . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196

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5.4 Syntax . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197

5.4.1 The verb-second rule . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197
5.4.2 The English modals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200
5.4.3 Possessives: of and ’s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202
5.5 Lexicon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205
5.5.1 Lexical borrowing: French . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205
5.5.2 Word formation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206
5.5.3 Meaning change: the case of indeed . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
5.5.4 Other words to look out for . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210
5.6 Final note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210
Suggested exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211
Texts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220

6 Old English (600–1150) 239

6.1 History and context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240
6.1.1 Scandinavian settlement and rule . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240
6.1.2 Old English and Celtic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244
6.1.3 Old English texts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245
6.2 Sounds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249
6.2.1 Palatalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252
6.2.2 i-umlaut . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255
6.3 Morphology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259
6.3.1 Verbs and verb endings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 260
6.3.2 Futurity and the dual paradigm of BE . . . . . . . . . . . 263
6.3.3 Nouns and the case system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 264
6.3.4 What happened to all the nominal morphology? . . . . 269
6.4 Syntax . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271
6.4.1 Old English clause structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271
6.4.2 Old English verb phrase structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273
6.4.3 Negation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275
6.4.4 Relative and correlative clauses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 278
6.5 Lexicon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 280
6.5.1 Word formation: derivation and compounding . . . . . . 280
6.5.2 Lexical borrowing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 282
6.6 Final note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 284
Suggested exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 284
6.6.1 Using the Bosworth-Toller Dictionary . . . . . . . . . . 285
Text samples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297

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7 The prehistory of English 307

7.1 History and context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307
7.1.1 Linguistic detective work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307
7.1.2 The aduentus Saxonum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 308
7.1.3 The Germanic family . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313
7.1.4 Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans . . . . . . . . . 316
7.2 Sounds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 318
7.2.1 Old English and Frisian vowels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 318
7.2.2 Runes and runic inscriptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319
7.2.3 The First Sound Shift . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 322
7.2.4 The Germanic stress shift . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 324
7.3 Morphology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325
7.3.1 The Germanic weak past tense . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325
7.3.2 The Germanic strong verbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327
7.4 Syntax . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329
7.4.1 Expressing the subject . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329
7.4.2 Analytic and synthetic languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . 330
7.4.3 Tense, aspect and the verbal system . . . . . . . . . . . . 332
7.5 Lexicon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 332
7.5.1 Sources of the lexicon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 332
7.5.2 Word formation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 333
7.5.3 Borrowing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 334
7.6 Final note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335
Suggested exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335
Texts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 339

8 Wrapping up 349
8.1 Main observations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 349
8.1.1 Variation, variation everywhere . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 349
8.1.2 The social life of language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351
8.1.3 Irregularities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351
8.1.4 Interpreting older literary and other texts . . . . . . . . 352
8.1.5 Different linguistic levels can interact . . . . . . . . . . 352
8.1.6 Language change is inevitable (and perfectly normal) . . 353
8.2 Themes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 354
Suggested exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 357

Answers to exercises 361

v
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Glossary of linguistic terms 379

References 387

Index 421
Name index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 421
Language index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 431
Subject index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 435

vi
About this book
Dear student (and dear teacher),

First of all, welcome to the history of the English language! We hope it’s going
to be an interesting ride for all passengers travelling with us this semester.
In this part of the book, we would like to explain what this book is about, why
it is the way it is, and how it is intended to be used in the course on the history
of the English language which you’ve most likely just started.
All books on the history of English necessarily focus on how English changes,
but ours does so a bit differently. First and foremost, our book differs from most
other history of the English language books by not proceeding in chronological
order. This means that rather than starting with a language called Indo-European
or Germanic and making our way to English as we speak it today, we instead start
precisely with English as spoken and written today, with the changes it’s been
currently undergoing in various parts of the world. And we will be following at
least some of the variation we encounter today as we plunge back in time in the
course of the semester. There are several reasons why this is the approach we’ve
decided to adopt.

• We are surrounded by variation in language all the time in our every-

day lives. Where does this variation come from? More relevantly for this
course, where does Present Day English variation come from? In order to
answer questions of this type, we need to go back in time and uncover the
history of English. We believe that standing at the (current!) end-result
state and moving backwards in time to unravel the origins of the English
language is in many ways, though perhaps a bit surprisingly, more logical
than starting with Indo-European or Germanic.

• Many, if not most degrees focusing on English Linguistics and/or English

Studies include the study of Present Day English variation. Thus, students
often first experience instances of variation found in recent varieties of En-
glish even from the point of view of your formal studies. Taking a course
on the history of English which starts with Present Day English variation
About this book

should therefore work better within currently offered programmes in En-

glish Studies, and help you to make the history of the English language
make more sense to you. Because this is, as we hope you’ll find, a course
useful for anyone who’s going to engage with the English language, for
example as a future teacher.

• Crucially, however, the history of the English language is still being writ-
ten. As long as (native or non-native) speakers of English exist, the lan-
guage is bound to vary and, as a result, potentially also change. This is
important to bear in mind – and it’s easier to do so if we start our journey
in varieties of English used today, and if we have a look at how these have
been changing within our own lifespans.

• Finally, many of you will be taking classes in contemporary or modern lit-

erature, written in the English language, standard as well as non-standard.
Your literary classes will likely not focus primarily on the literary works
of Chaucer or Old English literary pieces of the Beowulf type. This again
makes it likely that your first-hand experience with language variation and
change will be found in English of the 20th and the 21st centuries, so that’s
where our story of English starts as well.

Another important aspect of this book is that it is aimed as an introduction to the

history of English. In many English programmes currently offered, the history
of English is limited to a one-semester course, and this is the setup this book
is aimed at. It’s definitely not easy to tackle all that there is to tackle within a
couple of weeks (see, for example, Hayes & Burkette 2017: 4; Giancarlo 2017: 60;
Hayes 2017a: 195; Hayes 2017b: 107), and it’s certainly not easy to teach a course
like this within the time given and the range of students taking this course, with
so many different experiences and expectations.
Just consider the following. There has been a distinct language that we can
call “English” for approximately fifteen centuries. The history of English is not
limited to how words of the language have been changing, no – the history of the
language importantly involves discussions of various linguistic levels, indeed all
of the conceivable levels relevant for our study of language (phonetics, phonol-
ogy, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, lexicon). If that sounds like a
lot, also bear in mind that to fully comprehend how the language has changed,
we must look into all of these levels at multiple points in time!
And now think of your own English, or the English you know from films and
social media, or songs. Do these represent one and the same type of English?

viii
Most likely not. So here’s another dimension to our history of English: it’s found
in a range of sociocultural situations, and it’s always been found in a range of so-
ciocultural situations. Today’s variation is but one slice of the historical cake we
could eat. If you’re thinking this sounds a bit overwhelming, especially for a one-
semester course, then we fully agree with you. This means that the scope neces-
sarily has to be limited to those aspects from the history of the language that are
most important. And deciding which aspects those should be is no easy task (see
also Buck 2003: 47). However, because we focus on explaining the present state
and making the prior states accessible to the readers of older texts, we won’t be
introducing some of the phenomena traditionally taught in classes on the his-
tory of English.1 But please don’t worry – we do make sure to point the student
to further references if you/they would like to pursue the subject matter at hand
further, on your own or in more specialized courses on the history of the English
language, should you have the chance.
So this is why the timeline of the materials presented in this book moves back
through time. Another important thing to know about this book is that we don’t
necessarily use the same texts for the different periods in the history of English
as those used in traditional textbooks dealing with this subject. Why is that? Like
some other teachers of this course (e.g. Buck 2003: 47), we feel that the choice of
the texts should be motivated by the following factors. Do the texts demonstrate
the phenomena discussed in the relevant chapter? Do the texts represent the
language found in a broader range of social and stylistic contexts? Do the texts
also reflect any issues that are currently topical within non-linguistic fields, such
as various topics covered within gender studies or transmedia storytelling? We
truly hope that considering these questions during our text selection is going
to make the texts, and thus also the subject, more obviously useful as well as
appealing to as many of you as possible.
And now for the slightly less interesting but still important aspects of this
textbook. First and foremost, this is a stand-alone textbook. All the student is
intended to need is this open-access textbook and the internet.
In each chapter you will find exercises, at least one of which presents a pos-
sible written type of exercise. There are also exercises that include the use
of various online databases. And, of course, there are analytical exercises you
may be familiar with from your syntax, morphology, and phonetics and phonol-
ogy classes. More challenging exercises are marked with a chili pepper, like the
one to the left of this paragraph. It’s up to your teacher which of these exercises
will be used in classes, but the exercises are there, and so is the key at the end of
1
Such as breaking, back umlaut, weak and strong adjectives, and Verner’s Law.

ix
About this book

the textbook (for those exercises that have right and wrong answers – not all of
them do!). Each chapter is also accompanied by text samples, which can be read
for their own interest, investigated for the linguistic features that are discussed
in the chapter, used along with the preceding exercises, or ignored entirely – it’s
up to the reader and the teacher.
In the hope of making the life of students as well as teachers a bit easier, we
also provide you with a fairly detailed glossary of linguistic terms, which you
can find at the end of this book. So, if you need to remind yourself of what a
phoneme is, or what a corpus is, the glossary is one of the places you can turn
to.

For the teacher

Finally, we’d like to share a couple of words aimed primarily at the teacher. All
linguistic levels are covered in each chapter of this textbook. In contrast to many
history of English textbooks, however, we also explicitly discuss pragmatics and
do our best to include at least one example relevant to pragmatics and discourse
in each chapter. We feel historical pragmatics deserves its rightful place in this
textbook, considering the recent work done in the area (and see e.g. Jucker &
Taavitsainen 2013, Arnovick 2017). Regarding a related field, semantics, we di-
verge from the common history of English textbook practice. Instead of focus-
ing on the traditional semantic categories (such as semantic narrowing), we ap-
proach semantics opportunistically and only focus on those semantic phenom-
ena that make most sense to discuss within the individual chapters – and only if
they do. For instance, in Chapter 3, where we deal with prescriptivism, ameliora-
tion and pejoration are also introduced as they work well with this overarching
topic. Other than that, semantic differences are touched upon without employing
much semantics-specific terminology.

We hope you find this book useful on your journey through the history of English
and wish you safe travels!

x
Acknowledgements
In spring 2017, the two of us met up as friends. We discussed all sorts of things,
one of them being the history of English. Both of us voiced some frustration
over the suitability of the materials available for courses on this area of English
linguistics. We felt that although there are a lot of materials, they do not neces-
sarily fit the format of our individual courses, so much so that Míša professed
that “Sometimes I wonder if it might be easier just to write my own book”. After
some silence, we looked at each other, and it was clear to us what would happen.
And here we are, five years later, with a baby of a textbook.
Many individuals have helped us. First of all, we would like to thank the stu-
dents we have taught for the History of the English Language at Aarhus Univer-
sity between 2017–2021, some of whom served as guinea pigs for one chapter
while others for the entire book. The same goes for students of the History of
the English Language and of Old English at Konstanz from 2017 to 2021. To us,
our students were one of the best reviewing committees we could have asked
for. Among these studens we would particularly like to thank Dominik Dolt,
Jonathan Förderer, Robert Langen, Philipp Weiss, and Laura Weisshaar.
Many academics have read various drafts of this book, either in its entirety
or individual chapters. First and foremost, we would like to thank the editors
of the Language Science Press series Textbooks in Language Sciences, Stefan
Müller and Martin Haspelmath, and Martin in particular, who provided us with
very useful feedback while giving us the freedom we needed to make this book
happen. Sebastian Nordhoff has our thanks and gratitude for all his work on
the mountain of the final typesetting work. We were also fortunate to have an
army of eleven reviewers, all of whom contributed to the process of making this
book take its current shape. Melanie Röthlisberger has our special thanks. Other
friendly souls who were kind enough to spend their time on the book and/or dis-
cuss it with us in various ways include Aaron Ecay, Gry Faurholt, James Harland,
Frederik Hartmann, Anna Jespersen, Helle Kaalund Tornbo, Mads Kristian An-
dersen, Anne Mette Nyvad, Mirjam Schmalz, Nicole Tamer, Krestina Vendelbo
Christensen, Fiona Thomas, Sten Vikner, Michael Walkden, and Daniel Watson.
This book is dedicated to our students: past, present, and future. The future
history of the English language is in your hands!
Abbreviations
AAE African American English
D determiner
DP Determiner Phrase
EFL English as a Foreign Language
ELF English as a Lingua Franca
EModE Early Modern English (1500–1700)
ESOL English to speakers of other languages
Gmc Germanic
GVS Great Vowel Shift
I Inflection
IE Indo-European
imp imperative (mood)
ind indicative (mood)
IP Inflection Phrase
IS-V2 Information Structure verb-second
L1 first language
LModE Late(r) Modern English (1700–1945)
LVC Language variation and change
ME Middle English (1150–1500)
N noun
NCS Northern Cities Shift
NP Noun Phrase
OE Old English (600–1150)
OV Object Verb
PDE Present Day English (1945+)
RP Received Pronunciation
SSBE Standard Southern British English
SVO Subject Verb Object
V verb
V2 verb-second
VO Verb Object
VP Verb Phrase
The sounds of English
For your convenience, Figure 1 provides an overview of the different IPA symbols
used for vowels. It also shows the positioning of these vowels in the vowel space.
You will encounter 18 of these symbols throughout this book:

i• y ɨ• ʉ ɯ• u
ɪʏ ʊ
e• ø ɘ• ɵ ɤ• o
ə
ɛ• œ ɜ• ɞ ʌ• ɔ
æ ɐ
a• ɶ ɑ• ɒ

Figure 1: IPA chart of cardinal vowels (Chart by Zieben007, licensed

under CC BY-SA 4.0)

Similarly, below we provide you with consonantal IPA symbols that you will en-
counter as you read on.

Bilabial Labiodental Dental Alveolar Palatal Velar Uvular Glottal

plosives p, b t, d k, g ʔ
fricatives f, v θ, ð s, z ʃ, ʒ x ʁ h
nasals m n ŋ
approximants ʍ, w l, ɹ ʍ, w
affricates tʃ, dʒ
trills r ʀ
taps/flaps ɾ
retroflexes ɻ

The approximants /ʍ/ and /w/ are labiovelar, which is why you can find them
under both “Bilabial” and “Velar” columns.
1 Introduction to language variation
and change and history of the English
Language
1.1 The field of Language Variation and Change
Have you ever noticed that your family members, your friends, people you speak
with in the street, shops, those you encounter on your travels, or people who
speak English in films or on the radio, or in fact anyone who speaks English you
may have ever listened to or overheard, vary in exactly how they speak English?
Have you noticed that some speakers are, for example, more likely to use words
such as dude, or perhaps that they pronounce certain vowels differently than
you’d expected? Have you ever wondered why linguistic variation exists and
just how diverse it could be? Are there limits to language variation, or is literally
anything possible? If questions like these intrigue you, you’ll be pleased to learn
that there’s an entire field of linguistics which is concerned with questions of this
kind. The field is known as Language Variation and Change, often abbreviated
to LVC for convenience. It’s a fairly young field, with the Journal of Language
Variation and Change dating back to 1989 and the seminal work by Weinreich,
Labov and Herzog dating back to 1968. Weinreich, Labov and Herzog (1968: 183–
7 in particular) defined the following five problems (or goals) for the theory of
language change, which are intertwined and which are seen as central to the
researchers working within the field of LVC:

1. constraints problem. To begin with, what sort of linguistic variation is

there in the world? What sort of language changes are possible? To give
a somewhat abstract example, most of us would probably be quite happy
imagining two dialects where the vowel in a word like kit was realized as
[ɪ] in dialect A but something like [ɛ] in dialect B, i.e. the vowel would
be lower in the latter dialect. (This is actually a change attested in many
dialects of English; see §2.2.2.) We would most likely be quite happy with
this because all that the speaker needs to do is simply lower the jaw a little
1 Introduction to language variation and change and history

bit and produce a vowel of a somewhat lower quality. However, most of

us would probably not be so keen on a hypothetical dialect C, in which
the vowel was realized as the plosive [p]. Yes, this would give us [kpt]
as the pronunciation of kit. But as far as we know, this type of variation
and change is not attested. That makes sense: the series of adjustments the
speakers would have to make in their vocal tracts would be fairly complex
because sounds like [ɛ] and [p] require rather different movements of the
bits we use to produce these different sounds (such as different parts of the
tongue, etc.). The take-home message is that there are constraints on what
types of linguistic variation (and thus also language change) are found in
the languages of the world.
2. transition problem. When a speaker introduces a new linguistic feature
into their language, and thus the language of their community (assum-
ing the community has more than a single speaker!), how does this newly
innovated feature spread throughout the community? Does it actually al-
ways spread? Let’s imagine that one or a couple of random individuals
at some point started pronouncing the vowel in words such as kit as [ɛ]
rather than [ɪ]. Or that these speakers started glottalling their /t/s, thus
pronouncing the word otter as [ɒʔə] rather than [ɒtə] (also see Chapter 2).
What happened so that the newly innovated feature (vowel lowering or
glottalling) spread at first within the few speakers’ community and later
possibly across broader geographic areas? And how did it spread across
different generations? Was it perhaps the youngest speakers who intro-
duced the two features? Did the subsequent generations simply keep on
picking up these new innovative features? All these questions related to
how linguistic innovations propagate, get transmitted from one genera-
tion to another, and generally spread within a society, fall within what’s
known as the transition problem.
3. embedding problem. The embedding problem deals with what factors can
affect linguistic variation and is thus very similar to the constraints prob-
lem. However, the embedding problem focuses on how possible types of
language change are affected by various factors. For example, the change
from /t/ to a glottal stop is not limited to English, so from various lan-
guages we know that this change is possible and that we need a language
to have a /t/ for this change to be possible to begin with (Constraints prob-
lem). But, more specifically back to the embedding problem, when it comes
to English, are you more likely to glottal your /t/ in words such as but-
ter depending on your age? Does it matter where in the word the /t/ is?

2
 1.1 The field of Language Variation and Change

Would you, say, glottal word-medially (butter) rather than word-initially

(tabby)? When it comes to a phenomenon like glottalling, what social and
other factors can possibly affect whether and how a speaker or a group
of speakers produce this phenomenon? Understanding the linguistic sys-
tems in which we find linguistic variation is crucial for our understanding
of how certain features develop in some languages (and their varieties) but
not others. This of course also needs to be said of the social aspects of the
communities whose members speak the languages in question. Linguistic
innovations need to be considered in their linguistic and social contexts.

4. evaluation problem. The evaluation problem is all about how the speak-
ers within a community assess, or evaluate, linguistic variation. Sticking
to our example of /t/-glottalling, do some members of the community per-
haps frown upon those who glottal their /t/s? Or does /t/-glottalling take
place happily without getting noticed by anyone, or indeed fairly happily
despite being noticed by some? In other words, how do members of a com-
munity evaluate this linguistic phenomenon that’s been spreading in some
varieties of English?

5. actuation problem. Finally, why did anyone start glottalling their /t/s
to begin with? And why did it happen wherever and whenever it did?
Why not elsewhere? Why not at another time? Why does a new linguistic
feature get introduced in a language at one specific time and in one spe-
cific place rather than at some other time and in some other place(s)? This
is the most frustrating problem of the field, so much so that some have
deemed it unsolvable (see Stevens & Harrington 2014 and Walkden 2017
for overviews). But there’s no need to despair – it’s natural that scientists
don’t have all the answers they would love to have.
As apparent from the nature of the five problems, LVC overlaps heavily with the
aims of two other fields: historical linguistics and sociolinguistics. In this book,
historical linguistics involves the study of earlier stages of languages and of how
languages change. Sociolinguistics focuses on how social aspects interact with
language(s). Historical linguistics and sociolinguistics do often overlap in their
interest. How does LVC fit in? As we define it, LVC is broader than historical
linguistics and sociolinguistics: it encompasses the more traditional and older
field of historical linguistics and also embraces that of sociolinguistics.
Throughout this textbook, we’ll be exploring some of the five problems
through the lens of the history of the English language. The most important
lesson we’ll learn repeatedly is that languages are variable and changing, and as

3
1 Introduction to language variation and change and history

long as there are speakers who use a language, that language is bound to display
variation and change. That makes sense: no two individuals are exactly the same
in every single respect, though individuals who are socially closer to one another
are likely to be more linguistically similar.
In the remainder of this chapter, we’ll first discuss concrete examples of what
exactly can vary and change when it comes to languages. Because this textbook
focuses on the history of the English language (rather than the general principles
of language change found in the languages of the world), we’ll also introduce you
briefly to just how old English is and what historical periods its history tends to
be divided into. Finally, we believe it’s important for you to realize what good
there is in studying something like the history of the English language, and we
therefore finish the chapter by giving you six possible reasons (and perhaps you’ll
think of even more).

1.2 What can vary and change in language?

We can delineate the following linguistic levels: phonetics, phonology, morphol-
ogy, syntax, lexicon, semantics, and pragmatics. To make sure we’re all on the
same page throughout our journey, we will now very briefly introduce each of
these and illustrate them with examples of linguistic variation. And if you haven’t
encountered these terms before, worry not – we explain these below in a nutshell.

1.2.1 Phonetics and phonology

Phonetics and phonology represent linguistic levels (and fields) that focus on
the sounds of languages. Before we explain the difference between the two, let
us get one important message across: letters are not sounds. Please remember
this. Letters are not sounds. And one more time, just to make sure: letters are
NOT sounds. How so? If you think of words such as two and too, the spelling is
different (the letters used to spell the two words are not the same), but the pro-
nunciation is not different. Two and too sound the same. We could easily come
up with more examples of this type. Although we might think that it would be
very handy to have spelling systems that perfectly represent how words are pro-
nounced, this is in fact not what we find in languages with writing systems, for
various reasons, and a completely perfect representation may in fact be impracti-
cal.1 So, we need to bear in mind that the same letter can correspond to multiple
1
Even in systems with a one-to-one correspondence between letters and phonemes, much of
the fine-grained pronunciation is not reflected in the spelling, such as glottalled /t/s or lowered
kit vowels!

4
 1.2 What can vary and change in language?

sounds, that a single sound may be represented by a range of letters, and that
some letters are not pronounced in English; or they are, but only in some dialects.
Let’s see an example.
Some of us may be familiar with the fact that most speakers pronounce the
words whales (large ocean-going mammals) and Wales (the small country next to
England) as homophones, i.e. their pronunciation is the same (two and too are also
homophones), contrary to what we’d expect based on the spelling. However, the
spelling reflects an older stage of the phonological system of English – there used
to be a time when the two words were not homophonous. There are still speakers
around, in fact, who distinguish the two words, pronouncing Wales as e.g. [wɛɪlz]
and whales as [ʍɛɪlz], the latter containing a voiceless labiovelar approximant (or
a cluster of [h] and [w], depending on the dialect and the analysis you opt for;
more on this in §5.2.3). Discussing letters is therefore NOT the same as discussing
sounds.
Now that the distinction between sounds and spelling (or orthography) is
clear, let’s return to that between phonetics and phonology. If we wanted to
be precise, phonetics and phonology would really have to be presented as two
different linguistic levels, which are nevertheless closely related. Phonology is
preoccupied with abstract sound systems. For example, we know that the words
tuck and duck differ by whether there is a /t/ or a /d/ and nothing else (/tʌk/ and
/dʌk/). Thus, because /t/ and /d/ change the lexical meaning, these two sounds
are phonemes in English and are of great interest to phonologists. But then on
the other hand we find a lot of variation in how exactly different speakers of En-
glish pronounce these /t/s and /d/s. Despite this variation, they all preserve the
contrast between /t/ and /d/, and again this contrast is at the heart of phonology.
Phonetics, on the other hand, focuses (also) on the lexically non-contrastive vari-
ation that there is in how we pronounce things. However, there is a considerable
overlap between phonetics and phonology, and most phoneticians would also
identify as working on phonology.
Finally, before moving on to morphology, let’s introduce one term that will
come in handy and will be used in this book from now on: variant. In the ex-
ample above, we saw that there are two ways to pronounce whales: with a [w]
and with a [ʍ].2 These two ways, [w] and [ʍ], are two variants ([ˈveəɹɪənts]) of
realizing what used to be a [ʍ] in earlier stages of the language (see §5.2.3 for
the full discussion).

2
Two ways if we limit ourselves to the discussion surrounding the example given. There is a
considerable amount of variation in how speakers may actually phonetically realize what we
spell as <wh> (see e.g. Kolísková 2016).

5
1 Introduction to language variation and change and history

1.2.2 Morphology
The field of morphology focuses on the structure of words. For example, stan-
dard English would use the -(e)s ending (a grammatical morpheme) in the third
person singular present tense, as in e.g. He loves bumblebees. In some dialects,
though, such as African American English (AAE)3 and Cajun English (spoken
in Louisiana, US), there is no -(e)s ending in the third person singular present
tense (Dubois & Horvath 2003). As we will see in Chapters 6 and 7, this could
be thought of as a continuation of a change that can be observed throughout
the history of the English language, encompassing centuries, since the number
of grammatical morphemes present in the English language used to be much
higher than today.
The part of morphology that deals with
grammatical morphemes like -(e)s is called in-
flectional morphology. It’s worth thinking
at this point about what we mean when we use
the word word. In one sense, loves and loved
are different words, but in another sense they
are two forms of the same word: you wouldn’t
look up loves or loved in a dictionary, you’d
look up the verb love. When we need to be
more precise, we’ll say that multiple different Figure 1.1: Prata Wala, taken by
word-forms can belong to the same lexeme. Míša in Singapore in 2018
The set of word-forms that belongs to a lexeme
is called its paradigm, and when we need to refer to lexemes specifically we’ll
adopt the convention of representing them in ITALIC CAPITALS. For example,
the paradigm of the verb LOVE consists of the forms love, loves, loved, and lov-
ing.
Variation in morphology is not limited solely to grammatical morphemes (in-
flection). We also find variation in word formation, i.e. the creation of new lex-
emes. Indian English, for example, uses the morpheme wallah ‘occupation, role,
owner” (Kachru 1975: 69; Sailaja 2012: 362), as in the book wallah ‘the person who
deals with books”, which is not found in other varieties of English. Note that, in
morphology just as in phonetics and phonology, spelling can mislead! Book wal-
lah may look like two words on the written page (or on a restaurant sign, as in
Figure 1.1), but linguists have proposed tests to distinguish stand-alone words

3
AAE is also known as African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in much of the literature,
and sometimes as African American Language (AAL) in more recent work (e.g. Lanehart 2015).
See Green (2002: 5–8) on the issue of naming this variety. We avoid the term “vernacular”
where possible here, due to its traditionally pejorative or negative connotations (Rajendran
2019).
6
 1.2 What can vary and change in language?

from affixes; for instance, Bresnan & Mchombo (1995) propose five tests of word-
hood. The morpheme wallah fails these tests.
Word formation can involve the addition of an affix to an independent word,
as in this case – a process usually called derivation – or it can involve putting
together two independent words, usually called compounding. Word formation
is a part of language which lives quite happily both within the morphological and
the lexical levels. It is not unusual for phenomena to be of relevance to more than
a single linguistic level. Thus, morphology also interacts with phonology, and
when this happens, the phenomena are both morphological and phonological. If
you think of the differences between words such as sane and sanity, or serene and
serenity, the presence/absence of the morpheme -ity is not the only difference.
There are also differences in the quality and the length of some of the vowels:
[sɛɪn] vs. [sænɪtɪ], [sɪˈɹiːn] vs. [sɪˈɹɛnɪtɪ]. As we will see repeatedly in this book,
once we start exploring historical aspects of languages, we are bound to come
across interactions between different linguistic levels.

1.2.3 Syntax
Syntax refers to the level of the language that focuses on the structure of phrases,
clauses and sentences, above the level of the word. Plenty of variation is found
in the realm of syntactic phenomena as well. For instance, Can meet you at 5.
is something you may be familiar with from text messages or social media. This
sure looks different from I can meet you at 5., where the subject is overtly present
in the sentence. We do know who the subject is in Can meet you at 5. from the
context – the subject is still very much lurking in the background. Another pos-
sible example comes from Welsh English, where we can find what’s known as
fronting or topicalization, as in Examples (1) and (2) below (taken from Paulasto
2006: 158 and 160).

(1) Very much involved with [Women’s Institute] over the years I’ve been.
(2) And hens we had and eggs and ...

Notice that the subject is preceded by the elements of the clause emphasized
in bold, one of which is actually part of the predicate/verb phrase. Fronting does
happen in many varieties of English (Pineapples I really don’t like.), but has been
noted to be more frequent in Welsh English and possible for a more varied set of
syntactic elements (see Paulasto 2006 for more details).
There is a reason why fronting was chosen to illustrate syntactic variation: in
fronting, what changes is a movement of a certain unit within a sentence to a
different position. The order of words and constituents falls squarely within the

7
1 Introduction to language variation and change and history

syntactic realm. But sometimes it may not be quite so obvious that the level of
language we are dealing with is that of syntax. For example, in most varieties of
English, there can only be a single modal within a clause, so that the following
sentences would not be grammatical (taken from Bour 2015: 17–18):
(3) He’ll might could do it for you. (Hawick, Scotland)
(4) Sorry, we don’t carry them anymore, but you know, you may might can
get one right over there at Wicks. (North and South Carolina)
But there are nevertheless dialects of English where these multiple modals can
be found (such as those in North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, the
Appalachians and the Ozark territories, Southern Scotland, Northern England,
and North-Eastern Ulster; Bour 2015: 14, Huang 2011).
This type of variation is not, strictly speaking, only about the word order.
There is also something about the nature of the specific verbs involved which
makes this type of variation of interest to those who focus on the lexicon (for
example, are all of these modal verbs really verbs, or could some of them be
classified as adverbs, or even something else?), and notice that the modal will is
also phonologically reduced in (3). Many phenomena that are syntactic in nature
could thus often be seen as falling within the remit of morphology, and even pho-
netics and phonology, as well. Another example of this in English dialects would
be related to negation. When we contrast Will he not do it for you? with Won’t
he do it for you?, not only is there a difference in whether the negative marker
precedes or follows the subject, but the phonology and thus also the word struc-
ture of the verb will is also affected. Phenomena which are both morphological
and syntactic can be said to fall within the area of morphosyntax.
When thinking about the syntax of different varieties of English, it’s useful to
think about the words of the language as being attached to an abstract structure
of a sentence, as in (5). You can think of the words themselves as the skin on the
bones of a skeleton (i.e. the abstract structure), or the leaves on a tree. In fact,
tree diagram is the usual term for diagrams like (5).
(5) IP

We I′

I VP

can V you

meet
8
 1.2 What can vary and change in language?

In this view of syntax, sentences are made up of hierarchically structured phrases.

The tree structure here includes a Verb Phrase – VP – and an Inflection Phrase
– IP. Each phrase has a head: V (the verb) for the VP, and I for the IP. Phrases
may also have a complement (the sister of the head) and a specifier. In most
present-day English varieties, we can say that the subject (here, We) is in the
specifier of IP and that the object (here, you) is in the complement of VP.

X-bar theory

We can talk about elements of a syntactic tree having mothers and sisters,
like in a family tree: so, the verb meet is the sister of you in Example (5),
and their mother is the VP element itself. If a phrase has a specifier, then
the specifier’s sister will be something that is neither a head nor a full
phrase, but something in the middle: in Example (5), this is I′ (or “I-bar”).
It’s the mother of I and VP, the daughter of IP, and the sister of the subject
We. This approach to syntax is called X-bar theory, and it’s quite widely
assumed. In this book we’ll keep the syntactic theory to a minimum, but
if you’d like to pick up some more background, Carnie (2013) is a good
place to look.

Sometimes, syntactic variation will involve words appearing in different places in

the tree while the abstract structure may stay the same. In spring and autumn, the
leaves of trees may come and go, but the tree’s trunk and branches don’t change
much. Sometimes, we’ll argue that the tree structure itself changes; over its long
life, the branches of a tree may move, and new branches may be grown. What’s
exciting about syntactic change is establishing the limits of variation. Which
aspects of syntax are universal to human cognition, and which can vary cross-
linguistically? Studying the history and varieties of English can shed light on
these questions.

1.2.4 Lexicon
We have already seen an example of variation in word formation – the wallah
example – and said that variation in word formation can also be viewed as per-
taining to the level of the lexicon (§1.2.2). Indeed, word formation is all about
expanding the lexicon. But morphological word formation is not all there is to

9
1 Introduction to language variation and change and history

this linguistic level. Semantics is also important, and variation can be found re-
garding, for example, what word X means in dialect A as opposed to dialect B,
and what words are used for idea Z in which dialect. Let’s see some examples to
make this less abstract.
Speakers of Singapore English would use café to refer to a place to eat (so a
bistro) rather than a place to have a coffee (and typically some sort of cake), as
illustrated in Figure 1.2.4

Figure 1.2: A typical café in Singapore, selling mainly savoury take-

away meals (taken by Míša in 2018)

Where speakers of American English would use pants, most speakers of British
English would use trousers.5 And a small bread-like consumable can be referred
to with a range of terms, such as bap, barm, batch, bun, cob, muffin, roll, tea cake,
and possibly more, just within the UK.6
Lexical variation is by no means limited to nouns. Thus, where some speakers
of English may say You ought to know this, others may say You should know this.
Lexical variation is probably the first type of language variation we think of, but
as we have seen by now, the other linguistic levels by no means escape variation
and change.

4
That café is indeed used with a different meaning in Singapore English has been confirmed by
Gerry Kwek, a local Singapore linguist (personal communication, 2018).
5
Although see https://www.ourdialects.uk/maps/clothing/.
6
Find out more about the linguistic wonders of small bread-like consumables here: https://www.
ourdialects.uk/maps/bread/.

10
 1.3 The field of History of the English Language

1.2.5 Pragmatics/discourse
Pragmatic aspects of language are those that are related to the context in which
conversation takes place. This can be linguistic context, situational context, and
social context (Bergmann et al. 2007). Right now and right here, we don’t need
to worry about the different types of contexts that there are – what matters is
that pragmatics looks at units of language in context rather than in an abstract
vacuum (like we’ve been doing thus far in this chapter when throwing examples
at you). Some of you may have come across the term discourse as well. Usually,
discourse is defined as language use and linguistic structure beyond the level of
the sentence. What discourse and pragmatics are really about is how the whole
communication process happens, and this requires various aspects of language
to be considered. For this reason, phenomena from various other linguistic levels
could easily fall within the scope of pragmatics. It’s time for some examples now.
We find abundant variation at the pragmatic and discourse-related level. The
Tyneside area of the UK is well known for using terms of endearment such as pet
to address another speaker (Beal 2000: 346). It’s true – Míša was once making
her way to Gateshead from the airport at Newcastle, when the lady who sat
right opposite her, a complete stranger, asked, “What are you down for, pet?
Holidays?”, and she knew she was in Tyneside. And in the Midlands of England,
where George grew up, duck (a term normally used for an aquatic bird in most
varieties of English) is used as a term of address. Addressing a stranger as pet, love,
or duck would hardly be appropriate in all English-speaking regions of the world.
Some other good examples demonstrating the importance of context would be
Oh fudge, my hair is on fire! and Dear me, did he kidnap the baby? (taken from
Lakoff 1973: 50). Here, we see a mismatch between the gravity of the situation
(hair being on fire, a baby being kidnapped) and the exclamations that are not
considered appropriate in such contexts (oh fudge, dear me).
An example of a phonetic phenomenon with a range of pragmatic functions
would be voice quality. Do you, for example, change something about your voice
depending on the context? Do you whisper if you want to signal secrecy? The
beauty of pragmatics, and probably the frustrating thing about it (depending on
your perspective), is that any aspect of language can potentially have a pragmatic
function of some sort, and contribute to the structure of the whole conversation.

1.3 The field of History of the English Language

As the name suggests, the field of History of the English Language is concerned
with the history of the English language. This includes any linguistic level you

11
1 Introduction to language variation and change and history

could think of, which makes a subject like this somewhat more challenging and
wide-ranging than those subjects which limit themselves to specific linguistic
levels. Studying the history of the English language (or any other language, for
that matter) is a holistic approach to understanding how languages work. And
that’s worth the effort.
Depending on which textbook and which article you pick, you will find dif-
ferent estimates as to when English was born, so to speak. Some authors give
the year 449, while others mention the 7th century CE, and yet others would go
back still further (see §7.1 for some discussion). If we decide to be on the safe
side and say that we’ll consider English to have begun in the 7th century, which
is the earliest that any texts written in English have been preserved, and stop
in 2022, which is when this book was published, we end up with an amazing
15 centuries. All the examples illustrating different types of variation presented
in this chapter are only the tip of the iceberg of the variation we could possibly
discuss when it comes to the 20th and the 21st centuries. We could very easily
have several courses on the topic, limiting ourselves just to these two centuries.
But you’re taking a course on the history of the English language, so it’s impor-
tant that we bear in mind that the amount of variation and number of changes to
cover is bound to be substantial, simply because of the time involved. And that’s
exactly why we have to be selective in which aspects from different periods of
the language we present to you in the following chapters. If we thereby leave out
some of your favourite linguistic phenomena, we’re sorry! But we hope to also
give you the tools to find out more about other changes in the history of English,
using your own initiative.
The history of the English language is typically divided into the following
periods:

• Old English OE 600–1150

• Middle English ME 1150–1500

• Early Modern English EModE 1500–1700

• Late(r) Modern English LModE 1700–1945

• Present Day English PDE 1945–present

The Old English and the Middle English periods can also be further divided into
Early Old English and Late Old English, and Early Middle English and Late Mid-
dle English periods. Right now, in this chapter, it’s not important to discuss when

12
 1.4 Why study History of the English Language?

exactly each period can be said to begin and end – we’ll take this on in the chap-
ters that follow. What is nevertheless important to realize is that there are multi-
ple ways in which we can “slice up” the history of English into these periods. For
example, we could use important historical events to mark the beginning/end
of the periods, such as the Norman Conquest (see Chapter 5). Or we could look
at the linguistic structure of the language across different centuries and suggest
that a new period starts because that’s when we can see a significant linguis-
tic difference in contrast to the previous centuries. However, neither of these
approaches is without its problems. Although sociocultural changes are often re-
flected in the language(s) of the societies in question, this can happen in various
ways, some of which are more subtle than others. Furthermore, we’ll also see
in various parts of this book that often linguistic change may take centuries; in
other words, linguistic change takes time and is not necessarily as sudden as we
may expect at first. In sum, any periodization of the history of a language is an
idealization, because languages don’t change overnight and resist being chopped
up into discrete historical chunks.
Another important thing to remember about the history of English is just how
interdisciplinary it can be. We approach the history of English from a linguistic
perspective; however, it necessarily overlaps with fields other than linguistics.
The most obviously overlapping field is that of history (which is in itself a fairly
broad field with many different subfields), but we will see that the subject can
be approached also from the perspectives of archaeology (Chapter 7), literature
(all chapters), and media studies (Chapter 2), among others. This aspect of the
history of English makes studying it a thrilling endeavour, though admittedly to
some of us perhaps also a somewhat terrifying one. But rest assured – no one
could possibly know everything that there is to know about the history of the
English language, including the teachers, and we certainly don’t expect you to!

1.4 Why study History of the English Language?

The most obvious reason to study the history of the English language is to under-
stand how English has changed ever since it came into existence. However, the
benefits of studying the history of the language are manifold and deeper than
simply gathering facts about how English has been changing and when. We re-
view six of those benefits in what follows.

13
1 Introduction to language variation and change and history

1.4.1 Variation, variation everywhere

It is astounding just how much linguistic variation surrounds us without us even
noticing, at least consciously. When we study a subject such as the history of En-
glish, we necessarily focus on how language changes. Change, however, cannot
happen without there being variation first. This means that approaching the his-
tory of any language includes approaching linguistic variation. Irrespective of
which language(s) we speak, studying the linguistic variation in this language
or these languages enables us to discover intriguing social and interpersonal pat-
terns that affect all of us, on a daily basis. We’ve seen plenty of examples relevant
for English in §1.3, but more examples are coming in Chapter 2, where we discuss
the main trends in how Present Day English has been changing. Where does all
this variation come from? How did it come about? What functions does it have?
What purpose? If you’re interested in these questions, then you’re also interested
in the history of the English language, and Language Variation and Change more
generally. Doing a course on the history of the English language will provide you
with some concrete examples linked to these questions.

1.4.2 Irregularities
Those of us who are not native speakers of English will know that English is full
of irregularities we are expected to tackle. For example, most verbs form their
past tense by adding -(e)d to their root: I love bumblebees. And when I was 7 I also
loved bumblebees. But, in standard English at least, we can’t say I sing only when
I’m alone, and when I was 7 I also singed only when I was alone.
We’re also expected to learn that although the plural of dog is dogs, the plural
of sheep is “simply” sheep. Or that whilst the noun use is pronounced as [juːs], the
verb to use is pronounced as [juːz]. And there’s more irregularities of this type. If
you intend to teach English as a foreign language (EFL), or English to speakers of
other languages (ESOL), your life will be full of facing these irregularities in one
way or another. Where do they come from? This is the sort of question we can’t
answer unless we delve into the study of the history of the English language!

1.4.3 Interpreting older literary and other texts written in English

Some of you may be interested primarily in history, which means you may need
to work with older documents, such as decrees and other legal works. If you

14
 1.4 Why study History of the English Language?

are interested in such legal documents, these could come down to us from dif-
ferent points in time (10th century, 15th century...). Here’s an example from a
15th-century private charter:7
(6) In þe weche thyng wytnes to thys presont chertar I haue put to my sele,
be thes wetnessys, &c.
Literally: In the which thing witness to this present charter I have put to
my seal, by these witnesses, etc.
This is probably not the easiest text to understand – in part because of the style
specific to legal documents, but in part no doubt because of the differences be-
tween 15th-century English and Present Day English. You may object – surely
someone must have translated all these older texts, so why bother with under-
standing 15th-century English? Indeed, translations do exist, but how much has
been changed and lost in translation? Unless you can tackle the original texts,
you will never know...
Or perhaps you are keen on literature, and/or perhaps you are interested in
gender studies. If this is the case, you may be interested in the Old English elegy
called Wulf and Eadwacer. Here’s just one line:8
(7) willað hy hine aþecgan gif he on þreat cymeð
Literally: will they him take if he on troop comes
Hmm, that’s probably even worse than the English from the 15th century. Again,
translations into the English of today do exist, but unless you can engage with
the original text, you won’t know how much has been altered in the process
of translation. For example, Faulkner’s Light in August uses a range of dialectal
features in the English original, which – to Míša’s horror – were completely lost
in the Czech translation she’d read. That’s not something you want to discover
after reading about 400 pages you intend to engage with from an analytical point
of view, albeit a primarily literary one.
Taking a basic introduction to the history of the English language will en-
able you to engage with texts written in older forms of the language, even if
your primary interests lie in areas other than linguistics. The history of the En-
glish language can therefore provide you with a useful tool even if you’re not
linguistically-oriented.
7
This extract is taken from the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse, 2006, https://quod.
lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=cme;cc=cme;view=toc;idno=AJD3529.0001.001
8
This extract is taken from The Exeter Book, London, Exeter Cathedral Library, MS 3501, Wulf
and Eadwacer, 100v-101r https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/exeter-book. You can find the full
text in §4.

15
1 Introduction to language variation and change and history

1.4.4 The social life of language

William Labov is often considered the founding father of sociolinguistics (see
Koerner 1991 for the importance of Labov’s work within LVC) and yet he re-
fused to use the term sociolinguistics for a long time (see for example Chambers
2017). This is because, for Labov, language is very much a social thing: how can
we ever reach a full understanding of how language works and functions if we
do not consider social factors? As long as languages are spoken and written by
living human beings, there will be variation which reflects at least some of the
social variation of the speakers involved. This is not to say that linguistic phe-
nomena are always only affected by social aspects of our lives – not at all. But
the social aspects of our lives do play an important role. Let’s think of our He
love bumblebees example from above.
In Cajun Vernacular English (spoken in Louisiana), age and education level af-
fect the frequency at which 3rd-person singular -s applies (Dubois & Horvath
2003: 39), i.e. how frequently we actually find it where it occurs in standard
Englishes. This grammatical morpheme is reported to be absent in 32% of the
speakers studied by Dubois & Horvath (2003: 42) on average, whereas this ab-
sence reaches only 14% in Devon English (2003: 42). Region is therefore another
factor which affects variants in more and less subtle ways. Importantly, in these
cases, we’re not dealing with either-or differences in the sense that one group
of individuals either uses a certain variant all the time or never does. What’s
typical of variation around us is just how gradient it often is. Thus, variation is
indeed everywhere, but it may manifest itself in fairly subtle ways. Social aspects
of speakers can therefore correlate with linguistic variation.
Labov (2010: 212 and 223) presents us with an example of how ideological dis-
agreement may possibly motivate why the vowel system of the linguistic Inland
North in the USA (something we will return to in Chapter 2) has been developing
differently from that of the West Midlands. He shows that the residents of the
Inland North (as opposed to those from North and Midwest) were responsible
for most of the votes for John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, in
2004 – and this is considered to reflect the political differences between Ameri-
cans from the Inland North and the Midwest, similarly to the linguistic variation
found in their vowel systems.

16
 1.4 Why study History of the English Language?

William Labov

The importance of the American linguist William Labov (1927–) can’t be

overstated. Labov has shown that there is order in variation, i.e. that varia-
tion in language is not haphazard. He has also made a persuasive case that
speakers of non-standard varieties of English do not have slower learn-
ing abilities than those of standard English (in the 20th and 21st centuries
this has been particularly important for the African American community,
but of course is also applicable much more widely). Labov has also pro-
posed new methodological practices, aiming to reflect different degrees
of attention the speakers pay to speech when observed. You can listen to
Labov’s lecture titled A life of learning: six people I have learned from here:
https://vimeo.com/70455840

Understanding just how exactly social factors interact with linguistic phenom-
ena is something which is of interest to those who enjoy linguistics as well as
history, society, and culture. The linguistically-minded will be interested in gen-
eral principles of language variation and change. The sociohistorically-minded
can use certain linguistic variants and changes as a tool rather than a primary ob-
ject of interest. We will see many examples of linguistic changes linked to social
changes throughout the history of the English language, in each of its periods,
as we move backwards in time in the remaining chapters of this book.

1.4.5 Different linguistic levels can interact

Different linguistic levels can interact! Indeed, you’ve seen some evidence thereof
when we had a look at examples that don’t straightforwardly fall within a sin-
gle level of language. Interactions between different linguistic levels can be seen
rather nicely through the lens of language change. But let’s see an example which
is really relevant for all the linguistic levels:

(8) a. I am going to town later today.

b. I am going to go to town later today.
c. I’m going to go to town later today.
d. I’m gonna go to town later today.

17
1 Introduction to language variation and change and history

e. I’m going to meditate later today.

f. I’m gonna meditate later today.
g. I’ma meditate later today.

Much could be said about which linguistic levels interact with which and how
exactly here. But let’s discuss only the most obvious interactions. We can imag-
ine that as one speaks faster in for example conversation with friends rather than
when reading these sentences out loud from this page, we may not pronounce
every single sound of am going to (You can also think of I don’t know being pro-
nounced as [aɪdənəʊ] ‘I dunno’ rather than [aɪ dəʊnt nəʊ]). Many would most
likely say am gonna, or some such. This is about sounds, but not only – what
happened to the to? What happened to the -ing morpheme? And do all of these
different forms mean the same? If you think about it, although we can say I’m
gonna meditate (at some point in future), we can’t say I’m gonna town (meaning
‘I’m going to town’). This is because there are actually two GO verbs in English,
pronounced in a very similar way. One of these verbs indicates motion, whilst
the other one refers to a future event – they are semantically different, and this is
also reflected in their pronunciation. Historically, the future GO comes from the
motion GO, something we’ll discuss in Chapter 3. This is an example of gram-
maticalization – the historical process by which lexical words (like the GO
of motion) become grammatical, closed-class words (like the semi-modal gonna),
and free words become bound morphemes (often through an intermediate clitic
stage). Grammaticalization is very common in language change in general (see
Hopper & Traugott 2003) and in the history of English in particular, and we’ll
see many examples throughout the book.

1.4.6 Language change is inevitable (and perfectly normal)

You may have come across the opinion that language change is bad – the way
teenagers speak these days, and so on. However, language change is not only per-
fectly normal but actually inevitable. This is because social differences within
communities are also inevitable, however subtle, and language changes when-
ever society changes. As we will see in Chapters 3 and 4, the variety of language
which gets to be established as the standard one within the relevant commu-
nity has nothing to do with the linguistic properties of such varieties. What
matters in such cases is the hard-to-predict result of a number of intertwined
socio-historical events. We can discuss Standard British English and Standard
American English today, but there were times when the notion of a (standard)
variety of American English was rather novel. Today many dialects of English

18
 1.5 Final note

are deemed “incorrect”, simply because they diverge from the dialects that have
happened to “make it” into the social elite of standard dialects. But it is important
to realize that standard Englishes are just some of the many different dialects of
English (see Trudgill 1999). A history of English is a history of all of these vari-
eties, not just standard Englishes.
Sometimes, we’re rather sad to say, discrimination and bullying can take place
depending on one’s native dialect (and often other characteristics). The Accen-
tism Project (Carrie and Drummond) is full of testimonials of linguistic discrim-
ination from a range of users of English.9 The work of linguists doing research
within the field of LVC can help communities: for instance, Labov (1966) has
demonstrated that, contrary to the opinions of the time, African American En-
glish is governed by linguistic rules, just like any other variety of English (such
as Standard American English), and should not be considered a sign of lower
intelligence and slower learning.
All varieties of English are subject to variation and change. Which variety
happens to be selected as the standard one is similarly subject to change too.
This is something we will see as we look into the history of the English language
in more detail across the centuries (Chapters 3–6, especially §4.1.1).

1.5 Final note

We hope you’ll find that the history of the English language is an intriguing
subject to study and that you’ll join us on this fascinating ride. The exercises
below will further help you reflect on the topics discussed in this chapter.

9
For more, go to the project’s webpage: https://accentism.org/. For even more, Paterson (2009)
is an accessible interview with the project’s founders.

19
1 Introduction to language variation and change and history

Suggested exercises

E.1 The Sower and the Seed

The Christian Bible is a particularly useful text for the study of language
change, because it’s been translated so many times into so many different
languages over the centuries. Below are four versions of the Parable of
the Sower and the Seed (Matthew 13, verses 3–4), from different points in
time, across a thousand years of the history of English.
• A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some
fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up.
(New International Version, 1973)
• Behold, a sower went forth to sow; And when he sowed, some seeds fell
by the way side, and the fowls came and devoured them up.
(King James version, 1611)
• Lo! he that sowith, yede out to sowe his seed. And while he sowith,
summe seedis felden bisidis the weie, and briddis of the eir camen,
and eeten hem.
(Wycliffe version, c. 1395)
• Soþlice ut eode se sædere hys sæd to sawenne and þa þa he seow. sume
hig feollon wiþ weg. and fuglas comun and æton þa;
(West Saxon Gospels, c. 990)

The fourth and oldest version will probably be difficult for you to read
right now. But don’t worry – we’ll get there by Chapter 6! For now, try
to identify differences between the texts in terms of each of the linguistic
levels we’ve discussed in this chapter:
• Phonetics & phonology
(hint: here you’ll need to make an educated guess, based on spelling)
• Morphology (hint: look at the verbs in the Wycliffe version!)
• Syntax
(hint: what’s different about the clause “As he was scattering the

20
 Suggested exercises

seed” in the New International Version that isn’t found in any of

the earlier versions?)

• Lexicon

• Pragmatics/discourse

E.2 Jabberwocky

Here are extracts from Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky (1871):

’Twas brillig and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves
And the mome raths outgrabe.
‘Beware the Jabberwock my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!’
And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

For each of the words in bold, answer the following questions:

1. What word class (e.g. adjective, noun, verb...) would you suggest
each of the words belongs to and why?

2. Where the word has an affix (e.g. -ed), can you think of any other
English words that also have this affix?

3. Almost half of the words in the first stanza are not English words
(or weren’t when Lewis Carroll wrote them). Does that mean the
poem is still written in English? Explain your answer.

21
1 Introduction to language variation and change and history

Tip for teachers: Question 3 can be used for a written exercise.

Tip for teachers: You could also use the following question if your students
are familiar with open and closed classes: Do the words in bold belong to
closed or open classes?

Acknowledgement: The questions are adopted and adapted from Johanna

Wood’s Jabberwocky exercise, passed down to us in 2017.

E.3 Practice with trees

Look at the following tree.

IP

Everyone I′

I VP

should V bumblebees

appreciate
Try to answer the following questions based on the terms and notions
introduced in §1.2.3.
1. What word or phrase is in the specifier of IP?
2. What word or phrase is in the complement of VP?
3. What word or phrase is in the head of IP?
4. What word or phrase is in the complement of IP?
5. What is the mother of I′ ?

22
 Suggested exercises

6. What are the daughters of I′ ?

7. What is the sister of the object bumblebees?

E.4 Variation at which linguistic level?

Look at the following sentences, and provide what you think are their
Standard English equivalents (where applicable). Then answer the ques-
tions that follow the examples.
A. So from where do you come from? [Aberystwyth, mid Wales]

B. Yes, it has changed, but I still do come across it. [Aberystwyth, mid
Wales]

C. I dunno, people kind of associate Newcastle wi like sort of rougher

people sort of thing, you know. [Berwick-upon-Tweed]

D. How would I change the world? That’s a simple question. [Aberyst-

wyth, mid Wales]

E. In the seventies when I was in school, I was sort of you know laughed
upon. [Aberystwyth, mid Wales]

F. I divvent know nowt else you know. [Tyneside]

G. They said I was too clever, they went and jumped us two classes, and
I was never no good after that. [Tyneside]

H. So they hadn’t any time for anyone getting on in years. [Tyneside]

I. A photo Míša took at the train station in Newcastle, Tyneside, in

2016:

23
1 Introduction to language variation and change and history

1. Are there any sentences which contain no non-standard features?

Which ones?

2. What are the non-standard features found in the other sentences?

3. Which linguistic level (e.g. phonetics & phonology, syntax...) do

these features belong to, would you say?

4. Are the non-standard features restricted by region, formality, or

possibly anything else?

The sentences are taken from Beal & Corrigan (2005), Pichler & Levey
(2010), and Míša’s corpus of English recorded in Aberystwyth, Wales.a

Acknowledgement: This exercise was inspired by some of Heike Pichler’s

materials from her Language across Space course at Newcastle University
(2014, 2016).
a
Now available here: https://osf.io/2vpgr/, through combined efforts with Kamil
Kaźmierski.

24
 Suggested exercises

E.5 Whence and w(h)ither variation?

Think about some examples of language variation in English that

you have noticed (e.g. when watching films in English, in your
classes, when reading this book or some other books, or when speaking
with friends and family).
A. Why do you think this variation exists?

B. Is it possible to prevent this variation from happening? Why (not)?

Note that these are open-ended questions and many different answers
are reasonable.

Tip for students: If you want to follow up on these topics beyond the
seminar discussion, read Aitchison (2012: chapter 1).

Tip for teachers: This exercise can be used as a written exercise.

E.6 Claims about linguistic variation

Imagine a situation in which someone above 60 years of age com-

plains to a friend about how the youngsters today don’t know how
to speak English properly. Indeed, it seems that English is going to the
dogs...
Within 300 words, explain how you would establish whether this
claim is or isn’t correct. More specifically, introduce the claim tested,
then suggest the types of evidence you would use. Be critical of the types
of evidence available and their advantages and disadvantages.

Tip for teachers: Using group blog entries or wikis for this assignment
as well as a reasonable deadline is a good idea – it saves time for both

25
1 Introduction to language variation and change and history

the students and you, and the deadline will allow you to go through the
contributions prior to the seminar.

Tip for teachers: Add a condition of the students having to use at least
1 source (or more) to back up their claims, using the reference style of
your department.

Recommended further reading

Is your linguistic terminology a bit rusty? You can find some key terms
in our glossary. Beyond that, David Crystal’s Dictionary of Linguistics and
Phonetics (2003a) is an excellent rust remover. The dictionary is also useful
for more advanced terms. Remember that there’s no shame in not recog-
nizing a technical term at first sight – it’s just part of the learning process.
Furthermore, different readers of this textbook come from different aca-
demic backgrounds, and terms that may seem basic to some may really
not be basic for others.
If you would like to read a very gentle introduction to sociolinguistics,
then Peter Trudgill’s Sociolinguistics: An Introduction to Language and So-
ciety (2009) may be just the thing for you, and you can follow up on this
one with Trousdale’s (2010) An Introduction to English Sociolinguistics. If
you are interested in societal aspects of language, publications within the
field of sociology of language will be of interest to you. See e.g. Fishman
(1972).
Trudgill’s (1999) paper on standard English elaborates on why standard
English is just one of many different varieties of English.
A more advanced reading on the theory of language change is the pa-
per written by Weinreich et al. (1968), referred to in the first part of this
chapter. Other books by Labov will provide you with much more detailed
information.
If you wanted something more personal related to why anyone would

26
 Suggested exercises

decide to work within LVC, you can read the short paper by Hejná (2018b),
written specifically for students.
There are many introductory textbooks available on the core areas of
linguistics, if you’d like to delve further into one of these areas. Here are
some that we particularly recommend for beginners:
• Phonetics: Ladefoged & Johnson (2014)

• Phonology: Gussenhoven & Jacobs (2011)

• Morphology: Haspelmath & Sims (2010)

• Syntax: Carnie (2013)

• Semantics and pragmatics: Kroeger (2018)

• Conversation Analysis: Liddicoat (2007)

• Discourse Analysis: Gee (2014)

27
2 Change in English today
2.1 History and context
2.1.1 What is English?
In the previous chapter, we saw that variation is ubiquitous. We also noted that
it’s the prerequisite for language change, although we didn’t elaborate. Let’s elab-
orate a little bit now: there can’t be language change without there being lan-
guage variation first. Throughout its history, English has changed considerably,
and it has certainly been changing in the last two centuries as well. Before we
plunge into the discussion of the changes affecting English recently, we need to
answer two questions. What do we mean by English today? And what do we
mean by English?
The answers to the first question may vary depending on who you ask, but for
our purposes we will define the English of today, or Present Day English (PDE),
as starting in 1945 and continuing until, well, today! Why 1945 and not, say 1988,
or 2000? The main reason is our decision to follow the time division proposed
by Beal (2004) for Late(r) Modern English (see Chapter 3), which she defines as
ending in 1945. Our decision is therefore to a large extent a conventional one.
But whether we pick 1945 or 1988, from the point of view of the structure of
the language in the 20th and the 21st centuries, does not make that much of a
difference. But choose a starting point of some sort we must, for practical reasons,
and we choose 1945, the end of the Second World War.
The other question is, however, perhaps unexpectedly, trickier – how do we
define English? What is English? This can be answered in a very wide range of
ways. Some of us may think of standard English – but then there is no one stan-
dard global English; instead, there are several local standards (such as Standard
Southern British English, Singapore English, Scottish Standard English, General
American, etc.). Furthermore, restricting ourselves to standard varieties of En-
glish would be unsatisfactory – most speakers of English (including most non-
native speakers of English) don’t speak a standard variety of English, and those
who do arguably do not do so all the time. Does that mean they don’t speak En-
glish? Of course not. They just speak a variety other than those that happened to
end up being the ones officially recognized as standard. And should we only in-
clude L1 standard and non-standard varieties of English in what we mean when
2 Change in English today

we say the English language? As Míša was writing this chapter, she was writ-
ing it in (more or less) standard English, but English is not her mother tongue.
Would we therefore conclude this chapter is not written in English? Of course
not. There are now more non-native than native speakers of English, who use
English for a variety of purposes: when travelling, in education, for entertain-
ment, etc. (Crystal 2003b: 68). Both standard and non-standard varieties are part
of English, and so are both native and non-native varieties. As a result, it’s pos-
sible to find astoundingly diverse examples of English, but fairly often, we can
also find a lot of homogeneity (or similarity) across the globe. Have a look for
yourself:

• But here, ja, I can get a job, but there are too much challenges. It’s like, I
don’t know maybe if it’s the area I’m staying or is it around, or is — it’s
about South Africa.
(Zimbabwe English; from IDEA1 )

• Yeah, I’m gonna take my horse to the old town road. I’m gonna ride ‘til I
can’t no more. (...) I been in the valley. You ain’t been up off the porch, now.
Can’t nobody tell me nothing. You can’t tell me nothing.
(American English, Lil Nas X, Old Town Road)

• I will repair tomorrow.

(Mongolian English; Cohen 2005: 215)

• I like very much. I been out from Miami three times. I been Orlando, and,
ah, I been ‘94 in San Francisco to a wor, a World Cup. And most of my time
is spent in Miami and, and around Miami. My hobbies is, I play soccer, ah,
tennis and go to the beach, listen nice music, eat good food and meet nice
girls.
(Brazilian English; from IDEA2 )

• First time, after love, in each other’s arms; in the mirror chamber of our
mental and physical nudity, so frail, so delicate; so reluctantly we breathe,
lest we break the glass idols.
(Pakistani English; excerpt from First love, Riaz3 )

• he’s sitting on a chair this is him like he’s drunk or something

(Multicultural London English; Cheshire et al. 2011: 174)
1
https://www.dialectsarchive.com/zimbabwe-6.
2
https://www.dialectsarchive.com/brazil-4.
3
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-46362729.

30
 2.1 History and context

More examples for you to consider are found in §1, and you’re also welcome to
go back to those in Chapter 1.

Pidgins and creoles

For some varieties, called pidgins and creoles, there is a debate regard-
ing whether they can or should fall within what we call the English lan-
guage. Pidgins are usually defined as a form of language with no native
speakers, arising in language contact situations and functioning as a lin-
gua franca (Trudgill 2003: 103). Imagine this: three monolingual speakers
need to take the same taxi to get to different places and have different
amounts of money to spend. The first speaker only speaks Portuguese.
The second speaker can only speak Chinese. And the third speaker only
speaks Dusun (an Austronesian language spoken in Borneo). Clearly, they
cannot understand each other’s mother tongues. On top of this, imagine
these speakers have to rely on a taxi driver who only speaks one of the
Mongolic languages (or several – that wouldn’t really help!). The situa-
tion doesn’t actually have to be as diverse as this. Do you know anyone
who tried to use, say, English, on their holiday (without being able to
speak it well) with someone who can’t speak English very well either?
Pidgins develop in contexts of this type, but the contexts have to come
about on a regular basis. In history, the typical contexts in which pidgins
arise have been those of trade, migration, and, sadly, slavery. According to
some authors, pidgins by definition don’t have any native speakers, and
it is sometimes claimed that they tend to have less complex structures.
However, if speakers of pidgins have children and those children acquire
the pidgin as their mother tongue, they will add new and expanded struc-
tural possibilities to the former “pidgin”, and then we refer to these forms
of language as creoles, not pidgins. The debate is ongoing, because both
sociohistorical and linguistic factors play a role in deciding whether a par-
ticular variety is a pidgin or a creole, and different linguists take different
stances on how to weigh the evidence. See e.g. Velupillai (2015) for a good
introduction to pidgins and creoles.

31
2 Change in English today

We could think of multiple reasons behind diversity found in varieties of English.

At the same time, however, we could also think of reasons behind homogene-
ity found across varieties of the language. Some of the general differences most
likely come down to the individual histories of the speakers of different varieties
of English. In all cases, English became a language spoken in regions in which
other languages had existed, including Britain (yes, indeed, stay tuned for what’s
coming in Chapter 7). These local languages have often influenced the English
spoken in the area. Another general reason is that those who brought English to
many areas of the world did not necessarily bring standard English with them,
nor did they bring English which was necessarily uniform across all the newcom-
ers (see Chapters 3 and 4 in particular).
It is tempting to speculate that amongst the reasons behind the similarities
found across varieties of contemporary English may be the advent of a range of
digital media (see the rigorous study by Stuart-Smith, Pryce, et al. 2013, but also
for instance Androutsopoulos 2013, Tagliamonte 2014, and Tagliamonte & Denis
2008), generalization of compulsory education, and the increasing ease of travel-
ling opportunities (see also Beal 2004: Chapter 1, for a similar discussion related
to Late(r) Modern English). Although we could think of these as possible causes
of homogeneity, they could also be thought of as causes of further diversifica-
tion. But most importantly, researchers looking into this topic have found that
the technological innovations either do not lead to significant language change
or that such a change is difficult to establish in the first place (e.g. Androutsopou-
los 2013, Stuart-Smith, Pryce, et al. 2013, Tagliamonte 2014, Trudgill 2014).
We will now focus on specific varieties of English and touch upon some of the
socio-historical sources of linguistic variation and homogeneity for these vari-
eties. The varieties include English (or Englishes) in Britain and Ireland (§2.1.2),
English(es) in North America (§2.1.3), English(es) in Australia and New Zealand
(§2.1.4), and English(es) in India and South Africa (§2.1.5).4 After introducing
some of these varieties, we then proceed to discuss general changes affecting
English in a number of regions of the globe in the remainder of the chapter. Tak-
ing all these sections together, we will realize that there are indeed reasons for
both linguistic diversity and linguistic homogeneity.
4
Our selection of these varieties is driven by two reasons. Firstly, it is not possible to give an
overview of all of the varieties of English that exist. If you are interested in detailed overviews,
see some of the sources provided in Recommended further reading. Secondly, English has been
spoken the longest in Britain, which is why we focus on British English. The next candidate in
terms of age is North America. Australia, New Zealand, India, and South Africa then represent
areas with English varieties that are relatively young. Furthermore, these areas span several
continents, which enables us to consider global tendencies in the changes of English of today
as well as more local tendencies specific to some varieties of the language.

32
 2.1 History and context

2.1.2 English in Britain and Ireland

The English language came into existence in Britain and has therefore had its
longest history there (see Chapter 7 for just how this formation came about). En-
glish has come a long way since its birth, now being spoken as a first language
on a global basis, including Africa (e.g. South Africa), Asia (e.g. Singapore), Aus-
tralia, Europe (Ireland and the UK), North America (Canada and the US), and
New Zealand. In addition, it is recognized as an official language in a number
of countries (e.g. Belize, Guyana, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, Eswatini, Tanza-
nia, Zambia). English is also taught widely as a foreign language. Thus, since its
rather modest beginnings, due to historical events such as the formation of the
British Empire and the rise of the US as a superpower over the past two centuries,
English is now fairly widespread across the globe.
Limiting ourselves to Britain and Ire-
land here, although English is about 15
centuries old (Chapter 7), it is not equally
old everywhere. The first English speak-
ers in Ireland that we know of date back
to the 12th century; however, it was not
until the 16th and the 17th centuries when
English was introduced rather more inva-
sively into Ireland with the Plantations5
(Hickey 1993). Today, Irish English is the
mother tongue of most inhabitants of the
isle of Ireland, with very few native speak-
ers of Irish (a Celtic language) left. In
a similar way, in Scotland, English be-
came the official written language in the
18th century, at the point at which Scot-
land and England had come under the
rule of a single parliament and a single Figure 2.1: A zebra-crossing sign in
Aberystwyth, Wales, UK (taken by Míša
monarch (Wells 1982c: 394). Relatively few in 2014)
native speakers of Scottish Gaelic – an-
other Celtic language – are to be found today (e.g. Nance 2013). Finally, the
anglicization of Wales took a jump in the 16th century with the Acts of Union
(Williams 1990). The Welsh language has seen a decline in the number of native
speakers; nonetheless, Welsh seems to be the strongest of the Celtic languages
5
Plantations refer to instances of confiscation of land in Ireland initiated by the English govern-
ment. This is one example of colonialism.

33
2 Change in English today

spoken in Britain and Ireland today. It is important to mention the Celtic lan-
guages in Britain and Ireland here, because they have influenced the respective
varieties of English spoken on these isles as we know them today, in different
ways (see e.g. Filppula et al. 2008 and Hickey 2012 as well as §6.1.2 of this book),
and the use of these languages is imbued with political significance as well. See
Figure 2.1, showing Welsh and English.
However, the 20th and the 21st centuries have brought further important fac-
tors to consider regarding today’s linguistic variation in Britain and Ireland. There
are now numerous places in Britain and Ireland with contemporary multicul-
tural, multiethnic, and often multilingual populations.6 Finally, with the political
consequences of Brexit playing out at the time of writing, it remains to be seen
whether this may have linguistic consequences, such as (further) diversification
in English spoken in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland in particular.

2.1.3 English in North America

Together with Ireland, Wales, and Scotland, North America can be considered
the first colonies and dominions of England, with the beginnings of American
English ultimately going back to the first settlers in 1607, when Jamestown was
founded. The United States of America were also the first to claim their indepen-
dence in 1776, with a strong sense of national identity, which went hand in hand
with linguistic national identity as well (more on this is coming in Chapter 3).
The Dominion of Canada became self-governing later, in 1867.
The history of American English could certainly not be told without mention
of the high degree of language contact, as well as contact between various di-
alects of English (Chapter 3). To begin with, North America had already been
populated by the time English speakers arrived, and its inhabitants – the Indige-
nous peoples of the Americas – spoke a vast array of languages belonging to sev-
eral language families. Furthermore, English speakers were not the only settlers,
nor were they the only incomers.7 Today, the US includes ethnic minorities such
as Hispanic and Latino Americans and Asian Americans, as it has throughout its
history, and of course the largest “minority” is presented by African Americans.
Thus, a range of English varieties is to be found in the US (e.g. Wells 1982b, Wol-
fram & Schilling-Estes 2015), and more recently researchers have established that
6
See for example the Multilingual Manchester project website: http://mlm.humanities.
manchester.ac.uk/.
7
As we will see in Chapter 7, English, French, Russian, and Spanish – some of the settler-colonial
languages of the modern period – all belong to just one language family. On the varieties
spoken in North America, often known as heritage languages, see for example the website of
the Alliance for the Advancement of Heritage languages here: http://www.cal.org/heritage/.

34
 2.1 History and context

there is increasing linguistic diversity in Canadian English as well, despite the

fact that Canadian English is usually considered fairly homogeneous (Cheshire
& Hardwick 1986, Clarke 2010, Clarke et al. 1995).

2.1.4 English in Australia and New Zealand

The origins of Australian English and New Zealand English go back to 1788 and
to 1840, respectively. Note that these two dates refer to times after the American
Independence, and at this point a clearly distinct set of varieties of American En-
glish (as compared to British English) had already emerged. Australian English
and New Zealand English are thus relatively “young” varieties of English. Aus-
tralia became independent in 1901 and New Zealand in 1907. As with all the other
varieties of English discussed so far, what would grow into Australian English
and New Zealand English did not begin in a linguistic vacuum. To begin with, the
first settlers had brought their own dialects, which would later give rise to what
we now know as Australian English and New Zealand English (see Chapter 3 for
more on this). Secondly, Australia and New Zealand were already inhabited by
speakers of a range of Australian Aboriginal languages and Maori.8
Over the years, Australian and New Zealand English have emerged as vari-
eties of English clearly distinguishable from other varieties, although of course
similarities also exist, as we will see in the rest of this chapter. Naturally, the
presence of languages other than English in both Australia and New Zealand
has contributed to the linguistic diversity found in Australian English and New
Zealand English (e.g. Butcher 2008, D’Arcy 2010, Eisikovits 1996, Louro 2013).

2.1.5 English in India and South Africa

One of the reasons to mention Indian English and South African English in this
chapter (rather than some other varieties that are equally interesting and impor-
tant) is that they represent examples of English as an official language introduced
as a result of British imperialism, without being adopted as the mother tongue by
the majority of the population. Thus, the speakers of the local languages have for
the most part resisted the shift to English (Mesthrie 2015). Although the British
Empire was dissolved, together with the examples discussed in §§2.1.2–2.1.4, both
Indian English and South African English stand to show that the presence of the

8
There is an extensive amount of work on the emergence of New Zealand English and the mix-
ing of English dialects brought to a single place by different groups of settlers. See for example
the website of The Origins of New Zealand English Project here: https://www.canterbury.ac.
nz/nzilbb/research/onze/.

35
2 Change in English today

Empire has nonetheless had significant effects on the sociolinguistic landscapes

of the respective areas.
English was introduced into India in 1602, with the formation of the English
East India Company (British East India Company). The Company’s early activ-
ities involved exploitative trading practices, and these subsequently developed
into military engagements and outright conquest: see Dalrymple (2019). India
gained independence from the UK fairly recently, in 1947. The beginnings of
South African English lie in 1795. South Africa gained its nominal independence
in 1910 and full independence in 1931. The downfall of the British Empire goes
hand in hand with local independence, which is reflected in the linguistic diver-
sity that tends to be more pronounced at such times. In the case of India, we find
again that a vast range of languages had been spoken in the region before the
arrival of the English language, falling within a number of different language
families, e.g. Austroasiatic, Dravidian, Indo-European (see Chapter 7), Munda,
and others. A high degree of language contact of various types has contributed
to the variation we find in Indian English (e.g. Sailaja 2012, Wells 1982b). Turning
to South Africa, with a range of Bantu and other indigenous African languages as
well as another Indo-European language (Afrikaans) present in the region, it is
not surprising that South African English represents a variety of English sociolin-
guistically distinct from other English varieties and involves a range of locally
relevant varieties as well (e.g. Mesthrie 2015 and the references therein).
Standard native Englishes as we know them today once emerged and were
further shaped by contact with languages other than English (more in Chapters
5, 6, and 7).

Language, dialect, or variety?

How can one tell whether a certain form of language is a dialect or a

language in its own right? This is no easy task to resolve. Typically, the
decision is made using political rather than linguistic criteria. This would
apply to languages such as Czech and Slovak: Czech and Slovak are mu-
tually intelligible and a Czech and a Slovak can easily communicate with-
out having to learn each other’s language. Awareness that the two are
separate languages has increased dramatically since the division of the
20th-century state of Czechoslovakia into two countries in 1993. On the

36
 2.1 History and context

other hand, and perhaps more intuitively, languages can show differences
in their linguistic structures. Thus, a sentence such as Dwi’n hedfan yn yr
awyr (Welsh), Létám ve vzduchu (Czech), and I’m flying in the air (English)
are sufficiently different for us to conclude that these must be different
languages. However, the boundaries are not always so clear. That’s be-
cause, historically, dialects may develop into distinct languages, so there
is a whole cline of possibilities. You’ll see more on this in Chapter 7. Be-
cause there are two sets of criteria to use, political criteria and linguistic
criteria, but also because the term dialect may be associated with negative
connotations in lay use, linguists often resort to the term variety instead.
This enables us to avoid making (sometimes impossible) decisions and
any negative connotations.

2.1.6 Studying variation in contemporary English

Those of us interested in studying language variation and change in Present Day
English are very lucky indeed – we have linguistic evidence everywhere we turn,
in a number of digitalized forms as well as on paper, the former of which encom-
pass platforms as diverse as films, the radio, instant messaging logs, discussion
forums, podcasts, etc. We can easily analyse English used in a vast array of con-
texts, which is a luxury we don’t have when studying the older periods of the
language. It is fairly easy to get very specific types of evidence since there are
plenty of users of English around us – something that cannot be said of, say,
English of the 13th century (that is, unless you have the powers of necromancy
or time travel). This ease of access to linguistic evidence in Present Day English
is very lucky for us indeed. According to the so-called Uniformitarian Principle
(Labov 1994: 21–24), the linguistic processes observable today should also be as-
sumed to apply in the past, and the other way round. The present can therefore
be used to shed light on the past, and vice versa. With more data available for
Present Day English and with more advanced technology to record such data,
analysing Present Day English can be of great use for understanding the past.
Present Day English has seen, and continues to see, a great number of changes
on all linguistic levels. Some of these changes are locally restricted, as we would
expect considering the specific historical contexts of the individual regions in
which English is used. However, in what follows, we mainly focus on changes
that are more global in their nature, occasionally bringing attention to some more
local aspects as well.

37
2 Change in English today

2.2 Sounds
Let’s first remind ourselves of one of the messages from Chapter 1: letters are
not sounds. Because of the fairly widespread standard spelling (i.e. letters!) and
standardized education, looking at how speakers of a range of varieties write is
not necessarily the most thrilling thing to do if we’re interested in the sounds of
Present Day English varieties and how they differ. For that, we’ll have to look
at how people speak, and that takes us to phonemes and their phonetic realiza-
tions. Let’s remember that phonemes are units of sounds that are contrastive.
This means that if we replace /t/ with /d/ in English, as in tick /tɪk/, we’ll get
a rather different word (or two words, actually: Dick and dick /dɪk/). /t/ and /d/
are two phonemes because, if we replace one with the other, this changes the
meaning of the word. Allophones, on the other hand, are by definition not con-
trastive. In some varieties of English, /k/ (just like /t/, and also /p/) can be pre-
glottalized (e.g. Wells 1982c), which means that there is a bit of a sound like that
we know from glottalling (butter [bʌʔə]), except that we also get the [k] sound
itself, leading to [tɪʔk]. Whether we pronounce tick as [tɪk] or [tɪʔk] does not lead
to a change of the meaning of the word.9 Allophonic variation is found across
all varieties of English.
What’s important to realize when it comes to allophones is that we can predict
where we find any given allophone. Thus, we can predict that a pre-glottalized
/k/ or /t/ is not found word-initially (as in can) in the vast majority of English
varieties. We can also predict that a pre-glottalized /k/ or /t/ is more likely to
occur in the speech of some speakers than others, based on a range of different
social factors (e.g. Schleef 2013, Smith & Holmes-Elliott 2017). At some point in
the history of English, the plosives /p/, /t/, and /k/ started being pronounced as
pre-glottalized. This illustrates one of the characteristics of sound change (and
most linguistic variation): it is regular. This means that any given sound change
happens in a particular linguistic context, so all words that happen to contain that
context are affected by this sound change.10 If a variety of English develops pre-
glottalization in non-initial /t/, we can fairly safely expect to find a pre-glottalized
/t/ in all words that have a /t/ which is not in a word-initial context (so in words
9
Our discussion of allophony is somewhat simplified. If you want to learn more, see Chapter 8
in Davenport & Hannahs (2013) for more details. If you’d like something advanced about types
of phonemic contrasts and allophony, see Hall (2009).
10
Although we do need to note that the role of word-frequency effects on phonetic variants had
been hotly debated since before the field of sociolinguistics was born (see Labov 1981 for the so-
called Neogrammarian Controversy). What we mean by word-frequency effects is, for example,
a scenario in which low frequency words (words we don’t use particularly often) are less prone
to include the new variant, even though they do contain the appropriate environment.

38
 2.2 Sounds

such as spit, bitter and pant, for instance, but not in words such as Tom, at least
not in most varieties of English).
We will now look in more detail at four sound changes found in Present Day
English: glottalling, the Northern Cities Shift (and briefly other similar vowel
shifts), Uptalk or High Rising Terminals (HRTs), and vocal fry or creaky phona-
tion. All of these are regular sound changes in the sense just introduced.

2.2.1 Glottalling
Glottalling has already been mentioned both in Chapter 1 and in this chapter. In
the glottalling varieties of English, most frequently /t/ (rather than /p/ and /k/)
would be realized as a glottal stop of some type ([ʔ]), leading to the words cup
and butter being pronounced as [kʌʔ] and [bʌʔə] rather than [kʌp] and [bʌtə],
for example. If you’d like to listen to some examples, use a browser to find e.g.
the song P.O.W.A. by M.I.A., and listen to words such as cut, not, better, and get-
ting. The specific rules governing when glottalling happens may differ from one
variety of English to another (thus demonstrating local tendencies and hetero-
geneity), but in each variety of English the contexts in which we find glottalling,
and the frequency at which we find it, can be predicted by social factors as well
as language-internal, structural factors (see e.g. Schleef 2013, Smith & Holmes-
Elliott 2017).
Glottalling is assumed to have started in Edinburgh and, independently of that,
also in London, and generally affects /t/ which is not word-initial. No one quite
knows when exactly glottalling was introduced into these two varieties of En-
glish; however, estimates refer to the latter half of the 19th century (Beal 2004:
208–209, and Schleef 2013 and the reference therein). It seems that the spread
of glottalling in Britain took place primarily throughout the 20th century and
continues taking place today. Although glottalling is a well-known property of
varieties of English spoken in Britain, recent reports indicate that it is also found
in varieties such as American English (Eddington & Taylor 2009) and Australian
English (Cox & Palethorpe 2007: 342–3), which makes the title of Smith and
Holmes-Elliott’s paper (2017), “the unstoppable glottal”, rather fitting!11

2.2.2 Northern Cities Shift (and other shifts)

A complex sound change affecting the vowel system has been reported for the
area known as the Inland North in the US. We will first explain what this sound
change involves and then see that, although in some ways it is indeed specific
11
And all this despite the fact that the glottal stop has seen plenty of stigmatization during its
lifespan: https://tribunemag.co.uk/2020/06/the-glottal-stop.

39
2 Change in English today

to the Inland North, we also find some interesting parallels in other varieties of
English attested in other parts of the world. There are at least two reasons why
we should be interested in sound shifts: firstly, they are present in many varieties
of English (as well as other languages); secondly, they are a very nice example
illustrating the constraints as well as the embedding problems, two of the five
essential problems of LVC (see Chapter 1).
The Northern Cities Shift started with the vowel phoneme we find in words
such as cat. This vowel raised, i.e. it moved upwards in the vocalic space, and
started sounding more like an [ɛ ∼ eː] rather than [æ] (“∼” indicates that the qual-
ity may vary on a continuum between [ɛ] and [e]). This left space in the vowel
system: the phonetic quality of [æ] was no longer “occupied” by any phoneme.
As it turns out, this was not the case indefinitely, because the quality of the
phoneme /ɒ/ (as in the word lot) started changing as well, and it started moving
to where the original [æ] of “cat” words was to be found, as shown in Figure
2.2(a).12

dress cut caught

[ɛ] [ʌ] [o]

cat cot cat cot

[æ] [ɒ] [æ] [ɒ]
(a) The initial stages of the Northern Cities (b) The Northern Cities Shift
Shift

Further changes ensued. The vowel in words such as caught moved to the vowel
space no longer occupied by the cot vowel (which had moved to the original cat
region). This created an “empty” area in another part of the vocalic space, and
the vowel we find in words such as cut /kʌt/ started moving in the direction of
the original caught vowel. Finally, the vowel in dress /dɹɛs/ began moving as well,
to the territory left behind by the cut vowel (/ʌ/). This leaves us with a situation
found in Figure 2.2(b).
You can listen to examples of the post-shift phonetic quality of these phonemes
on Eckert’s webpage13 ; Eckert has investigated the Northern Cities Shift in great
detail (e.g. Eckert 1990). We can refer to shifts like the Northern Cities Shift as a
12
See Nesbitt (2018) on some very recent research on “cat”.
13
https://web.stanford.edu/~eckert/vowels.html.

40
 2.2 Sounds

chain shift, because one change triggers another. It is tempting to ask why a
chain shift starts happening in a speech community. One potential explanation
proposed for the Northern Cities Shift is that white speakers kept more distance
from African American speakers following the African American Great Migra-
tion (Van Herk 2008).
The existence of a chain shift of this type is interesting, but what’s even more
interesting is that the Northern Cities Shift is just one of many shifts that we find
across varieties of English. Labov et al. (2006), for instance, list the Southern Shift,
the Pittsburg Shift, and the Back Upglide Shift amongst the main shifts currently
taking place in varieties of American English, in addition to the Northern Cities
Shift. Eckert14 shows a vowel shift in California English, and reports of shifts are
also found for Canadian English (Clarke et al. 1995: 212), New Zealand English
(e.g. Langstrof 2006), and British English (Hickey 2018, Hejná 2015: 272–273 for
Welsh English), as well as Irish English, Australian English, and South African En-
glish (Hickey 2018). Hickey (2018) presents an interesting discussion of one spe-
cific chain shift (Short Front Vowel Lowering) which is fairly widespread across
the Anglophone world.15 In the case of these shifts from the 20th and the 21st
centuries, it is primarily short vowels that participate in the changes involved.
All these shifts have one thing in common. First, one vowel phoneme under-
goes a sound change. Its quality changes, which means that it moves in the vo-
calic space. What then follows is a change, or movement, of another vowel in the
vowel system. And on and on this can go, affecting the phonetic realization of a
whole series of vowel phonemes. We start with one vowel changing, and we end
up with this one change triggering a whole series of other changes. Hence the
name chain shift. But the number of phonemes does not change – we end up with
the same number of phonemes; what changes is the phonetic quality associated
with these phonemes. So in the Northern Cities Shift as discussed here, we start
with five distinct vowels and we end still with five distinct vowels.
We will see two other fairly famous instances of such chain shifts, one related
to vowels (Chapter 4) and one related to consonants (Chapter 7), as we continue
our journey through the history of the English language.

14
https://web.stanford.edu/~eckert/vowels.html.
15
See also Boberg (2019), who uses the term Short Front Vowel Shift for the same, or at least
what seems to be closely related, phenomena.

41
2 Change in English today

2.2.3 Uptalk and High Rising Terminals (HRTs)

Another innovation that has been spreading throughout the English-speaking
world is related to intonation.16 Uptalk, or High Rising Terminals,17 refers to
the phenomenon in which speakers use a rising intonation (the melody we are
familiar with from yes/no-questions) or intonation with a higher pitch, at the
end of statements, i.e. in declarative sentences. If you’d like to listen to some
examples, visit platforms such as YouTube and search for Uptalk.
Linguists have proposed a range of functions Uptalk performs, amongst which
are checking understanding, conveying uncertainty, checking approval, holding
the floor, and others (McLemore 1991).
Uptalk is said to have started in California, US, or possibly in New Zealand, or
Australia (Wells 2006: 37, in Mohamad & Deterding 2016). There are nowadays re-
ports of Uptalk in a range of American English accents (McLemore 1991, Ritchart
& Arvaniti 2014). Since the first reports of Uptalk, researchers have noted the phe-
nomenon in Australian English (Fletcher et al. 2010), British English (Bradford
1997: 36, Jespersen 2018, Shobbrook & House 2003), Canadian English (Sando
2009, Shokeir 2008), Brunei English (Mohamad & Deterding 2016), New Zealand
English (Britain 1992, Fletcher et al. 2010), and South African English (Bekker
2012: 146), if not more. While we may think of the rise and spread of Uptalk as a
global change affecting varieties of English, the precise use and forms of Uptalk
are nevertheless not the same across these different regions. For instance, in her
Belfast English data, Jespersen (2018: 529) observes that Uptalk is used more fre-
quently by Republicans than by Unionists, signalling political stance in the com-
munity. This again shows that global phenomena can be accompanied with local
flavours, presenting us with both a degree of homogeneity and heterogeneity at
the same time.
Unlike chain shifts introduced in the previous section (§2.2.2), Uptalk has been
negatively stereotyped in the US in particular, as obvious from the title of the
PhD thesis by Gorelik (2016), which focuses on perception of Uptalk in Ameri-
can English: Uptalk as a Powerless Speech Style Characteristic of Job Candidates.
Interestingly, however, Gorelik (2016) did not find that the use of Uptalk would
decrease the candidates’ employability chances.

16
We’re very lucky to be able to investigate intonation in Present Day English. This is not some-
thing we could really investigate for the older periods of the language.
17
See Warren (2016: 4–7) for a discussion about the terms Uptalk and HRTs.

42
 2.2 Sounds

2.2.4 Vocal fry and creaky voice/phonation

The last sound change in progress we will mention is known as vocal fry or
creaky voice/phonation. For most speakers, the vocal folds vibrate regularly dur-
ing much of their speech. When creaky phonation is produced, this is in most
cases due to irregular vibration of the vocal folds. The auditory percept is that of
a rattling wheel to many listeners. If you would like to listen to some examples,
again use platforms such as YouTube and search for vocal fry.
Researchers have been trying to establish the functions of creaky phonation
in different varieties. Some of the suggestions that have been brought forward
include those that creaky phonation may signal urban-oriented upwardly mobile
identity of (accomplished) female speakers (Yuasa 2010), affective stance (see Es-
posito 2017 for an analysis of creaky phonation in Lady Gaga’s interviews), and
a transition of relevance in a conversation (Grivičić & Nilep 2004).
Creaky phonation has been very negatively stereotyped in American English,
with creaking individuals being more likely to be associated with various nega-
tive attitudes and less likely to be employed (Anderson et al. 2014). Again, as is
the case for Uptalk, creaky phonation is not limited just to American English. It
has been observed e.g. in Australian English (Sicoli 2015), British English (Sicoli
2015), and Newfoundland and Labrador English (Clarke 2010: 154); yet, in these
varieties of English, the phenomenon does not seem to carry the same social
stigma as in American English.18
These aspects all fall within the realm of pragmatics. For example, whether
someone creaks may indicate that they are about to finish what they say. The
functions associated with such linguistic variation go well beyond the level of
the sentence. And if someone uses Uptalk, this may imply they are not quite done
with what they would like to say. However, as we have discussed above, these
phenomena can also be used to provide further information about the speaker’s
intention or their interpretations of the situational context.
Although we have focused on four sound changes characteristic of Present
Day English, there are many more sound changes under way in a range of differ-
ent accents.

18
Dallaston & Docherty (2020) recently show that, actually, we know very little about creaky
voice in varieties of English – or even within a single variety of English.

43
2 Change in English today

2.3 Morphology
2.3.1 Absence of -s
Depending on how many and which languages other than English you speak, you
may or may not have thought that English does not seem to be particularly rich
regarding its inflectional morphology. If we consider the simple present tense,
nothing much happens with the verb depending on which person and number
the subject refers to:

(1) I like bumblebees.

(2) You like bumblebees.
(3) So we all like bumblebees.
(4) They like bumblebees too.
(5) And, surprise surprise, she likes bumblebees as well.

The only difference in the verb is found if we contrast the third person singular
form with all the other forms: like becomes likes. In some languages, however, we
would get a different verb form in each of these sentences with different gram-
matical attributes of the subject (e.g. in Czech or Spanish), or at least in many
more of these sentences. As we will see in the chapters to come, the verbal sys-
tem of the English language has seen a number of simplifications regarding its
inflectional morphology. In fact, some varieties of English show absence of -s
today even in the 3rd person singular present tense.
The first instances of absence of -s date back to the English spoken prior to
the colonization of North America (at least), and go back primarily to East Anglia
and the south of England (Schneider 1983: 102). In Present Day English, we find
this phenomenon in African American English, East Anglia (Schneider 1983), Al-
abama, Reading, and – only with the auxiliary verb DO – in Inner Sydney English
(Eisikovits 1996: 236–7). However, whilst some dialects seem to have unified the
verbal paradigm by getting rid of the -s, others have generalized the morpheme
across all or more persons and numbers: for instance, Schneider (1983: 102) notes
such a tendency for Northern English varieties.
Although the loss of -s may be approached as an instance of the simplification
of the system at first, it brings in the potential for new complexities as well. For
instance, Myhill & Harris (1986: 27) found that in their African American English
data, the speakers could either use -s or leave it out; however, the use of -s was
associated with narrative clauses whereas its absence was reserved for present-
reference contexts. In addition, as we will see in Chapters 3, 4, and 5, the loss of

44
 2.3 Morphology

verbal endings has been accompanied by the rise of other verbal constructions in
the language. We are therefore again observing a phenomenon which presents
us with a degree of both linguistic homogeneity and heterogeneity.

The Northern Subject Rule

In some English varieties, the use of -s is subject to more complex con-

straints. The best known of these is the Northern Subject Rule of
northern British English varieties. Here, the -s ending is also used in
the third person plural, as in The birds sings. This only happens when
the finite verb occurs right after a subject that isn’t a pronoun: so, sen-
tences like The birds often sing and They sing are found alongside The
birds sings (see de Haas & van Kemenade 2014). What’s more, the sys-
tem is subject to substantial variation, much of it probabilistic. Many va-
rieties around the world have similar, more complex distributions of -s:
see e.g. Clarke (1997) on Newfoundland English and Cukor-Avila (1997)
on African American English. The Northern Subject Rule is today con-
sidered to be non-standard. Contrary to a common misconception, non-
standard forms aren’t always (or even normally) recent innovations: very
often, non-standard variants are actually much older than their “standard”
equivalent. This is the case for the Northern Subject Rule as well: it dates
back to Early Middle English (de Haas & van Kemenade 2014) and in some
form even to Old English (Cole 2017).

2.3.2 Verbal concord with collective nouns

Collective nouns are nouns such as cast, committee, company, crowd, family, gov-
ernment, jury, staff, team, and names of countries (especially when referring to
competing teams). What they all have in common is that they usually involve
more than a single individual, hence their name: collective nouns or collectives.
In Present Day English, we find a difference in verbal concord (agreement) with
regard to collective nouns, primarily between British and American English.
Where speakers of American English would tend to use a verb in the singular
when a collective noun is the subject, speakers of British English would typically

45
2 Change in English today

use a verb in the plural, as shown in the examples below (taken from Butters
2001: 337):

(6) Our team wins often. (American English)

(7) Our team win/wins often. (British English)

Thus, American English is more likely to exhibit grammatical concord, whereas

British English is more likely to show notional concord (based on the semantics
of the subject rather than its morphological number).
Which is older? The British English notional concord option. As Hundt (2003)
discusses in her study of the phenomenon, American English of the 20th cen-
tury is leading in this linguistic change. Other varieties of English tend to show
a mixture of these two concord strategies which falls between the state of affairs
found in American English and in British English. Some of these varieties include
Australian English, New Zealand English, Philippine English, and Singapore En-
glish (see Hundt 2003 and the references therein): all varieties of English exhibit
variable concord to a greater or lesser extent. As Hundt (2003: 207) further notes,
there is a trend for the grammatical concord (Our team wins) to be gaining in
numbers in varieties of English globally. The change from notional to grammat-
ical concord thus leads to more variation found, which illustrates that standard
varieties of languages are indeed like the non-standard ones in many ways: they
are also subject to change.

2.4 Syntax
In this section, we will look at the rise of a new quotative (BE like) and the
GET passive. The former represents a change that many of us may be aware
of, whereas the latter seems to be more below our radars.

2.4.1 Quotative BE like

Quotatives are verbs or constructions that introduce reported speech. Let’s have
a look at a couple of examples:

(8) And then he said: “Aren’t bumblebees fluffy?”

(9) He sighed, “But what about dragonflies? Don’t they deserve our attention
too?”
(10) She objected: “You and your insects. Someone should think of kingfishers
too.”

46
 2.4 Syntax

(11) Ultimately, they all cried out: “Long live bumblebees, dragonflies, kingfish-
ers, and everyone else.”

The verbs in bold all introduce direct speech (marked in what are aptly called
quotation marks). Several new quotatives have been recently noticed in English:
BE all, GO, BE like, this is X (where X stands for the subject whose speech we
quote; see Buchstaller 2001, 2013 and D’Arcy 2010 for more details). We will only
focus on BE like here, which we’re sure you’ve all encountered. See for yourself:

(12) She’s sitting there and she’s like, ‘Oh my god!’

She’s like, ‘That’s your boyfriend?’
(Tagliamonte & D’Arcy 2004: 493)

The first study of BE like focuses on the new quotative in American English and
dates back to 1982 (Butters 1982, but see also Buchstaller 2006). However, since
then it’s been reported in an increasing number of varieties of English, at increas-
ing frequencies of occurrence, including Australian English (Louro 2013), Cana-
dian English (Tagliamonte & D’Arcy 2004), Jamaican English (Bogetić 2014), and
New Zealand English (D’Arcy 2010).
The attitudes towards this new quotative vary across different varieties. Buch-
staller (2006) contrasted attitudes towards BE like in American and British En-
glish, and this is what she found. Firstly, the quotative is associated with young
speakers in both varieties. However, whilst Americans associate the quotative
with California and the Valley Girl, Brits don’t. Instead, Brits associate the quota-
tive with speakers whose personality traits are those of giddiness, animatedness,
being cool and trendy, being less ambitious, and being less educated. In conclu-
sion, although on the one hand the quotative is spreading across the globe rela-
tively fast, the connotations associated with it and its socio-pragmatic functions
are not necessarily the same across the globe. One thing that the new quotative
does share across the relevant varieties is that, in a fairly cool way, it’s ambiguous
as to whether it introduces what the speaker had actually said or just thought,
and it may introduce facial gestures as well as direct speech/thought! Thus, for
instance, the sentence George was like “Aaaaargh!” for three hours. does not mean
that George literally uttered “Aaaaargh!” for three solid hours without pausing
for breath. In fact, George may well not have uttered “Aaaaargh!” at all – the new
“quotative” here can introduce mental states. Perhaps this flexibility may explain
why it’s been adopted so widely and so rapidly.

47
2 Change in English today

2.4.2 GET passive

The typical example of the passive voice in the English language could be some-
thing like this:
(13) The hungry bumblebee was taken to the honeysuckle.
(14) All my honey has been eaten!
(15) Mistakes were made.19
The GET -passive is a type of the passive in which the verb BE is replaced with
the verb GET, as in the example that follows, and is found more frequently in
spoken than written language:20

(16) If nothing else, the fans will want to go and see which resident of Spring-
field gets killed in the last few frames. Could it be Lisa’s new Irish boyfriend
Colin? After hearing his ghastly singsong “brogue”, most domestic view-
ers will wish it so.
(Amador Moreno 2010: 9, in Nolan 2012: 1138)

The first instances of the GET -passive go back to the late 17th century (Fleisher
2006: 227), and the construction started increasing in its frequency in the latter
half of the 19th century (Anderwald 2018: 3), first beginning to attract criticism
from prescriptivists during the 20th century. It has kept on developing a num-
ber of more nuanced uses since its inception, throughout Present Day English
(Anderwald 2018: 1–2). Anderwald offers interesting sociocultural details that
elaborate on why some verbs were more likely than others to be used in this
GET -construction when it started spreading (such as to get run over and to get
mugged, which refer to activities that one did not necessarily do or arrange one-
self in a certain period of time).
The GET -passive is a fairly widespread phenomenon, having been studied in
British English, American English (Hundt 2001), Irish English (Nolan 2012), Sin-
gapore English, and Jamaican English (Bruckmaier 2016), among others.

19
This is a famous example used by a number of politicians, including Jeb Bush. It has its own
Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistakes_were_made. We are thankful to Sten
Vikner for drawing our attention to this wiki page.
20
If interested in the formal arguments against all GET constructions being suitable exam-
ples of GET -passives, and whether the term passive is always appropriate, see Mitkovska &
Bužarovska (2012).

48
 2.5 Lexicon

2.5 Lexicon
2.5.1 Global vocabulary
Due to its geographical spread, English has come into contact with a number
of languages, which have introduced many lexical items or new meanings of
already existing words into the language. These innovations may be restricted
locally, but some may have spread across the globe. Regarding Present Day En-
glish, we have for example seen the local differences in the use of the word café
in Singapore English and also the wallah suffix used in Indian English (Chapter 1).
Other examples are the word Pakeha in New Zealand English, meaning ‘stranger,
not Maori’ and originating in Maori (to be precise, Pākehā), where it had the same
meaning; babalaas ‘suffering from hangover’ in South African English, originat-
ing in Afrikaans; cwtsh [kʊtʃ] ‘a cuddle, cuddly hug, hug’ originating in Welsh.
However, English has also become important as the language of business com-
munication, aviation, digital technologies, and science, which has resulted in the
rise of words such as to google (first attested in 2000 with an object according to
the Oxford English Dictionary), cursor (in the sense of a computer mouse cursor
first attested in 1967 according to the OED), to troll (first attested in the sense of
posting hostile messages in online discussions in 1992), Twitterati (prolific users
of the social network Twitter, first attested in 2006), to photobomb (to spoil a
photo by appearing in it unexpectedly, first attested in 2008), and to rickroll (to
cause someone to unintentionally watch a pop music video by Rick Astley).21

2.5.2 Social media, instant messaging, and new expressions

Some of the technological developments in the 20th and the 21st centuries in-
volve various forms of instant messaging and other digitally-mediated commu-
nication platforms. Tagliamonte & Denis (2008) take up and critique the public
opinion that instant messaging ruins the English language and is a form of “bas-
tardization” (2008: 4). Such negative attitudes are, amongst other things, related
to the introduction of abbreviated words, such as lol (< laughing out loud), btw
(< by the way), omg (< oh my god), wtf (< what the fuck), etc. However, Taglia-
monte & Denis (2008) show that these new abbreviated lexical items represent a
marginal proportion of the vocabulary in their Canadian English teenage instant
messaging data (e.g. 0.02% of the overall vocabulary in the case of wtf, or 0.41%
in the case of lol). Thus, the authors conclude that “[t]he use of abbreviations,
21
This term is not yet in the OED, but see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLzxrzFCyOs for
relevant discussion.

49
2 Change in English today

short forms, and symbolic uses in IM [Instant Messaging] is without a doubt a

new vogue, but much rarer than the media have led us to believe” (Tagliamonte
& Denis 2008: 12). Furthermore, the fact that we do find such abbreviated lexical
items in digitalized communication platforms does not imply these will be used
at the same frequency in spoken English. It’s unlikely they are equally frequent
in spoken language.
Tagliamonte & Denis (2008: 25) nonetheless show that “the variety of English
used in the IM corpora we have studied here is neither a caricature of real lan-
guage nor some kind of basilectal lowlife”, but rather a new register which could
be thought of as a blend of spoken and written language, from the point of view
of both structural and lexical similarities and differences (see also Baron 2008
and Biber & Conrad 2019). That in itself presents a type of language change that
doesn’t neatly fall within a single linguistic level such as morphology or syntax
– it is indeed a change related to the discourse structure of the language, which
may be reflected in the lexicon but also at other levels.
The study of internet language has taken off dramatically in recent years – see
McCulloch (2019) for an accessible overview.

2.6 Final note

In our day and age, there are many factors which could no doubt be thought of
as leading to homogeneity on various levels of our existence. It’s so much easier
to travel across the globe, education is compulsory for much larger portions of
the population than used to be the case, and, of course, the means to communi-
cate across distances have been boosted by a number of technological advances
(see also Beal 2010: Chapter 1). All these factors are sometimes seen as being the
reasons why local varieties of English are dying out (Beal 2010: Chapter 1, pages
1, 3, and 8 in particular). And yet, we have been witnessing many linguistic in-
novations spreading across different parts of the world and getting utilized and
localized by those who adopt them potentially for different purposes in their re-
spective regions. But this is not where regional and other linguistic differences
stop: any quick browse through an issue of journals such as Language Variation
and Change, Journal of Sociolinguistics, and English Language and Linguistics will
make it obvious that we’re far from a homogeneous English bereft of local fea-
tures in the 21st century.
And now, we encourage you to do the exercises found below. These will enable
you to think more carefully about how we can establish whether two varieties
of English are more different or more similar. You’ll also try to establish which

50
 Suggested exercises

linguistic features are standard and non-standard, or somewhere in between per-

haps, and whether you pay equal amount of attention to a range of different
types of linguistic variation that surrounds us. And if you do that, then you’ll be
going home with the take-home messages of this chapter safely sitting in your
backpack (or a pocket).

Suggested exercises

E.1 Practice with varying features

Look at the sentences below. Which of the variable features discussed in

this chapter can you identify? There’s one major feature to be identified
in each sentence.
1. “My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard
And they’re like, it’s better than yours” (Kelis, Milkshake, 2003)

2. “The results will show where your team is on track as well as where
problems may be brewing.”a

3. “Ahhh The Queen photo-bombed our selfie!!”b

4. “I faked having Covid-19 on Facebook and got arrested”c

5. “Pumps and a bump, pumps and a bump

He like the girls with the pumps and a bump
... one taste and he want it” (Fifth Harmony, He Like That, 2017)
a
https://hbr.org/2016/06/the-secrets-of-great-teamwork, accessed June 2020.
b
https://twitter.com/_JaydeTaylor/status/492269017215012864, 2014, accessed June
2020.
c
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52397294, accessed June 2020.

51
2 Change in English today

E.2 Tracking words and phrases with Google N-grams

Use a web browser to visit the Google N-grams site.a This interface allows
you to look at the changing frequency of words over time in the Google
Books corpus (or short strings of words, called n-grams). You can choose
whether to investigate English in general, or American English or British
English in particular (at the time of writing, other Englishes are sadly not
available).
A. Look at how frequent the word fuck is in the Google Books corpus
over time. Go as far back in time as the corpus allows. 1. Describe
the pattern you see. 2. Can you think of any explanations behind
this pattern? 3. If you did think of at least one explanation, how
could we go about testing whether this may indeed explain what’s
happening in this specific n-gram?

B. Look up biscuit and cookie and their frequencies across centuries.

Go as far back in time as you can. 1. Which one is more frequent?
2. Does the answer depend on the period? 3. Does the answer de-
pend on whether you’re limiting your searches just to American or
British English? 4. How can we explain the patterns indicated by
your searches?

C. Think of pairs of words that might overlap in meaning in British and

American English, like biscuit vs. cookie or tap vs. faucet. Search for
these in the British corpus. What do you see? Can you explain your
results?

D. In §2.4.1, the quotative BE like was introduced. Look at the historical

trajectory of BE like, SAY, and BE all. Does BE like indeed increase as
we approach 2020? What happens to the other quotatives? Do you
get different results for the British and the American subsections of
the corpus?

E. In §2.4.2, the GET -passive was introduced. Can you think of a

way to investigate the rise of the GET -passive using the Google N-
gram Viewer? What are the advantages and disadvantages of this
method?

52
 Suggested exercises

F. What are the advantages and disadvantages of the Google Books

corpus as a whole?

G. Can you think of using Google N-grams in any way either as a re-
searcher or as an English teacher?
a
Available at https://books.google.com/ngrams.

E.3 American and British English – more different or more

similar?
Are there more differences than similarities between British and Amer-
ican English? Each student/group (as specified by the teacher) should
answer the question in a short written piece of no more than 400 words.
Feel free to use the extracts in §1 as well as any other sources that may
be of relevance.

Tips for students: If you don’t know how to begin, you can structure
your answer as follows: 1. What is the question? Introduce the question.
Don’t assume your reader is telepathic.; 2. What do you want to argue
for/against?; 3. Show us why you argue the way you do (what’s your
evidence?); 4. Conclude briefly to remind us of the main argument/point.

Tip for teachers: Using group blog entries for this assignment as well as
a reasonable deadline is a good idea – it saves time both for the students
and you, and the deadline will allow you to go through the contributions
prior to the seminar.

Tip for teachers: Add a condition of the students having to use at least one
source (or more) to back up their claims, using the reference style of your
department.

53
2 Change in English today

E.4 How does English vary?

Look at the excerpts in §1. Can you see any non-standard features?
What linguistic level do they represent? Have you come across
them in other varieties of English? What varieties were they? Can you
think of any possible reasons why this variation exists?

Tip for teachers: Assign different excerpts to different groups of students.

E.5 Homogeneity vs. heterogeneity

In Present Day English, do factors such as the advent of digital me-

dia, generalization of compulsory education, and the increasing ease
of travelling opportunities contribute to an increasing similarity, or homo-
geneity, increasing dissimilarity, or heterogeneity, both, or neither?
Each student/group (as specified by the teacher) should answer the
question in a short written piece of no more than 300 words. Feel free to
use the extracts in §1 as well as any other sources that may be of relevance.

Tip: see the tips in exercise 3.

Texts
This section contains texts from different varieties of Present Day English. In this
chapter, and in the other chapters, the texts are in reverse chronological order:
like the book itself, the selection of texts goes backwards in time.

54
 Texts

T.1 Queen’s Christmas Speech

Below is an extract from the Queen’s Christmas Speech from 2016.a The
Queen’s speech has not escaped the scrutiny of linguists and so we also
give you a snippet here.
Throughout the Commonwealth, there were equally joyful celebra-
tions – Grenada, the Bahamas, Jamaica, and New Zealand won more
medals per head of population than any other countries. Many of
this year’s winners spoke of being inspired by athletes of previous
generations. Inspiration fed their aspiration and, having discovered
abilities they scarcely knew they had, these athletes are now inspir-
ing others.
a
You can listen to the entirety of it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
ouieLx4VryU.

T.2 Kisses don’t lie

Kisses don’t lie is a song by Rihanna, a singer from Barbados, in the
Caribbean. The song comes from her 2006 album titled A Girl Like Me,
and we give you a couple of lines below. Rihanna’s song Work might be
another intriguing example to look up.
Cause when you kiss me
I feel everything that I been missing
I try to slow down but my heart won’t listen
And it’s tearing me all up inside
And when you touch me
I feel a rush but I’m afraid that it might crush me
Should I put my trust in something I don’t trust in
Cause baby kisses don’t lie
Kisses don’t

55
2 Change in English today

No, they don’t

Never don’t lie.

T.3 This is her first publication

This is her first publication (2004) is a poem by Conor O’Callaghan, an

Irish writer.a
a
You can access it at the Poetry Foundation at the following link: https://www.
poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=42229.

T.4 Excerpt from The Wire

The Wire is a crime drama set in Baltimore, which aired between 2002 and
2008. In this extract from the first season (2002), one of the African Amer-
ican characters, D’Angelo, is teaching two others – Wallace and Bodie –
how to play chess.
D’ANGELO A’ight, see this? This the king, and he the man.
You get the other dude’s king, you got the game.
But he trying to get your king too. So your gotta protect
it. Now the king move one space in any direction he
damn please. Like this, and this, and this. But he ain’t
got no hustle. So the rest of these motherfuckers
on the team, they got his back.
And they run so deep, he ain’t gotta do shit.
BODIE Like your uncle.
D’ANGELO Yeah, like my uncle. [picks up a queen] You see this?
This the queen; she smart, she fierce.

56
 Texts

She move anyway she want as far as she want.

And she is the go-get-shit-done piece.
WALLACE Remind me of Stringer.
D’ANGELO And this over here is the castle, like the stash.
It move like this, or like this.
[demonstrates]
WALLACE Yo, stash don’t move, man.
D’ANGELO Come on, yo, think, how many times we move the stash
house this week. Right? And every time we move the
stash, we gotta move a little muscle with it.
BODIE True. A’ight, what about them little bald-headed
bitches?
D’ANGELO These right here, these are the pawns. They’re like the
soldiers. They move one space forward, only, except
when they fight, and it’s like-[demonstrates]-or like this.
They in the front lines, they be out in the field.

T.5 Tyneside English

Britain is full of interesting (and diverse) varieties of English. Tyneside

English is spoken in the North East of England. Below you get an ex-
tract from the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (speaker
TLSG01, recorded in the 1960s–1970s).a
Speaker 1: “it’s quite nice up here is it”
Speaker 2: “yes conditions is better”
Speaker 1: “yes you do you think eh do you find that people around
here are fairly neighbourly you know do you know most of the peo-
ple”
Speaker 2: “yes they are yes I mean if you were wanting a helping

57
2 Change in English today

hand they would help you you know”

Speaker 1: “yes mm-hm”

a
If you’d like to see more Tyneside English and listen to examples, we recommend the
Talk of the Toon webpage: https://research.ncl.ac.uk/decte/toon/.

Recommended further reading

As in Chapter 1, Trudgill’s (1999) paper on standard English and what it

is and isn’t provides the readers with perspectives on language varieties
that happen to be considered standard.
For good detailed introductions to specific varieties of English, consult
A Handbook of Varieties of English, edited by Kortmann and Schneider
(2004). The handbook comes in two volumes, one of which focuses on
phonetic and phonological aspects and one on morphology and syntax.
Wells’s three volumes of Accents of English are also a very good overview
of differences in the sounds of English dialects, i.e. of accent differences:
Wells (1982a,c,b). There are also two volumes on lesser-known varieties
of English: see Schreier et al. (2010) and Williams et al. (2015).
If you are interested in English as a global language, you may enjoy
reading David Crystal’s English as a Global Language (2003b) and Jen-
nifer Jenkins’ Global Englishes: A Resource Book for Students (2015). The
literature on English in a global context and World Englishes is fairly rich
and you will find a lot of reading options.
Sadly, there’s no book that provides an introduction to change in
Present Day English. We therefore recommend that you read the individ-
ual papers cited in the relevant sections of this chapter if you are really
interested in the changes discussed. In addition, Leech et al. (2009) present
in-depth research studies of ongoing changes.
General introductions to sociolinguistics are provided by Mesthrie et al.
(2009) and Meyerhoff (2019).

58
3 Late Modern English (1700–1945)
3.1 History and context
The period of Late Modern English (LModE) is characterized by notable techno-
logical advancements and social changes, which are also reflected in the varia-
tion we find in the language of the period. To begin with, Late Modern English
saw the introduction of steamships in 1790, railways in 1825, cars in 1763 and
1886,1 telephone in 1876, radio in 1895, sound-film in 1925, and experimental TV
transmission in 1939 (Strang 1970: 75). These technological developments are im-
portant for the following reasons. First, they made travelling easier and more
accessible and increased dialect contact as a result.2 Secondly, the introduction
of the telephone planted the seed of what has by the 21st century become a way
to communicate with a potentially large number of individuals living in regions
separated by considerable distances on a daily basis. This has again led to more
dialect contact. Similarly, the introduction of the radio and the TV led to the ex-
posure to those varieties of English that were represented in these media at the
time, and these varieties of English were – unsurprisingly – those that were con-
sidered standard. Due to their representation in these media, their “standardness”
only increased as they became considered the hallmarks of speaking properly in
the years to come.
Communication-related consequences of technology are, however, just one
part of the sociolinguistically meaningful events of Late Modern English. The
industrial revolution, starting in 1760, impacted society in several ways. Perhaps
most importantly, the people in power were no longer just those who had in-
herited power by birth. The emergence of the nouveau riche (the new rich) had
one language-related consequence: although you may have had the wealth and
thus also political and social power based on this wealth, your language reflected
your social background, that is, at least, unless you consciously or unconsciously

1
Steam-driven in 1763; petrol-driven in 1886.
2
And of course, over time, this also led to somewhat easier immigration. In case of Britain during
the Late Modern English period, this would be primarily immigration associated with former
colonies of the British Empire. Many of these immigrants would not speak English natively.
3 Late Modern English (1700–1945)

changed how you spoke. This created the need to know what the “correct” way
of speaking was.
In addition to this development, Late Modern English also saw increasing de-
mocratization ensuing from the Glorious Revolution (1689), urbanization, and
the foundation of the Royal Society, which “[promoted] scientific and rational
discourse” (Beal 2004: 3). This enlightenment resulted in a “period ... in which
faith was no longer solely placed in an omnipotent God, but in humanity’s capac-
ity for rational thinking” (Beal 2004: 3). These social changes are also important
and go hand in hand with the rise of prescriptivism (see §3.1.1). For instance,
some structures began to be perceived as incorrect based on an appeal to “logic”
or because of comparison to Latin, prime examples being negative concord
(Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone), flat adverbs (extreme unwilling, Muggle-
stone 2003: 11), and the use of who rather than whom in sentences such as those
who you love versus the form traditionally deemed correct, those whom you love.
To focus on just one of these constructions, the supposed “logic” behind the
idea that negative concord is incorrect and indeed formally illogical was the ar-
gument that if a sentence contains two negatives (Ain’t no sunshine, I don’t do
nothing), then these two negatives cancel each other out. Thus, I don’t do noth-
ing does not mean, according to this argument, that the speaker is not engaging
in any activity, but that it is not the case that the speaker is not engaging in an
activity. This is indeed how negation works in Standard Present Day English,
at least in theory. We find similar discussions today surrounding the so-called
singular they. An example of a singular they would be Everyone should go look
for bumblebees if they feel like it. Boyd (2019: 273) outlines the supposed logic
behind the critique of sentences like the bumblebee one containing singular they
above:

They is plural, so it is ungrammatical to use it with a singular antecedent.

The stature of the writer who violates this rule has no bearing on whether
the rule is valid, since the logic of the rule is unimpeachable. Shakespeare
does it? “What a shame,” says the conservative prescriptivist, “I never knew
Shakespeare had such bad grammar”.

Importantly, arguments based on “logic” of the type mentioned above are irrele-
vant to natural language use. And negative concord in English is very old indeed,
since it’s the norm as early as the earliest Old English: see §6.4.3.
Finally, the technological advancements combined with British colonization
resulted in the spread of the English language across the globe. As we saw in
Chapter 2, most varieties of English as we know it today are only a couple of

60
 3.1 History and context

centuries old, and their establishment as distinct, individual varieties took place
during the Late Modern English period. For some, this process is still ongoing. In
this chapter, we will focus only on two varieties of English: British English (and
primarily English English) and American English. Because English came into ex-
istence in Britain, we will be discussing English used in Britain during the Late
Modern English period. This perhaps somewhat obvious (and admittedly rather
traditional) reason is nevertheless not the only motivation to discuss British En-
glish and English English in particular. As we will see, what was deemed socially
prestigious linguistic behaviour was often related to the norms established in
England. We will, however, learn more about the history of American English
in this chapter as well. The speakers of American English were some of the first
to explicitly and formally rebel against English linguistic norms, and American
English was one of the first and the earliest to see its official recognition as an
individual variety of English. In the twentieth century, as we will see particu-
larly in §3.3, the pendulum has swung back in the other direction, and in many
contexts American English is socially more prestigious than British English due
to its cultural and technological influence.
In the rest of this section, we concentrate on the rise of prescriptivism, which
characterizes Late Modern English, and its consequences for our understand-
ing of language variation and change not only in Late Modern English but also
Present Day English (§3.1.1). The emergence of American English is described in
§3.1.2.

3.1.1 Prescriptivism
The word prescriptivism originates in the Latin praescrībere, meaning literally ‘to
write beforehand’ and, more importantly here ‘to lay down rules, to limit’. In the
context of language, prescriptivism is the attempt to establish rules that govern
what linguistic usage should or should not be like. Linguistic prescriptivism is
something most of us are likely to come across, although not necessarily con-
sciously so. The Accentism Project by Carrie & Drummond offers a number of
examples reported primarily by English speakers,3 whether native or non-native.
For instance, Sta gives the following story on the Accentism Project website as
someone who is not a native speaker of English (3rd February 2018):

Because I sound so American, it always strikes me when people start cor-

recting my English only after they find out I am not a native speaker and

3
https://accentism.org/.

61
3 Late Modern English (1700–1945)

actually from South Asia. Seems I speak it “like a native” but only till they
figure out my passport. Then it’s a giveaway.

Negative attitudes associated with non-native varieties of English fall within the
ideology of so-called native-speakerism, according to which, for instance, only
native speakers of English should teach English.4
Regarding native speakers of English, prescriptivism is typically observable
with nonstandard dialects, although it is by no means limited to these. A story
by Lisa (28th March 2018) contains a typical example:

When I started at Oxford in the late 80s someone told me, “You can’t possi-
bly be studying English at Oxford with an accent like that!” This came hot
on the heels of a teacher at a study week telling me “The northern accent
is generally associated with being thick.”.

Prescriptivism is in opposition to descriptivism. A descriptive approach to lin-

guistic variation is one where we describe how speakers use a language, whether
they are native or non-native speakers of that language, and whether or not they
speak a standard or a nonstandard variety of that language. A prescriptivist ap-
proach to variation, however, is a prohibitive one: some types of language-related
phenomena are seen as incorrect, and often these correlate with specific social
groups. Linguistic research as carried out in academia is descriptive, not prescrip-
tive.
Furthermore, certain properties of language and speech, such as those asso-
ciated with one’s sex and/or gender, can also tap into stereotypical biases (e.g.
Hall 1985). It is very likely that linguistic discrimination of various sorts has been
around for as long as any type of discrimination has. When speakers start criticiz-
ing the language of others openly, however, we are dealing with prescriptivism
and proscriptivism: the way one should use language and the way one should not,
respectively. We find the first more conventional traces of prescriptivism in the
history of English after the language begins to undergo a process of standardiza-
tion. This makes sense: after the printing press was introduced in 1476, a specific
variety of English (more in Chapter 4) began to spread in written contexts across
the island and, as a result, began to be seen as prestigious (Mugglestone 2003: 9;
cf. §4.1.1). Just think of the “If it’s printed, it must be true” line of thought (see
also Strang 1970: 81).

4
For an interesting discussion of native-speakerism, see Jenkins (2006) and Firth & Wagner
(2007).

62
 3.1 History and context

Very indicative of this rise of prescriptivism are the numerous grammar books
and dictionaries produced by a range of grammarians of the period. For instance,
an anonymous manual titled Poor letter H, its use and abuse: addressed to its little
vowels, a, e, i, o, u, and the millions who use them, by the Hon. Henry H., published
in 1859, was sold in thousands at the time (Mugglestone 2003: 4).5 Thus, we find
instruction on the “best” language-related practices. Here’s an example of an
entry from one such manual, the Critical Pronouncing Dictionary by John Walker
from 1823; this one outlines the desired pronunciation of the word mercy:

The vulgar pronounce this word as if spelled marcy, many above the vulgar
pronounce it as if written murcy; but there is a delicate shade of difference
between this and the true sound of e, which must be carefully attended to
... (Walker 1823: 387)

This flourishing of grammar books and instructive materials clearly shows that
audiences of the period were interested in and indeed preoccupied with knowing
how to talk properly. This is the beginning of what Crystal (2005: 249) refers to
as the complaint tradition, which has persisted till this day. As Crystal writes, we
are indeed dealing with complaining, i.e. focusing on the negatives: “people do
not usually write, phone, or band together to commend usages they like”. Less
direct but still very striking evidence of the general prescriptivism of the period
can be frequently found not only in grammar books and manuals, but also in
fictional literature of the times, as in the following observation from Jane Eyre
(Brontë 2006: 444):

She is not an uneducated person, I should think, by her manner of speaking;

her accent was quite pure; and the clothes she took off, though splashed and
wet, were little worn and fine.

In short, there is no lack of evidence from the Late Modern English period that
suggests that a concept of “pure” English was indeed very much alive.
Resonances of these prescriptive times can be found in the opinion that lan-
guage change is not good and should be prevented. In the 21st century, language
change is frequently seen as language decay (see also Aitchison’s 2012 very ac-
cessible and absorbing read titled Language Change: Progress or Decay?). We do
not have to do too much searching to find judgemental, prescriptive comments
like this one (York 2017):
5
Some of the authors of these manuals were well known: John Dryden, John Hart, Robert Lowth,
Lindley Murray, and Richard Mulcaster.

63
3 Late Modern English (1700–1945)

Slang has been around for generations, e.g. “Swell” was a popular 1930s ap-
proval word, and dozens more descriptive words become trendy but then
fade away. Today, however, slang has acquired a new and disturbing quality
by ignoring the difference between sexes (guys), grossly overstating (awe-
some), and adding a different meaning (cool). Much of it is disgustingly
vulgar. Worse, it’s everywhere and used by people of all ages, backgrounds,
educational and economic levels.

This perceived decay of the language was also mentioned in Chapter 1. However,
systematic study of language variation and change across centuries and a range
of languages has shown time and time again that language variation and change
are perfectly natural and have taken place for as long as the language in question
has been used. That the English language has always been undergoing changes
is something we are going to see in the rest of this book.

Figure 3.1: bestest friends – an example of a double superlative; photo

taken by Míša in Scotland in 2011

64
 3.1 History and context

The emergence of Received Pronunciation as a sociolect

One of the pronunciation standards used in numerous Present Day En-

glish dictionaries and textbooks, as well as related audio teaching ma-
terials, is Received Pronunciation, often abbreviated just to RP. It is
sometimes used interchangeably with BBC English. Where does RP come
from? It is a variety of English based on Standard Southern British (=
English!) English. As Fennell (2001) explains, the term RP “entered into
British common vocabulary” at the end of the 19th century “to refer to
the educated accent of London and the Home Counties” (Fennell 2001:
185). It became “received” when it had become recognized by speakers as
the accent to aim for in order to climb the social ladder. Daniel Jones was
the first to call this spoken variety “Public School English” in 1917. Later in
1926, he termed the same variety of the language Received Pronunciation.
Today, RP may have negative connotations for some – it can be perceived
as too posh, and the characters of evil geniuses (or genii!) are often por-
trayed with an RP accent in American films (see Lippi-Green 2012). The
emergence of RP is linked to the establishment of “public schools”, a small
set of private, originally all-male boarding schools traditionally attended
by children of the British ruling classes. Public School English, to give rise
to RP in time, had a certain type of prestige attached to it. Interestingly,
the mastery of Public School English took on religious associations as
well: ‘In the church, RP was considered a necessary qualification for An-
glicans, whereas “a non-standard accent in a minister of religion would,
until comparatively recently, be a fairly safe indicator that he belonged to
a Non-conformist denomination’” (Honey 1989: 34, in Görlach 1999: 61).

3.1.2 Emergence of American English

In this section, we target varieties of American English spoken in the United
States of America. As we saw in Chapter 2, American English was certainly seen
as a variety in its own right, at least by some Americans, around the years 1775–
1783, when the American War of Independence took place. Thus, Noah Webster,
an American lexicographer and a spelling reformer, wrote in 1828 that the style of
American writers is “in purity, in elegance and in technical precision, [...] equaled

65
3 Late Modern English (1700–1945)

only by that of the best British authors, and surpassed by that of no English
compositions of a similar kind” (Webster 1828: viii). He further adds that “[i]t is
not only important, but, in a degree necessary, that the people of this country,
should have an American Dictionary of the English Language; for, although the
body of the language is the same as in England, and it is desirable to perpetuate
that sameness, yet some differences must exist” (Webster 1828: vi-vii). This is
a reaction to the fact that in Britain American English was considered “a tract
[i.e. trace] of corruption” (Samuel Johnson, a prominent English lexicographer,
quoted in Martin 2019: 4).
Webster was a particularly noteworthy spelling reformer because some of his
suggestions have actually caught on – something most spelling reformers could
not boast of. It is thanks to Webster that the word colour is spelt as color in
American English: “we ought to reject u from honor, favor, candor, error, and
others of this class” (Webster 1806, cited in Shapiro & Lynch 2017: 435). He also
proposed to unify the spelling of word-final <er> and <re> under <er> (Webster
1806, cited in Shapiro & Lynch 2017: 434–435):

The present practice is not only contrary to the general uniformity observ-
able in words of this class, but is inconsistent with itself; for Peter, a proper
name, is always written in the English manner. Metre also retains its French
spelling, while the same word in composition, as in diameter, barometer,
and thermometer, is conformed to the English orthography. Such palpable
inconsistencies and preposterous anomalies do no honor to English litera-
ture, but very much perplex the student, and offend the man of taste ...

American English was, however, not a monolithic entity around the time of the
revolution, nor is it today, and nor was it prior to the revolution. To begin with,
there have always been various ethnic communities to consider. What probably
comes to our mind first are, on the one hand, the original inhabitants of North
America and, on the other, the settlers and other types of immigrants. It was
not just native speakers of English who came to settle the area that would later
become the United States of America. Specific areas of today’s US are still as-
sociated with influences of – for instance – French in New Orleans, German in
Pennsylvania and New York, Spanish in Florida, and West African languages in
the Lower South (Wolfram & Schilling-Estes 2015: chapter 4). Other important
nationalities in the sociolinguistic history of English include native speakers of
Italian, Norwegian, and Polish. To give one more specific example, Herold (1997)
suggests that the so-called COT-CAUGHT merger, whereby the vowels in words

66
 3.1 History and context

like cot and caught become identical, happened in specific regions of Pennsylva-
nia due to the influx of native Polish speakers in these regions.
In addition to a large number of speakers of languages other than English,
there were of course also immigrants from Britain and Ireland. Importantly, these
speakers did not speak the same dialect of English, as they came from various
parts of those countries. For instance, Wolfram & Schilling-Estes (2015: 104) men-
tion immigrants from Southeastern England coming to Jamestown and “some
two million immigrants of Scots-Irish descent”, who came to America in the 18th-
20th centuries. Moreover, “[i]t is estimated [...] that fully one in seven colonists
was Scots-Irish [by 1776]”. It is also important to realize that speakers from South-
eastern England were far from speaking a uniform variety of English, and the
same goes for speakers of English originating in Ireland and Scotland. Further
yet, even those who came from Britain and Ireland were not necessarily native
speakers of English, but may rather have been native speakers of Irish, Scottish
Gaelic, and Welsh.6 Furthermore, speakers of languages such as Irish, Scottish
Gaelic, and Welsh were religious dissenters, unlikely to (aspire to) speak RP.
We couldn’t possibly present a chapter on Late Modern English in North Amer-
ica without noting the presence of a numerous group of enslaved individuals
brought to North America. Interestingly for the development of African Ameri-
can English, the first generation of enslaved people spoke completely different
languages. American history is chequered with struggles for equality, and equal-
ity linked to one’s ethnicity in particular. The histories of African Americans,
the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas (who spoke yet other languages), and
other groups in North America present us with ample examples of discrimination.
For an example from recent films, see e.g. The Best of Enemies by Robin Bissell
from 2019, which depicts discriminatory behaviours towards African Americans.
Regarding academic research into linguistic discrimination, the seminal study by
Purnell et al. (1990) showed – like other studies focusing on a range of languages
and speakers – that one’s accent, such as African American English or Chicano
English, can negatively bias the listener. So, when one of the researchers on the
team called landlords using what may be seen as a “neutral” (i.e. standard) accent
in order to arrange an appointment, he was more likely to succeed than when he
adopted an African American English (AAE) accent or a Chicano English accent.
Today, AAE represents one of the traditionally studied varieties of English. It
differs from other varieties of English in a range of differences pertaining to all

6
That Celtic languages are indeed fairly different from English can be illustrated by a sentence
from Welsh: Beth hoffet ti fwyta? ‘What would you like to eat?’. See also §6.1.2 of chapter 6 for
more on Celtic influence in the history of English.

67
3 Late Modern English (1700–1945)

levels of language (see e.g. Green 2002, Wolfram & Schilling-Estes 2015: Chapter
7, and the chapters in Lanehart 2015).
A considerable amount of ink has been spilt over where AAE comes from ex-
actly. Wolfram & Schilling-Estes (2015: §8.3) review the mainstream hypotheses
about the origins of AAE and conclude that we are unlikely to reach a final an-
swer, at least at this stage. The major hypotheses are the Anglicist, the Creolist,
and the Substrate Hypotheses. According to the Anglicist Hypothesis, AAE can
be traced back to older stages of English, which it ultimately originates from. Ac-
cording to the Creolist Hypothesis, AAE started off as a pidgin and finally became
an English-based creole. Finally, the Substrate Hypothesis argues for a variety of
English with an uninterrupted line of descent from other, earlier stages of En-
glish, which has nonetheless been influenced by African languages. For much
more detail, we refer you to Wolfram & Schilling-Estes (2015: Chapter 7) and
Part 1 of Lanehart (2015).
AAE nevertheless represents one of many ethnolects found in North America
today as well as in the past. This is a good reminder that no introductory textbook
on the history of the English language can possibly cover all of the variation that
exists in the language. However, we hope to pique your interest and steer you in
at least some further directions here.7

Languages of the colonizers as languages of the most pow-

erful?
In the previous chapter, you may have read our pidgin and creole box.
If you haven’t, we recommend that you do so before engaging with this
box. As Smith & Kim (2019) point out, most of us will think of pidgins and
creoles containing linguistic aspects of English (or some other language
of the colonizers, such as Dutch and French). It is typically the language
of the more powerful group that serves as the main basis for a pidgin.
Because of the power dynamic between colonizers and the colonized dur-
ing British colonization, we might therefore expect English to form the
basis of all North American pidgin languages. However, it wasn’t always

7
We also recommend The hidden treasure of Black ASL: its history and structure by McCaskill
et al. (2011), which comes with a DVD, and the Talking Black in America documentary by Walt
Wolfram, Neal Hutcheson, and Danica Cullinan (https://www.talkingblackinamerica.org/).

68
 3.2 Sounds

the colonizers who represented the group whose language served as the
main basis for a pidgin. Pidgin Delaware presents an example of a pidgin
which originally developed out of contact between the indigenous people
of Delaware, North America, whose mother tongue provided the base of
the pidgin, and the Dutch colonizers.

Now that we have seen some of the main sociohistorical events relevant for Late
Modern English and their consequences for linguistic variation, we can proceed
to the specific linguistic phenomena characteristic of this thrilling period in the
history of English.

3.2 Sounds
We will first discuss two canonical examples of linguistic variables indicative of
the speaker’s class which saw rather interesting developments in the period of
Late Modern English. The first phenomenon is referred to as /h/-dropping and
the second as /r/-vocalization. We will also introduce you to what is known as
the FOOT-STRUT split, which originated in Late Modern English. However, as
we will see and as is often the case, the traces of these developments can be found
already in the periods preceding Late Modern English.

3.2.1 /h/-dropping: to drop or not to drop?

/h/-dropping refers to when a speaker does not pronounce an /h/ in words his-
torically pronounced with an /h/. When /h/-dropping takes place, words such as
house, hill, and hum are pronounced as /aʊs/, /ɪl/, and /ʌm/ rather than /haʊs/,
/hɪl/, and /hʌm/. In other words, the /h/ is deleted (or, indeed, dropped). English
/h/-dropping is a rather interesting phenomenon, especially if approached from
a historical point of view. First, the term is typically used to cover only instances
of word-initial /h/-dropping (or /h/-deletion) in lexical words and not grammati-
cal words (house vs. has), but only if the /h/ is found in a stressed syllable.8 This
does not mean, however, that we do not come across /h/-deletion in grammati-
cal words, such as his, him, and her.9 As we will see in Chapter 5, dropping one’s

8
And grammatical words are often unstressed.
9
If you ever wondered where the English ’em comes from, as in Track ’em, find ’em, kill ’em
from the film Expendables 2 (2012), it does not come from them but an older pronoun used for
the third person plural: hem (more in §5.3.3 on them and hem). Hem [hɛm] changed to [ɛm] ∼
[əm], which gives us the spelling variant <’em>.

69
3 Late Modern English (1700–1945)

/h/s in grammatical words is a fairly old phenomenon. In Present Day English all
English speakers are bound to drop their /h/s in grammatical words. Grammat-
ical words are well-known for such reductions: for example, the preposition to
is frequently reduced to [tə] or even just [t]. /h/-deletion in grammatical words
therefore shouldn’t come as a surprise – it’s just one of the many possible reduc-
tions relevant for grammatical words. So now we know that the phenomenon
called /h/-dropping, at least in the history of English, typically refers to word-
initial deletion of /h/ in the stressed syllables of lexical words.10
There is nevertheless a rather important difference between /h/-deletion re-
lated to lexical as opposed to grammatical words. Deleting one’s /h/s in gram-
matical words goes pretty much unnoticed (e.g. Barber 1964: 56). On the other
hand, /h/-deletion in lexical words, or in stressed grammatical words, is stigma-
tized. So, in an article on Tony Blair’s pronunciation, a commentary raises the
following questions: “But joking aside, where were the Prime Minister’s T’s?
What happened to his H’s?” (Lyall 1998).
Dropping one’s /h/s was heavily stigmatized in Late Modern English. We can
find instances of /h/-dropping in the earlier periods (as we shall see in §5.2.3
of Chapter 5), but it is in Late Modern English that /h/-dropping becomes one
of the hallmarks of perceived pronunciation inadequacy. We have already seen
that a manual existed devoted solely to the Poor letter H: its use and abuse, for
dropping one’s /h/s could be seen as social suicide (!) at the time (Mugglestone
2003: 4). Beal (2004: 159) dates the stigmatization of word-initial /h/-dropping to
the latter half of the 18th century, which is in line with Strang (1970: 81).
As we go back in time, however, we need to make the discussion a little bit
more nuanced. The words mentioned above, house, hill, and hum, are all of Ger-
manic origin. In other words, they have been part of the English language since
its emergence. As we will discuss in detail in Chapter 5, the period of Middle
English (1150–1500) saw a great influx of words of French origin. Present Day
French words spelt with <h>, as in honneur ‘honour’ and hommage ‘homage’, do
not reflect the fact that there is no /h/ in the pronunciation – as is also the case in
the English equivalents, all loans from French. Importantly, in words of French
origin, it was desirable not to pronounce the /h/ as written, as this was what
was done in French pronunciation, and French was socially prestigious. By the
time of Late Modern English, this may have led to confusion if you did not speak
French and/or if you did not use words of French origin, especially those typi-
cally associated with learned vocabulary as well. It was also – if not primarily –
because of this that manuals and dictionaries for native speakers were available
10
However, Beal (2004: 157), for instance, uses /h/-dropping to also cover the merger of /w/ and
/ʍ/, resulting in Wales and whales sounding alike. See Chapters 1 and 5 for more details.

70
 3.2 Sounds

at the time, in which users could consult whether or not a specific word should be
pronounced with an /h/. Some such examples are for instance Walker’s Walker
remodelled: a new critical pronouncing dictionary and James Elphinston’s Princi-
ples of the English language digested: or, English grammar reduced to analogy. In
Two Volumes.11
Over time, some words that had historically no /h/ nevertheless acquired an
/h/ in standard English, such as herb, from the Old French erbe.12 Interestingly,
whilst in American English the typical pronunciation is the more conservative
/h/-less one, [ɜːɹb], what we find in standard British English is the more inno-
vative version containing an /h/, [hɜːb]. Other words originally lacking an /h/
include hospital, hotel, and humble (Mugglestone 2003: 145, 148). In some cases,
there is still variation within a single regional variety, as in the case of historic
[hɪstɒɹɪk] ∼ [ɪstɒɹɪk].
The phenomenon of /h/-dropping enables us to introduce the concept of hy-
percorrection. If you are someone who drops their /h/s, as in words such as
harm [ɑːm], and you live in a society in which such /h/-dropping is stigmatized,
you might start doing your best to make sure that you do not drop your /h/s as
that affords you certain social benefits. However, this might pose certain chal-
lenges. In the pronunciation of a regular /h/-dropper, words such as harm and
arm sound the same. If you then attempt to avoid /h/-dropping as someone who
can’t necessarily tell which words do or do not have a historical /h/, you might
overdo it by introducing the /h/ also in words that historically do not have this
phoneme, as in arm [hɑːm]. In hypercorrection, then, the prestigious variant
is overused rather than underused. Thus, /h/-dropping-related hypercorrection
manifests itself by inserting /h/s in new contexts because it’s better to be safe
than sorry. Hypercorrection is nevertheless by no means limited to /h/-dropping!

Even Latin speakers /h/-dropped

Latin was often viewed as the language to look up to. Interestingly, how-
ever, Minkova (2014: 106) mentions an example of /h/-dropping in Latin
texts written by Saint Augustine, from the period 354–430. Even Latin
speakers /h/-dropped! Would this make the prescriptivists turn in their
graves, we wonder?

11
But see Feddema (2013), who disagrees with the theory that /h/-dropping may have been due
to contact with French.
12
The Present Day French form is herbe.
71
3 Late Modern English (1700–1945)

3.2.2 /r/
One of the features that distinguishes most British and American English accents
is rhoticity [ɹəʊˈtɪsɪtɪ]. Accents can be rhotic ([ɹəʊtɪk] ∼ [ɹɒtɪk]), non-rhotic, or
somewhere in between. What does it mean for an accent to be rhotic or non-
rhotic? If you speak with a rhotic accent, any time you see an <r> in the ortho-
graphic representation of a word, you indeed also have an /r/ of some sort in your
pronunciation of that word. However, this is not the case for non-rhotic speak-
ers. Thus, if we think of words with a postvocalic /r/, such as car, cart, card, far,
and fart, the transcription relevant for accents such as Standard Southern British
English would simply ignore the /r/s implied by the orthography, because SSBE
speakers do not have these postvocalic /r/s in their accents: /kɑː/, /kɑːt/, /kɑːd/,
/fɑː/, /fɑːt/.
Although Present Day American English is generally known as rhotic and
British English as non-rhotic, the situation is not that straightforward. In today’s
British English, Scottish English is rhotic, as is the English we find in Northern
Ireland. Welsh English and English English, on the other hand, are known as
non-rhotic. But even this is simplistic. We do find certain regions in England
associated with rhotic accents, such as some parts of Cornwall and Blackburn.
Similarly, some speakers of Welsh English may pronounce postvocalic /r/s as a
result of their L1, since all <r>s are pronounced as such in Welsh. Finally, Scottish
English has been recently reported to be losing its postvocalic /r/s in certain
regions and strata of the society (Stuart-Smith, Lawson, et al. 2013).
Not surprisingly, American English also presents us with variation in terms of
rhoticity. New York English has been traditionally known for being non-rhotic
(see what Woody Allen does, for example, in Exercise 12), although this has been
changing in the course of the 20th and the 21st centuries (Becker 2014), with
rhoticity becoming more and more established. Boston is another area tradition-
ally associated with non-rhoticity. However, similarly to NY English, rhoticity
has also been making inroads in this variety and increasing in frequency (Nagy
& Irwin 2010). Such changes from a primarily non-rhotic to a rhotic variety might
present us with interesting cases of hypercorrection. Figure 3.2 shows a spelling
of the word souvenir which contains an <r> (<sourvenir>), which is very sugges-
tive of the author overusing postvocalic /r/s, and thus of hypercorrection. Finally
(for the purposes of this chapter), non-rhoticity is one of the phonological fea-
tures associated with AAE (e.g. Becker 2014 and Thomas 2007). The non-rhoticity
of AAE is rather interesting in that we can also find the absence of /r/ intervo-
calically, as in [flɑəɾə] for Florida (Thomas 2007: 454).

72
 3.2 Sounds

Figure 3.2: sourvenirs in Boston, Massachusetts, US; photo taken by our

colleague Kamil Kaźmierski in 2019

To sum up, rhoticity is more complex than a simple division between rhotic
and non-rhotic accents. First, we find variation within specific varieties, and sec-
ondly even speakers from the same region can show variation. Even single indi-
viduals can be sometimes rhotic and sometimes non-rhotic, depending on a range
of social and language-internal factors (see Becker (2014) for a nice overview of
the relevant social constraints).13

13
As you may know by now from your English phonetics and phonology classes, we also find
plenty of variation in how those /r/s that are pronounced by English speakers are realized
phonetically. We find a plethora of variants, including a voiced approximant [ɹ], a labio-dental
approximant [ʋ], a retroflex approximant [ɻ], an alveolar trill [r], and a uvular fricative [ʁ]. If

73
3 Late Modern English (1700–1945)

Where does all this variation come from? And why have we just spent so
much space discussing Present Day English variation in rhoticity in a chapter
on Late Modern English? As you may have just guessed, it is the Late Modern
English period which – to an extent – holds the key to our understanding of
just what has happened to English /r/ and the reasons for its current state in
Present Day English. Similarly to /h/-dropping, Late Modern English speakers
first started vocalizing just some of their /r/s. When American English was being
established as a variety of English, English in Britain, the island of Ireland, and
North America was a rhotic English. This started changing in England, where
postvocalic /r/ first began to weaken to a schwa /ʃwɑː/. It could be, and ultimately
was, deleted altogether in many (though not all) accents.
Certain communities in North America were looking up to Britain, and tended
to adopt Britain-oriented norms. As a result, non-rhoticity was the prestigious
norm in these communities, which lasted variably throughout the 20th century
(Becker 2014: 142). However, some of the earliest studies that investigated the
use of this variable highlighted the complexity of the situation and the extent
to which standard language is an arbitrary concept. Labov (1966) showed that
postvocalic /r/ in New York English, a traditionally non-rhotic variety, was as-
sociated with prestige at the time of his study. This contrasts with the prestige
that non-rhoticity had in NY earlier, and it also contrasts with areas such as
Charleston, where the absence of /r/ was also seen as prestigious originally.14 In
a nutshell, what we end up with is roughly this: in NY it was rhoticity that ended
up being seen as prestigious, whereas it was the opposite, non-rhoticity, which
had been established as the norm to aspire to in English English (Montgomery
2001: 139).
This is somewhat ironic, considering that /r/-lessness was stigmatized when it
made its first appearance in England: “[m]any writers (and speakers) [...] seemed
to cultivate an ostrich-like mentality, resolutely refusing to acknowledge that
such a change had taken place, or that, if it had, it had done so only in the most
vulgar of surroundings” (Mugglestone 2003: 99). When the weakening of /r/ was
first noticed in English in the 18th century, it was commented on negatively:

But if this letter [i.e. the letter <r>] is too forcibly pronounced in Ireland,
it is often too feebly pronounced in England, and particularly in London,
where it is sometimes entirely sunk. (Walker 1791: 51, in Beal 2004: 153)
interested in Present Day English /r/s, see Wells (1982c). We will revisit this issue briefly in
Chapter 6.
14
Similarly to what Labov has shown for NY English, Baranowski (2006: Chapter 4) shows that
rhoticity has won the day in Charleston as well.

74
 3.2 Sounds

It was stigmas of this sort which were used to hound Keats, whose rhymes
of thorns/fawns, and thoughts/sorts contravened popular notions of correct-
ness [...], even if they did agree with the realities of linguistic usage at the
time. Keats’s use of aural rather than visual authority in his poetry was,
however, typically to bring censure rather than praise. (Mugglestone 2003:
101–102)

Beal (2004: 154) provides contemporary evidence of manuals on ‘good’ pronun-

ciation of the times that points to a continuing stigmatization of /r/-vocalization
also “throughout most of the nineteenth century”. As said earlier, changes of this
type are often dormant in a language, and this was also the case with post-vocalic
/r/.15

Linking and intrusive /r/

We need to at least touch upon two phenomena related to /r/, which are
relevant only for non-rhotic varieties of English and whose origin is tied
to that of the origin of non-rhoticity. The first is known as linking /r/
and the second as intrusive /r/. Linking /r/ is not stigmatized and refers
to when postvocalic /r/s are pronounced despite the accent’s usual non-
rhoticity. These linking /r/s are pronounced when a postvocalic /r/, as in
car, is followed by another vowel, which is part of the following word, as
in The car I like. [ðəˈkɑːɹaɪˈlaɪk]. Intrusive /r/, on the other hand, is stigma-
tized (Minkova 2014: 127): in Present Day English, it is to a large extent
through the knowledge of how English words are supposed to be spelt
that speakers can know whether there is an underlying /r/ which can
resurface as a linking /r/. However, speakers do not have historical memo-
ries that go beyond their own lifespan. This sometimes results in inserting
a “linking” /r/ where this “linking” /r/ has no business to be, so to speak.
The most famous instance of this intrusive /r/ can be seen in the pronun-
ciation of Law and Order as [lɔːɹənɔːdə] – as we can see, the spelling does
not suggest that there has ever been an /r/ in law historically, which is
indeed the case. Intrusive /r/ is another example of hypercorrection.

15
See Minkova (2014) for some early examples attested already in Old English (600–1150).

75
3 Late Modern English (1700–1945)

So far, we’ve focused on two consonantal features very relevant for Late Modern
English, as well as Present Day English. The last phonological feature we will
focus on, the so-called FOOT-STRUT split, is related to the vowel system of
English.

3.2.3 FOOT-STRUT split

An important phonological change that took place in Late Modern English is the
FOOT-STRUT split. But first of all, what is a split? A split refers to the process
whereby a language acquires a new phoneme (phoneme B), which develops from
an already existing phoneme (phoneme A). However, it is not the case that the
phonetic realization of phoneme A simply changes to another realization, real-
ization B (as in [A] > [B]). In the new situation, we get the new B, but we still
get the older A, thus /A/ > /A/ as well as /B/, and /A/ and /B/ are contrastive.
In standard varieties of English, the words foot and strut are pronounced with
two different phonemes: e.g. /fʊt/ and /stɹʌt/. That the vowels /ʊ/ and /ʌ/ are
indeed two phonemes is nevertheless more visible if we compare words such as
put /pʊt/ and putt /pʌt/, look /lʊk/ and luck /lʌk/, or book /bʊk/ and buck /bʌk/.
If we replace one with the other, we get a different word, not just a phonetic
variant of the same word.
Before the FOOT-STRUT split happened, the words that now contain the /ʌ/
phoneme, as in strut (STRUT), used to have the same phoneme as words such as
foot (FOOT). Words such as FOOT used to have an /oː/ vowel (/foːt/), which – as
we will see in Chapter 4 – underwent a change to /uː/ in Early Modern English
(/fuːt/). In Late Modern English, this vowel was then shortened and laxed into
an /ʊ/ (/fʊt/). Words such as STRUT, until Late Modern English, did not experi-
ence quite that much vocalic excitement: the STRUT vowel remained phonolog-
ically stable and reflected an /u ∼ ʊ/. Thus, by the time of Late Modern English,
FOOT and STRUT came to contain the same vowel phoneme: /u ∼ ʊ/. However,
although this change is reflected in most varieties of English, there are still ac-
cents in which we find the pre-split situation. Northern England varieties typi-
cally show FOOT and STRUT with the same vowel phoneme category, /ʊ/ (see
for instance Baranowski & Turton 2018 or Strycharczuk et al. 2019), and these
two words therefore rhyme in the varieties in question (e.g. /fʊt/ and /strʊt/).
This is also the case for some Irish accents, such as that spoken in Dublin (Wells
1982c: 422).

76
 3.3 Morphology

The social life of STRUT

The exact phonetic relation of STRUT is subject to variation in Present
Day English varieties. For example, even in the north of England, there
are speakers who do have two vowel categories for FOOT and STRUT, but
they may reflect a vowel quality in STRUT somewhere in between that of
FOOT (/ʊ/) and that of the Standard Southern British English (SSBE) /ʌ/
(Chambers & Trudgill 1998: 111, and also Baranowski & Turton 2018). Irish
accents have been noted to have a more centralized quality of STRUT than
SSBE and RP (Wells 1982c: 421). Interestingly, Irish English and Northern
England English are not the only varieties of English that differ in their
phonetic realization of STRUT from RP and SSBE. Welsh English tends
to show a [ə] in the STRUT words (Hejná 2018a; Wells 1982c: 383). And
things definitely do not end here as regards the phonetic and phonological
variation of STRUT.

3.3 Morphology
Language change, especially if related to the structural properties of a language
rather than for example newly coined lexical items, has been said to show “long
stretches of dormancy” (Strang 1970: 96). What this means is that, very frequently,
seeds of a change can be found in the language centuries before the change be-
comes particularly noticeable: it often takes centuries for changes to complete.
That this is indeed the case is something we will see repeatedly in the remainder
of this book. In this particular section, however, we focus on negative contrac-
tion and the history of what is known as the subjunctive. Both of the changes
discussed have drawn hostile comments from prescriptivists over the years.

3.3.1 Negative contraction

In the sentence You shouldn’t do that!, do you think that shouldn’t is one word
or two? Decide what you think before reading further. Don’t base your answer
just on the spelling – that’s only one part of the story.
The answer you have arrived at probably depends on what you think the status
of the Present Day English negative morpheme -n’t is. Under one view, -n’t is an

77
3 Late Modern English (1700–1945)

inflectional suffix, part of the single word shouldn’t – and therefore belongs to
the domain of (inflectional) morphology.16 Under the other view, -n’t is a clitic, a
form of the word not that just happens to be phonologically reduced and attached
to the end of the modal should – and therefore we’re really dealing with two
separate syntactic words here, should not.
In this book we deal with syntax and morphology in separate sections of each
chapter. However, in real life, the boundary between syntax and morphology is
not always that clear. The morpheme -n’t is one such case, and part of the fun
of linguistics is to look beyond the surface in order to figure out what’s really
going on in cases like these. The use of -n’t rather than not is usually called
negative contraction. Linguists have developed a range of tests to figure out
whether elements like -n’t are inflectional affixes or clitics. The traditional view
(e.g. Zwicky 1969) is that -n’t is a clitic. Zwicky & Pullum (1983), however, look
in depth at this morpheme, apply the linguistic tests, and come to the conclusion
that it is in fact an inflectional suffix.
One test pointing in this direction (among many) is the fact that the base to
which -n’t attaches displays some pretty weird behaviour. It’s easy to see how
you can get from should to shouldn’t: a simple rule of “add -n’t” will do the
trick. But what about will and won’t? Here you can’t simply “add -n’t”, because
that would give you the ungrammatical form *willn’t. But there’s no word *wo
meaning ‘will’, either. So we’re forced to treat will and won’t as two different
inflectional forms of the same word.17 Zwicky & Pullum’s paper contains several
other arguments all pointing in the same direction: Present Day English -n’t is
an affix, not a clitic.
The forms with -n’t are found only with the auxiliaries: have, be, do and the
modals (on which see §4.4.1). They’re not possible with ordinary lexical verbs:
*playn’t, *eatn’t, *goesn’t, for instance, are not found. The -n’t forms rose to
prominence during the Late Modern English period, as shown in Figure 3.3. This
figure is based on the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts (Diller et al. 2011),
which contains texts by British authors from between 1710 and 1920 split into
three 70-year periods.18 Initially, we can see that don’t is far ahead of all the
other contractions, but by the final period other contractions are catching up.
16
For the distinction between inflectional morphology and word-formation, see §1.2.2.
17
We can make the same argument using do and don’t, though this time it’s not obvious from the
spelling. Remember, letters are not sounds – see §1.2.1! In British English, these are pronounced
[duː] and [dəʊnt] respectively (American English [duː] and [doʊnt]). This is not what you’d
expect from simply sticking [duː] and [nt] together.
18
This figure is inspired by, and replicates findings presented in, Nakamura (2012), using a dif-
ferent data source.

78
 3.3 Morphology

don't

60%

won't

40%
% contraction

can't
haven't
shouldn't
shan't
mustn't
doesn't
wouldn't
20% hasn't
isn't
couldn't
mayn't
aren't
mightn't

0%

1710-1780 1780-1850 1850-1920

Date

Figure 3.3: Negative contraction as a proportion of use (e.g. should not

vs. shouldn’t) during the Late Modern English period. Data from CL-
MET 3 (Diller et al. 2011).

Of course, we have to be careful with this evidence, as standardization and

prescriptivism probably meant that the innovative spelling -n’t lagged far behind
contraction in speech in terms of rate of use.
The data shown in Figure 3.3 suggests that -n’t probably wasn’t always an
inflectional suffix. During the period 1710–1780, we see that the only contractions
that occur more than five percent of the time were the ones whose stem ended in
a vowel, a nasal or a liquid (do, will, can, shall), with other contractions virtually
nonexistent. This apparent phonological conditioning suggests that in this early
period we’re dealing with a clitic after all, which only later became an affix. Clitics
becoming affixes is a common pathway of language change cross-linguistically:
it’s part of a process called grammaticalization (see §1.4.5), and changes in
which two separate words become a single word are referred to as univerbation.
We’ll see several more examples of this kind of change throughout the book.

79
3 Late Modern English (1700–1945)

Ain’t
The negative contraction ain’t – as in If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it – re-
mains one of the most stigmatized words in the English language as far
as prescriptivists are concerned, even though it is found in almost every
known variety of English (Anderwald 2012: 311–316). It’s exceptionally
prevalent in American English, but also found to a great extent in tradi-
tional British English dialects, and to a lesser extent in varieties of English
elsewhere (e.g. New Zealand). Needless to say, there’s nothing logically or
aesthetically wrong with it. Ain’t can mostly be used as a negated form
of BE or HAVE. Especially in African American English, it also replaces
didn’t, as in I ain’t shut my eyes last night (Howe 1997). Like other nega-
tive contractions, ain’t really gained ground during the Late Modern En-
glish period. You can find out more about ain’t in the papers in Donaher
& Katz (2015). And if you wonder where it comes from, let’s just say it
belongs to the same historical stem as Present Day English am.

3.3.2 The “subjunctive”

Take a look at the following sentences of Present Day English:

(1) It is important that he leave.

(2) It is important that he leaves.
(3) It is important that he should leave.

All three sentences mean roughly the same thing, but the form of the verb is
different. In example (1) there is no third person singular ending on the verb
leave, unlike in (2). Meanwhile, in (3) there’s a modal, should.
Sentences like (1) are sometimes said to contain a morphological subjunc-
tive, but this is misleading. The term “subjunctive” has its origins in the tra-
ditional grammar of classical languages like Latin and Greek. In languages like
these, verbs have special morphological forms – inflections – that indicate the
speaker’s attitude to what they are saying. This is called mood, and moods com-
monly found in European languages include the indicative, the subjunctive and
the imperative. Generally, in these languages the subjunctive is used to express

80
 3.3 Morphology

irrealis meaning: the speaker is not committing themselves to the truth of the
statement. In German, for example, the usual third person singular form of the
verb sein ‘be’ is ist ‘is’, but the special subjunctive form is sei. The form ist is in-
dicative, which is the normal mood used most of the time without any special
meaning.
Unlike Greek, Latin, French or German, English doesn’t have any special mor-
phological forms for mood, including the subjunctive. Instead, “subjunctive” sen-
tences like (1) just contain the default form of the verb – it’s always the same as
the verb’s infinitive form. This is made clear when we look at examples (4)–(6),
containing forms of BE.
(4) It is important that he be good.
(5) It is important that he is good.
(6) It is important that he should be good.
Example (4) contains the non-finite form be. That is, since English doesn’t have
any distinct morphological subjunctive inflection, it doesn’t make much sense
to say that English has a subjunctive under the traditional, morphological inter-
pretation of the term.19 Does it make sense to say that Present Day English has
a subjunctive at all, then? In the Cambridge grammar of the English language,
Huddleston & Pullum (2002: 88) make it clear that they use the term “subjunc-
tive” for a syntactic construction, and not for a morphological mood (see also
Aarts 2011). What Huddleston & Pullum (2002) call the subjunctive construction
is found exclusively in finite embedded clauses.20 Other linguists prefer to abol-
ish the term entirely in English grammar (Palmer 1988). This option is tempting,
as there are few things that annoy prescriptivists more than telling them that
English doesn’t have a subjunctive! In the rest of this book, though, we’ll use the
term subjunctive construction, following Huddleston & Pullum (2002). This
term has the advantage of capturing the historical link with subjunctive mor-
phology while making it clear that we are dealing with a syntactic construction
in today’s English.
19
It’s possible, of course, to argue that English does have a morphological subjunctive, and that
its forms just happen to be written and pronounced in exactly the same way as the infinitive.
But this is a pretty weird way of thinking, and is motivated only by the desire to shoehorn
the English language into grammatical categories that were developed for Latin and Greek.
Perhaps a better way of thinking about it is provided by Roberts (1985: 40–42): clauses like (1)
and (4) contain a modal which is unpronounced. This accounts for the fact that such clauses
behave like other finite clauses while the verb form itself appears to be non-finite.
20
Apart from a few fixed phrases, such as Long live the king!. Huddleston & Pullum (2002: 87)
argue that “irrealis were”, as in If I were you, is a different phenomenon, not part of the sub-
junctive construction; see their book for details.

81
3 Late Modern English (1700–1945)

There is variation in the use of subjunctive constructions like (1) and (4). To the
authors of this book, they sound clunky, and they belong only to a high, formal
register – we much prefer the alternatives (3) and (6) with should. Regional vari-
ation in the use of this subjunctive construction has long been recognized, and
in general the subjunctive construction is usually considered to be much more
characteristic of American English than of British English. Over the last forty or
so years, empirical studies have shown that this is indeed the case (Johansson
1980, Algeo 1992, Övergaard 1995, Hundt 1998a,b, 2009, Leech et al. 2009). Other
varieties, such as Australian English and New Zealand English, have generally
been shown to behave more like American English than like British English in
favouring the subjunctive construction (Hundt 1998a,b, Peters 1998, 2009). Here
are some examples from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies
2008):

(7) When your child is tense, suggest that he sit down for a few minutes and
take slow, deep breaths.
(8) the fact that he’s an associate with Barack Obama demands that he be
scrutinized and questioned by the American people.
(9) But what’s important is that he be elected governor and Kirsten be elected
Senator.
(10) His right eye was swollen almost completely shut. I asked that he be given
some medical attention.

What is striking is that, in both American English and British English, the fre-
quency of the subjunctive construction (as opposed to the use of the normal fi-
nite verb or a modal such as should) has actually increased during the twentieth
century. One recent corpus-based study, Waller (2017), looks at texts from both
British and American English from four time points: 1931, 1961, 1991 and 2006. In
American English the major increase in use of the subjunctive construction took
place between 1931 and 1961, while in British English it took place later, between
1961 and 1991. The change in British English during this period did not go un-
noticed, with one influential British usage guide (Gowers 1986: 139) stating that
“[i]t is remarkable [...] that under the influence of American English the use of
the subjunctive is creeping back into British English”. Waller (2017) also consid-
ers it plausible that American English influence was a factor in the increasing
use of the subjunctive construction in British English.
It would be inappropriate to end this section without a spoiler as to what you’ll
see later. Though modern English doesn’t have a morphological subjunctive at

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 3.4 Syntax

all, when we go back as far as Middle and Old English, there are verb forms that
we can justifiably call subjunctives. Read on and find out!

3.4 Syntax
We will discuss two syntactic phenomena: the rise of the progressive construc-
tion and the rise of a group of verbal constructions that could be called semi-
modals. Just like the morphological phenomena discussed above, both of these
changes have been targeted by the complaint tradition.

3.4.1 Progressive
The emergence of the progressive, and its uses in various constructions, is a syn-
tactic change that marks the Late Modern English period. The progressive con-
struction refers to the BE V+ing construction, as in examples (11)–(17).

(11) The bumblebees are searching for some yummy flowers.

(12) The bumblebees were searching for some yummy flowers yesterday, too.
(13) The bumblebees will surely be searching for even more yummy flowers in
the times to come (providing bumblebees don’t become extinct).
(14) The bears have been trying to find something for their tummy all day.
(15) The bumblebees had been searching for yummies when we got to the
meadow.
(16) Míša is obsessing about bumblebees again.
(17) I’m just being funny.

This construction is also referred to as the progressive tense/aspect and the con-
tinuous tense/aspect, with the exact term dependent on the particular academic
source you may be using. Broadly speaking, the progressive construction is used
for events that are (or were) in progress or ongoing.
You may be wondering why we are bringing your attention to the progressive,
considering all the phenomena discussed so far have been somehow linked to the
topic of prescriptivism. The progressive is something we don’t really consciously
think about that much today when it comes to any stigma possibly attached to
it, perhaps with the exception of the infamous I’m lovin’ it made widely known
by McDonalds. The general absence of negative comments on the progressive in
Present Day English does not represent how the construction fared throughout

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its entire history, though. Progressives first start occurring at higher frequencies
in subordinate clauses in the first half of the 18th century. They start proliferating
in main clauses as well as subordinate clauses in the second half of the 18th
century (Beal 2004: 78).
It is not, however, just the frequency at which
we can find the progressive in the materials from
Late Modern English that signals a change. What
started changing about the progressive in this pe-
riod was also the range of its uses. For one thing, an
increasing number of specific verbs started occur-
ring in the progressive form. Verbs describing the
scene were particularly prone to being used in this
form. For example, Jane Austen was linguistically
progressive when she adopted the progressive form
in her works in her time, as evidenced in the follow-
ing example:
Figure 3.4: Jane Austen
(18) a water party; and by some accident she was
falling overboard (Emma, 1816: Chapter 8)

As Beal (2004: 79) further comments on this example, “Strang (1970) suggests
that Austen used the progressive experimentally in her novels. In this example,
the effect is to involve the reader in watching the action as it happens, almost
as an ‘action replay’. [... I]n Austen’s time [this construction] flouted received
views on grammar and logic”.
Progressives first start appearing in the active voice: it
is only later that the progressive passive starts appearing
as well. Thus, “in 1700 constructions such as The house is
being built were ungrammatical but by 1900 they were
normal” (Beal 2004: 66). Its rise takes place gradually be-
tween the end of the 18th century and the middle of the
20th (Hundt 2004). The use of the progressive passive was
still looked upon with a disapproving eye by some in the
first half of the 20th century. It was considered not only Figure 3.5: Location
“clumsy” (Beal 2004: 82) but also “barbarous”, “despicable”, of the Lake District,
place of residence of
and “in bad taste”, and criticism of the progressive pas- the Lake Poets. (Map
sive was particularly vitriolic in America (Anderwald 2014), by Nilfanion based
on OS data, licensed
though today it is not considered objectionable even by the under CC-BY-SA 3.0)
crustiest of prescriptivists.

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 3.4 Syntax

Jane Austen was not the only innovative member of the literati. Pratt & Deni-
son (2001) show that the Southey-Coleridge cirle (the Lake Poets),21 who formed
a close-knit type of group, were some of the first to use the progressive passive,
with the earliest examples dating to the second half of the 18th century. Pratt &
Denison (2001: 416) argue that

In the politicised English literary world of the decades around 1800, with its
aggressive reviews, often highly critical about diction, it is certainly possible
that consciously or otherwise, groups of literary people might have wanted
to distance themselves from other, older and more conservative groups.

So, the progressive passive may have served as a marker of a group identity, this
group identity being that of the Lake Poets, young individuals, and those with
political views similar to those of the Lake Poets. It is also not surprising then that
this linguistic innovation was seen as “monstrous” by many, particularly those
who did not belong to this group and who did not share the same worldviews.22

I’m lovin’ it
To the disapproval of some, in 2003 McDonald’s released an advertis-
ing campaign with the slogan I’m lovin’ it.a Is this evidence of language
change? Are we observing the same type of disapproval that the progres-
sive passive received in Late Modern English? Freund (2016) conducted an
analysis including a range of methodological approaches and found that
it is specific verbs, love and think, that are being used more frequently in
the progressive in Present Day English. Anderwald (2017), using corpus
data from historical and Present Day American English, also proposes that
the rise of the progressive with love is due to a change in the meaning of
love, which is becoming semantically bleached to yield a meaning more
like ‘like’ or ‘enjoy’. Both Freund (2016) and Anderwald (2017) argue that
it is not the whole class of stative verbs that has been experiencing the
rise of the progressive as such. Furthermore, the now famous I’m lovin’ it

21
The members included Dorothy and William Wordsworth, Robert Southey, Samuel Taylor Co-
leridge, Charles and Mary Lamb, and Mary and Percy Shelley.
22
See Pratt & Denison (2001: 418–419) and van Bergen (2013) if you want to know more.

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3 Late Modern English (1700–1945)

phrase associated with McEnglishb in fact shows patterns attested already

in early 19th-century English (Aarts et al. 2010: 162–163).
a
See http://www.macmillandictionaryblog.com/lovin-it.
b
See https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=McEnglish.

3.4.2 Semi-modals
Do you use verbal constructions such as those found in the following examples?

(19) I’m going to/gonna do some bumblebee spotting.

(20) Do you want to/wanna come?
(21) You have to/hafta know all about bumblebees.
(22) You’ve got to/gotta love bumblebees.

Congratulations, you’re a user of semi-modal constructions! As the name implies,

semi-modal verbs can behave like true modals (modal auxiliaries) in some ways,
but not in others. A fuller discussion of the auxiliaries can be found in the next
chapter (§4.4.1), so here we keep it brief.
The verbs be, have, and do are auxiliaries, and here are some examples:

(23) Are you looking forward to reading more about semi-modals?

(24) Have you ever heard that the word corgi originates in Welsh? (It means ‘a
dwarf-dog’.)
(25) Did you know that the word penguin may originate from the Welsh pen
gwyn ‘white head’?

These three verbs are used to form various types of periphrastic tense and aspect
constructions, like the progressive discussed above. In addition to these three
auxiliaries, there are also modal auxiliaries, such as can, will, and must, as in
(26) below. These English modals share a number of morphological and syntactic
properties, and all belong to the semantic domain of modality, which is concerned
with possibility, necessity, ability, desire, and obligation. The history and current
status of these “true” modals are discussed in §5.4.2.

(26) Can we tempt you with another example about bumblebees?

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 3.4 Syntax

Another construction that increased in frequency in the Late Modern English

period is semi-modals. Semi-modals (also known as quasi-modals or emerging
modals) have modal meanings, like true modals. The core semi-modals are have
to (or hafta), (have) got to (or gotta), want to (or wanna), and going to (or gonna).
Another semi-modal found in some varieties is fixing to (or finna).
The semi-modals share some syntactic properties with the true modals: for in-
stance, unlike most normal lexical verbs, they occur with a following non-finite
verb, as in (19)–(22) above. However, they do not behave quite the same way
regarding their morphosyntax as modal auxiliaries do. Perhaps the most impor-
tant difference is that, while auxiliaries can be found in front of the subject as
in (19)–(26) (e.g. Can we ...), this is never possible with semi-modals, as (27)–(30)
show.

(27) *Going to/Gonna I do some bumblebee spotting?

(28) *Want to/Wanna you come?
(29) *Have to/Hafta you know all about bumblebees?
(30) *Got to/Gotta you love bumblebees?

So the semi-modals have a liminal status: they don’t behave totally like lexical
verbs, but they don’t fit in as auxiliaries either. Krug (2000) suggests that they
form a group on their own.23
The history of going to has been abundantly researched. Like the history of
negative contraction, discussed in §3.3.1, it’s a typical example of grammatical-
ization. The first instance of this construction used as a marker of intention and
futurity (rather than as a simple lexical verb of motion) is dated to 1482. However,
it was not until the mid-17th century that its frequency as a future marker started
to increase, and it was not until the end of the 18th century (i.e. Late Modern En-
glish) that it became “firmly entrenched in usage” (Poplack & Tagliamonte 2000:
318–319). In Present Day English, it is the second most frequent future marker
(Poplack & Tagliamonte 2000: 319), at least in standard Englishes. The traditional
textbook account of the historical trajectory of going to is the following:

1. First we get a verb of motion used in the present progressive (I’m going to
town).

23
Other potential members of the group include need (to) and dare (to), and fixing to. To keep
things relatively simple, we’ll focus on the five that are mentioned in the main text, but we’ll
come back to fixing to later in this section.

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3 Late Modern English (1700–1945)

2. Then we start seeing a verbal construction indicating a goal/intention/de-

termination (Some day somehow I’m gonna make it alright but not right
now, as in Nickelback’s 2003 song titled Someday).

3. Finally, we see a verbal construction indicating a prediction, e.g. Am I really

gonna go sixty years without cancer again? (Rees 2017).

The contracted form, gonna, has received some negative criticism from prescrip-
tivists, especially in writing: Lorenz (2012: 2) reports the claim that “there is no
word ‘gonna’”. As we know, though, what makes a word a word is whether peo-
ple use it as such, and the spelling gonna is much closer to the usual pronuncia-
tion than going to is. Like gotta, wanna and hafta, the semi-modal gonna is very
well established in Present Day English.
Krug (2000) shows that the semi-modals – or “emerging modals”, as he prefers
to call them – underwent a cluster of rapid changes between 1850 and 1950, even
if this is not always reflected in the word’s spelling. For instance, it’s basically
impossible to insert anything between the body of the verb and to, e.g. *I’m going
soon to be sick or *I want quickly to come. This shows that the to has become
univerbated with the body of the verb, and that they now form a single word
in most Englishes – similarly to what we saw with negative contraction in §3.3.1
above.
As with the other phenomena we introduced in this chapter, there is regional
variation in use of the semi-modals as well. In general, semi-modals are used
more in American English than in British English. Wanna in particular is some-
times thought to be an exclusively American English form – but Krug (2000: 153–
155) shows that wanna is used a fifth of the time in the spoken part of the British
National Corpus (containing British English from the 1960s to the 1990s), and
its frequency increases every year between 1990 and 1997 in the British newspa-
per The Guardian. Just like the subjunctive discussed in §3.3.2 above, then, semi-
modals are a feature of both British and American Englishes, even if they’re more
characteristic of the latter. Lorenz (2012: 8) suggests that during the 19th and 20th
centuries the semi-modals have been steadily replacing the core modals in both
varieties.
One semi-modal with a very specific regional distribution is fixing to. This
has the meaning of ‘[settling] one’s mind or [deciding]’ (Smith 2009b: 13) and/or
involves an “immediacy [...] after a period of short delay” and “preparatory ac-
tivity in order for the main action to be taken” (Ching 1987: 335). Here are some
examples (Smith 2009b: 13, 17):
(31) I thought you knew they were fixing to run away and get married.

88
 3.4 Syntax

(32) I’m fixing to go to a university and I am fixing to have some hard classes.
The construction has a range of forms, including fixin’ to and finna /fɪnə/. It orig-
inated in the south of the US in the 18th century and, although stigmatized, it
has been spreading beyond the south of the country (Smith 2009b). As Smith
(2009b: 17) shows, some users of fixing to get prescriptive reactions in online
forums such as “Go to school and get an education. Your grammar sucks. How
about “fixing” to do that!”. Although we present this interesting Southern Amer-
ican English innovation here very briefly, Ching (1987) demonstrates that it is a
semantically and pragmatically complex (and fascinating) phenomenon, involv-
ing nuances to do with signalling procrastination and psyching oneself up to do
an action (Ching 1987: 336). Importantly, fixing to cannot simply substitute go-
ing to or will, and thereby stands to show that regional variation can present us
with structural and pragmatic complexities not necessarily present in standard
varieties of a language.

Figure 3.6: American South, shown in red. (Map by Pharexia, licensed

under CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Overall, the semi-modals increased substantially in use during the Late Mod-
ern English period, and it seems like they are here to stay – despite fierce opposi-
tion from prescriptivists. More research is still needed on the use of semi-modals
outside British and American English.

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3 Late Modern English (1700–1945)

/ng/ clusters through time

Constructions such as fixing to are interesting from a phonological point

of view as well. First of all, they show the alteration between the stan-
dard /ɪŋ/ pronunciation of the -ing morpheme with the non-standard /ɪn/,
which has been subject to plenty of sociolinguistic studies. A different phe-
nomenon, similarly frequently investigated, is that of the so-called “velar
nasal plus”. In standard Englishes, any time we find <ng> in the spelling,
this corresponds to the velar nasal consonant /ŋ/, apart from where this
is found morpheme-internally (e.g. anger and finger) or when the mor-
pheme following this <ng> is the comparative or the superlative er and
est, respectively. In these cases, what we say is /ng/ instead, i.e. one more
consonant – plus one! As the spelling suggests, /ng/ represents an older
state of affairs. In some Present Day English dialects, <ng> in words such
as sing is still pronounced as /ng/.

3.5 Lexicon
As mentioned earlier, Late Modern English is characterized by prescriptivism and
by diverging developments in American and British English. We will therefore
focus on two closely related aspects of the Late Modern English lexicon here.
First, we will introduce you to two semantic processes strongly linked to social
evaluation by language users: amelioration and pejoration. Next, we will discuss
Americanisms and their reception in Britain at the times, and we’ll see yet again
how common negative attitudes towards linguistic innovations are – and how
futile!

3.5.1 Amelioration and pejoration

Let’s start with pejoration first, in the overall spirit of this chapter. The word
spinster used to refer to ‘a woman who spins’ (OED, s.v. spinster, n.). Today, it
has rather negative connotations: it’s not desirable for a woman to be a spinster,
‘an old maid’. In contrast, the word bachelor does not carry such negative associ-
ations. This process of obtaining negative connotations is known as pejoration,

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 3.5 Lexicon

or degeneration, and involves negative value judgement. Here are some other
words that have undergone this process:

• amateur (‘one who loves or is fond of’ > ‘one who cultivates anything
as a pastime, as distinguished from one who prosecutes it professionally;
dabbler, or superficial student or worker’; OED, s.v. amateur, n.)

• silly (‘blessed, fortunate’ > ‘lacking in judgement or common sense’; OED,

s.v. silly, adj., n., and adv.)

• mistress (‘a woman having control or authority’ > ‘a woman other than his
wife with whom a man has a long-lasting sexual relationship’; OED, s.v.
mistress, n. and adj.)

• villain (‘a low-born base-minded rustic’ > ‘an unprincipled or depraved

scoundrel; a man naturally disposed to base or criminal actions, or deeply
involved in the commission of disgraceful crimes’; OED, s.v. villain, n.).

You’ll look at some more in Exercise 9.

On the other hand, amelioration, also known as elevation, involves a posi-
tive value judgement. A word that used to have negative or neutral associations
gains more positive ones. Some of these words include dude, originally ‘a man
who shows an ostentatious regard for fashion and style in regard to dress or ap-
pearance; a dandy, a fop’ and now primarily ‘a person (usually a man) regarded
as being ‘cool’ or fashionable, or as embodying some other admirable or desirable
quality’ (OED, s.v. dude, n., adj., and int.). Some other examples include knight
(‘a boy or lad employed as an attendant or servant’ > e.g. ‘[one] in recognition
of personal merit, or as a reward for services rendered to the crown or country’;
OED, s.v. knight, n.) and pretty (‘cunning, crafty’ > ‘attractive and pleasing in
appearance’; OED, s.v. pretty, adj., n., and int.), and again you’ll see some more
on your own in Exercise 9.
It may not be straightforward to decide whether a word has undergone ame-
lioration or pejoration. Thus, Millward & Hayes (2018: 205) notably remark that
“[a] possible example of amelioration during [the Middle English period] might
be, depending on one’s viewpoint, the word dizzy. In [the Old English period] it
meant ‘foolish’, a meaning that survives marginally in such expressions as a dizzy
blonde; but by [Middle English] its primary meaning was ‘suffering from vertigo’.”
The semantic complexities are not limited just to one’s point of view though, i.e.
just to whether or not a semantic change is seen as positive or negative. Some

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3 Late Modern English (1700–1945)

words may have genuinely undergone both amelioration and pejoration in dif-
ferent stages in their history. And this can also be subject to region-specific dif-
ferences, as in the case of homely, which has come to mean ‘cosy, comfortable’ in
British English, but which has come to mean ‘of plain appearance, unattractive’
in North America (OED, s.v. homely, adj.).24
To take a more recent example of potential pejoration, we can consider the
word clever: “Although clever is typically favorable today, signs of its ultimate
degeneration appear in such expressions as ‘too clever by half’ and ‘too clever
for one’s own good’” (Millward & Hayes 2018: 289).25
We may wonder how the processes of pejoration and amelioration come about
exactly, and why. These are very good questions to ask, and the answers to them
are complex because we need to analyse specific words case by case, paying atten-
tion to the contexts in which these are used across decades and centuries. Let’s
consider one example here. Lakoff (1973), who focuses on gender asymmetries
in American society of the twentieth century, points out that these asymmetries
are reflected in lexical “pairs” such as spinster and bachelor, or the need to distin-
guish between Miss and Mrs for women while for men Mr seems to suffice. One
could therefore suggest that the more negative connotations of spinster (as op-
posed to bachelor) reflect societal context and developments, and this semantic
change thus has to be explored through a careful analysis of the details belonging
to the fields of historical sociology and gender studies here. The more negative
meaning of the word, that of ‘[a] woman still unmarried’ and ‘one beyond the
usual age for marriage, an old maid’ in particular (OED, s.v. spinster, n.), enters
the scene during the Late Modern English period.

Taboos and euphemisms: you know who...

Certain aspects of life may be considered taboo in different communities

and societies. Typically, these are related to excretion (to do with men-
struation, peeing, pooing, and throwing up, for instance), sexual inter-

24
We’re simplifying here. But why don’t you check out the entry for yourself, to discover all of
the meanings of this word at different stages of the history of the language, and to find out
more?
25
We took inspiration for most of these examples primarily from Campbell (2013) and Millward
& Hayes (2018: 205 and 289).

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 3.5 Lexicon

course, death, and beings who are feared. When a word is considered to
be too direct, another word (considered less direct, or somehow milder) is
used instead – a euphemism. Well, at least until this euphemism becomes
too directly associated with the concept and there’s a need for a new eu-
phemism yet again. Menstruation seems to be a topic giving rise to plenty
of lexical variation. Some speakers may prefer to refer to the event as lady
time, Aunt Flo, the crimson wave, shark week, and the monthly visitor.a
From the realm of beings that are feared or should not be mentioned, we
can throw in Old Nick (for the Devil) and He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named
(referring to Lord Voldemort in Harry Potter). A similar phenomenon can
be observed when we avoid swearing with expressions that may be per-
ceived as strong by some, e.g. fucking hell, bloody hell, holy smokes, shit,
and for fuck’s sake, among many others. The following would most likely
be perceived as rather harmless: fudge, gosh, shoot, and zoonds. Campbell
(2013) also gives the interesting examples of euphemisms coined in Amer-
ican English but not in British English, resulting in the following variants:
ass vs. donkey, and cock vs. rooster. When it comes to the place where hu-
mans excrete, the lexical variation becomes more complex. Interestingly,
one of the reviewers of this chapter noted that “[t]he section on taboo and
euphemisms is somewhat embarrassing in its length and explicitness”. As
we can see, people do tend to feel strongly about taboos, and the stigma
attached to these leads to the constant fuel of lexical innovation as dis-
cussed here.
a
Or so at least The Independent claims: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-
style/health-and-families/menstruation-study-finds-over-5000-slang-terms-for-
period-a6905021.html.

3.5.2 As American as apple pie?

Typically, when a discussion gets started about language change and dialects,
the first examples that are mentioned in conversation pertain to the lexicon. One
thing is called X in this region, but Y in another. Today, we might say without
much hesitation that fall, rather than autumn, and zee for the letter Z, rather
than zed, are typical American words – in other words, Americanisms. The term
“Americanism” was introduced in 1781 (Fisher 2001: 68). But deciding whether or
not a phrase is an Americanism is not as straightforward as may first meet the

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eye. For example, although some words and expressions may have been coined
in North America, others might predate colonization and in fact date back to
what used to be – but no longer is – the preferred word or expression in other
varieties of English, and British English in particular. In what follows, we rely on
Cassidy & Hall (2001), who distinguish so-called synchronic and diachronic
Americanisms.
Synchronic Americanisms are those words and expressions that are used pri-
marily in the US in Present Day English. Diachronic Americanisms are those
words and expressions that were coined in North America, but which are not
necessarily used solely in the US in the 21st century. Thus, as Cassidy & Hall
(2001) aptly say, there is some tension in saying that something is “as American
as apple pie”.
Let’s have a look at a couple of diachronic Americanisms. Often, when interact-
ing with new cultures and coming across new fauna, flora, and various other as-
pects of life and the universe, the lexicon needs to be enriched in one way or other
so that these new aspects of life can be referred to. This naturally happened also
during the colonization of North America. The first wave of diachronic Ameri-
canisms can therefore be thought of as consisting precisely of words borrowed
from native American languages for new concepts, as in chipmunk (from Ojibwe),
moccasin, and raccoon (both from Powhatan). This sometimes happened via a de-
tour through other languages of European colonizers (e.g. Spanish), as in potato
(originally from Taíno). Another way to refer to new concepts is by making use
of the already existing vocabulary, as in Indian corn, later shortened to corn.
These are not the only words that could be labelled Americanisms. As Cassidy
& Hall (2001) also mention, sometimes British English experienced innovation,
while the older expression continued being used in America, and ended up being
perceived as American after enough time had elapsed. This is in fact what hap-
pened to fall (vs autumn) and zee (vs zed, referring to the letter <z>). So these
Americanisms are synchronic ones. These examples provide us with an interest-
ing lesson to learn: what may seem to be a synchronic oddity may once have
been the norm! This is something we will see at least a couple more times in the
chapters to follow.
Finally for our purposes, what may have started as an Americanism may no
longer be perceived as such. Apart from the diachronic Americanisms mentioned
above, consider the following words and expressions, and decide whether you’d
perceive them as Americanisms: atomic bomb, baseball, boot camp, boss, browser,
cable car, cahoot, campus, chat room, cowboy, cupcake, department store, dough-
nut, email, floppy disk, genocide, hacker, hip, hydrant, iffy, jazz, jive, know-how,
Kodak, martini, milk shake, OK, parking meter, peanut butter, popcorn, populist

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 3.6 Final note

party, radiator, refrigerator,26 sex appeal, sky scraper, soap opera, spell check, sun-
dae, telegram, to bury the hatchet, to commute, to download, to get even, to get the
hang of (something), to lynch, and whodunnit. How many of those would you
consider American?27
On a different but not unrelated note, with the emerging consciousness to-
wards the end of the 19th century that the English spoken in the US is a form of
English different from that found in Great Britain, it is not surprising that lex-
ical differences between English spoken in the US as opposed to Great Britain
began to be commented on. These comments weren’t always positive. Although
coining new words for new concepts is “inevitable [...], British observers tended
to designate [these] as barbarous ‘Americanisms’” (Fisher 2001: 68). This is con-
firmed by Cassidy & Hall (2001: 185) as well:

Americanisms – variances from what was considered good English usage

– had to be carefully noted and judged, certainly not adopted unaware. In
short, the word Americanism at first implied a certain critical caution on
the part of the observer. Later it came to be used neutrally and even, with a
transatlantic shift in the point of view, favorably.

Today, still, we find plenty of “juicy” and prescriptive data, as in “How Ameri-
canisms are killing the English language. A book released this year claims that
Americanisms will have completely absorbed the English language by 2120”.28

3.6 Final note

As we have seen repeatedly in this chapter, variation and change are a natural
state of affairs. Furthermore, social stigma of various types can get attached to
linguistic variation, just like it can be attached to any other variation. This varia-
tion is only stigmatized, however, because some part of society decides to view it
as inappropriate in some way or other. There is nothing inherently wrong with
linguistic variant A as opposed to linguistic variant B.

26
Just in case you wonder, this is where fridge comes from.
27
Historically speaking, all of them are!
28
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20170904-how-americanisms-are-killing-the-english-
language.

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3 Late Modern English (1700–1945)

Suggested exercises

E.1 Fighting accentism

A. Imagine the press approaches you to provide a specialist’s opinion on

the question of which English dialect is correct. Come up with an answer.
B. Using 5 stories from the Accentism Project launched by Carrie and
Drummond, discuss how accentism (and prescriptivism more generally)
may affect people’s lives.a

Tips for teachers: This exercise can be used as a written assignment. Set
up the maximum/minimum word count and a deadline. We recommend
400 words to be used for both parts in total – this makes sure the students
focus on answering the question and avoid waffling.
a
https://accentism.org/.

E.2 Pet peeves

Ask three faculty members (or, if at all possible, other individuals who
teach or want to become teachers) if they have any pet peeves related to
language use. Ask them also why these are important to them. What are
these pet peeves? Were you surprised by any of the examples given? Why
(not)? How do the peeves reported by these individuals make them feel?
How does this whole exercise relate to prescriptivism? And finally, should
English teachers and university lecturers support or fight pet peeves?a
a
This exercise was inspired by Baragona (2019), who collects a database of linguistic
bêtes noires of faculty members with her history of English students.

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 Suggested exercises

E.3 To boldly go

The Star Trek franchise has made the phrase To boldly go where no man
has gone before famous. There have nevertheless been some who have
criticized the grammar of this sentence: to boldly go is an example of a
split infinitive, and one should allegedly never split one’s infinitives (one
should instead say to go boldly, so that the to and the verb are right next to
each other, all snuggly). Using the internet and/or other sources, find out
how old the anti-split-infinitive prescriptive rule is. Be ready to present
your answer to the rest of the class, including the sources you used.

Figure 3.7: To boldly go; illustration kindly provided by Gry Faurholt,

2020

Earlier in the Star Trek franchise, the phrase that was used was to boldly
go where no man has gone before. It was later changed to to boldly go where
no one has gone before. Why do you think this change took place? Feel free
to speculate as well as search online.

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E.4 Translating into 18th-century English

§3.3 and §3.4 make it clear that quite a lot has changed in the structure of
English since 1700. Can you translate the text below into 1700-era English,
paying particular attention to the morphological and syntactic features
discussed in this chapter and chapter 2?
I’m loving the look of the new house, but it is still being built, so I
shouldn’t go in there yet, even though I wanna. I would probably get
hit by falling bricks and be all “Owwww, this wasn’t a good idea!” I
gotta be patient.

E.5 Tracing word formation

Note: for this exercise you will need access to the online Oxford English
Dictionary (OED) via your library or university.

Look up -like and gate as suffixes in the OED. They are labelled “combi-
nation forms” in the dictionary. Answer the following questions:
• When were these two suffixes first attested in the history of En-
glish? Are you surprised? Why (not)?

• Go to “entry profile” (type “ctrl+f” and then “entry profile”, or

“cmd+f”). In which years, approximately, were the suffixes most
frequent? You will find the relevant information under “Timeline
of quotation evidence”.

• Now look at the entries that contain the suffixes (“Entries which
link here”). Find 1–3 more examples with the suffixes.

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 Suggested exercises

E.6 Late Modern English: seemingly the same as Present

Day English?

Have a look at the excerpts provided in §1. Can you notice any dif-
ferences between these excerpts in contrast to Present Day English?
Note down any differences and classify them by distinguishing the fol-
lowing linguistic levels:
• phonetics/phonology

• orthography (i.e. spelling)

• morphology

• syntax

• lexicon and semantics

• pragmatics

How many differences have you spotted? Are you surprised in any way?
Why or why not? Would you say there are a lot of differences? How could
one establish what amounts to “a lot of” differences in this context?
On a different note, can you spot any examples in the excerpts that
point to prescriptivism, proscriptivism, or linguistic discrimination in any
way?

E.7 Gritty details and abstractions

Look at Figure 3.3 and the claim that contraction is preferred when the
stem of the verb ends in a vowel, a nasal, or a liquid. Does the data back
this claim up?

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3 Late Modern English (1700–1945)

E.8 Looking at Americanisms

Note: for this exercise you will need access to the online Oxford English
Dictionary (OED) via your library or university.

Use the OED and work with the following words: to antagonize, to belittle,
butte, coca-cola, cookie, cougar, creek (referring to a stream-like object),
funky, lengthy, and woodchuck. Make sure you exploit the information
available in the dictionary to its full extent – don’t just look at the first
couple of lines. Your tasks are the following:

Figure 3.8: On the way to Skinner Butte in Eugene, Oregon, US; photo
taken by Míša in 2019

• If you aren’t familiar with the words, do some web searching first of
all to make sure you get a general sense of what these words might
refer to.

• Which of these words are restricted to North America?

• Which of these words are restricted to specific regions in North

America?

• When is the word first attested and what is its origin (etymology)?
Are you surprised in any way? Why (not)?

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 Suggested exercises

• What does this say about the contact of American English speakers
and other cultures?

• What makes an Americanism? What criteria should a word or an

expression meet for it to count as an Americanism, in your opinion?

Tips for teachers: Assign different words to different students/groups, or

assign only a couple of the words.

E.9 Tracing semantic change

Note: for this exercise you will need access to the online Oxford English
Dictionary (OED) via your library or university.

Find the following words as nouns in the OED: baboon, churl, gay, girl,
hussy, mouse, and weed. Check out the following adjectives as well: artful,
coy, crafty, cunning, fond, funky, jolly, lewd, nice, shrewd, silly, and subtle.
Focus on these words as nouns (if they can be nouns) or as adjectives (if
they aren’t used as nouns). Also look at the following as verbs: to await,
to shit, to smite, and to tease. Answer the following questions:
• Can you trace any semantic change in the history of these words?

• If so, are there any instances of amelioration and/or pejoration?

Make sure you go through all of the meanings the dictionary entries
provide. It may be a bit unusual to work with the dictionary at first, but
one of the points of this exercise is to make you get to grips with how to
find information in the entries related to semantics.

Tips for teachers: Assign different words to different students/groups, or

assign only a couple of the words.

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3 Late Modern English (1700–1945)

E.10 Everybody poops and everybody pees

Ask at least one (native or non-

native) speaker of English about
the words they use to refer to
the object shown in Figure 3.9.
Ask them if they know any other
words for this object. Next, ask
them if there’s a reason why they
use the one that they say they
use.a

Figure 3.9: An excretion facility in Mel-

bourne, Victoria, Australia; photo taken
by Míša in 2019
a
Check out Tarō Gomi’s book titled Everyone Poops.

E.11 Food for thought

Answer the following questions. These are taken, and very slightly
adapted, from Hickey (2019: 52) and Paraskevas (2019: 289):
1. In what ways do you think the notion of standard English can be
beneficial? Are there any disadvantages to concentrating on stan-
dard English(es) in education?

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 Suggested exercises

2. What are the pros and cons of integrating non-standard language

into school programmes, such as English-language arts classes?
Would this change lead to more advantages for students, or would
it disadvantage them?
3. If you were to teach your own class on the history of English, would
you focus on the history of standard English(es)? Why (not)?

Tips for teachers: This can be used as a writing exercise.

E.12 How do celebrities pronounce their /r/s?

Search on the web for a famous person from New York or Boston and look
up an audio(visual) interview with this person online.a
Note down all words, and all instances of words, which can be realized
with a post-vocalic /r/ (e.g. car, card). Listen to the interview as often as
necessary to answer the following:
• Does your famous person always pronounce these with an /r/? If
not, determine how many words do have an /r/ out of how many,
e.g. 7 out of 11 words contain a post-vocalic /r/. Then calculate the
percentage. Hint: if 11 is 100%, then 0.11 is 1%. 7 divided by 0.11 gives
us 64%.

• Are there any cases where you couldn’t quite decide if the /r/ was
there?
a
Alternatively, you can simply use this video with Woody Allen (from New York): https:
//www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpniYxRjX3o.

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E.13 Morphosyntactic variation in World Englishes

Using the Electronic World Atlas of Varieties of English,a look at the

following under the “Features” tab, and be prepared to summarize how
widespread these variants are, and in what types of English they occur:
• “7. Me instead of I in coordinate subjects”

• “10. No gender distinction in third person singular”

• “91. DO as habitual marker”

• “94. Progressive marker stap or stay”

• “98. After perfect”

• a feature of your own choice that particularly intrigues you

Acknowledgement: We would like to thank Melanie Röthlisberger for

drawing our attention to this database and suggesting that we might add
an exercise based on this wonderful resource.
a
https://ewave-atlas.org/.

Texts
Late Modern English is full of texts one could look at linguistically. Below we
give you just a very small taster.

T.1 Lawing and Jawing

The following is an extract from Lawing and Jawing (originally published

in 1931) in Three Plays (2005) by Zora Neale Hurston, one of the most
prominent African American authors.

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 Texts

JUDGE Hear! Hear! Court is set! My honor is on de bench.

You moufy folks set up!
(He glares at the boy with the pretty girl)
All right, Mr. Whistle-britches, just keep up dat jawing
now and see how much time I’ll give you!
BOY I wasn’t talking, your honor.
JUDGE Well, quit looking so moufy.
(to CLERK) Call de first case.
And I warn each and all dat my honor is in
bad humor dis mawnin’. I’d give a
canary bird twenty years for peckin’ at a elephant.
(to CLERK) Bring ’em on.
CLERK (Reading) Cliff Mullins, charged with assault upon his
wife with a weapon and disturbing the peace.
(As CLIFF is led to the bar by the officer, the JUDGE glares
ferociously at the prisoner. His wife, all bandages, limps
up to the bar at the same time.)
JUDGE So youse one of dese hard-boiled wife-beaters, huh? Just
a mean old woman-Jessie! If I don’t lay a hearing on you,
God’s a gopher! Now what made you cut such a caper?

T.2 North and South

North and South is a novel written by Elizabeth C. Gaskell in 1854. It
presents us with characters with southern and northern English affilia-
tions, who enter into relationships of various sorts.a
“As you please. As Dixon pleases. But, Margaret, don’t get to use
these horrid Milton words. ‘Slack of work:’ it is a provincialism.
What will your aunt Shaw say, if she hears you use it on her return?”
“Oh, mamma! don’t try and make a bugbear of aunt Shaw,” said Mar-
garet, laughing. “Edith picked up all sorts of military slang from Cap-
tain Lennox, and aunt Shaw never took any notice of it.”

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“But yours is factory slang.”

“And if I live in a factory town, I must speak factory language when I
want it. Why, mamma, I could astonish you with a great many words
you never heard in your life. I don’t believe you know what a knob-
stick is.”
“Not I, child. I only know it has a very vulgar sound; and I don’t want
to hear you using it.”
“Very well, dearest mother, I won’t. Only I shall have to use a whole
explanatory sentence instead.”
“I don’t like this Milton,” said Mrs. Hale. “Edith is right enough in
saying it’s the smoke that has made me so ill.”
Margaret started up as her mother said this. Her father had just en-
tered the room, and she was most anxious that the faint impression
she had seen on his mind that the Milton air had injured her mother’s
health, should not be deepened—should not receive any confirma-
tion. She could not tell whether he had heard what Mrs. Hale had
said or not; but she began speaking hurriedly of other things, un-
aware that Mr. Thornton was following him.
“Mamma is accusing me of having picked up a great deal of vulgarity
since we came to Milton.”
The “vulgarity” Margaret spoke of, referred purely to the use of local
words, and the expression arose out of the conversation they had
just been holding. But Mr. Thornton’s brow darkened; and Margaret
suddenly felt how her speech might be misunderstood by him; so, in
the natural sweet desire to avoid giving unnecessary pain, she forced
herself to go forwards with a little greeting, and continue what she
was saying, addressing herself to him expressly.
“Now, Mr. Thornton, though “knobstick” has not a very pretty sound,
is it not expressive? Could I do without it, in speaking of the thing
it represents? If using local words is vulgar, I was very vulgar in the
Forest,—was I not, mamma?”
It was unusual with Margaret to obtrude her own subject of con-
versation on others; but, in this case, she was so anxious to prevent

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Mr. Thornton from feeling annoyance at the words he had acciden-

tally overheard, that it was not until she had done speaking that she
coloured all over with consciousness, more especially as Mr. Thorn-
ton seemed hardly to understand the exact gist or bearing of what
she was saying, but passed her by, with a cold reserve of ceremoni-
ous movement, to speak to Mrs. Hale.
...
“Thornton’s?” asked he. “Ay, I’ve been at Thornton’s”
“And what did he say?”
“Such a chap as me is not like to see the measter. Th’ o’erlooker bid
me go and be d——d.”
“I wish you had seen Mr. Thornton,” said Mr. Hale. “He might not
have given you work, but he would not have used such language.”
“As to th’ language, I’m welly used to it; it dunnot matter to me. I’m
not nesh mysel’ when I’m put out. It were th’ fact that I were na
wanted theer, no more nor ony other place, as I minded.”
“But I wish you had seen Mr. Thornton,” repeated Margaret. “Would
you go again—it’s a good deal to ask, I know—but would you go to-
morrow and try him? I should be so glad if you would.”
“I’m afraid it would be of no use,” said Mr. Hale, in a low voice. “It
would be better to let me speak to him.” Margaret still looked at Hig-
gins for his answer. Those grave soft eyes of hers were difficult to
resist. He gave a great sigh.
“It would tax my pride above a bit; if it were for mysel’, I could stand a
deal o’ clemming first; I’d sooner knock him down than ask a favour
from him. I’d a deal sooner be flogged mysel’; but yo’re not a com-
mon wench, axing yo’r pardon, nor yet have yo’ common ways about
yo’. I’ll e’en make a wry face, and go at it to-morrow. Dunna yo’ think
that he’ll do it. That man has it in him to be burnt at the stake afore
he’ll give in. I’ll do it for yo’r sake, Miss Hale, and it’s first time in my
life as e’er I give way to a woman. Neither my wife nor Bess could
e’er say that much again me.”

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3 Late Modern English (1700–1945)

“All the more do I thank you,” said Margaret, smiling. “Though I don’t
believe you: I believe you have just given way to wife and daughter
as much as most men.”
“And as to Mr. Thornton,” said Mr. Hale, “I’ll give you a note to him,
which, I think I may venture say, will ensure you a hearing.”
“I thank yo’ kindly, sir, but I’d as lief stand on my own bottom. I
dunnot stomach the notion of having favour curried for me, by one as
doesn’t know the ins and outs of the quarrel. Meddling ‘twixt master
and man is liker meddling ‘twixt husband and wife than aught else:
it takes a deal of wisdom to do ony good. I’ll stand guard at the lodge
door. I’ll stand there fro’ six in the morning till I get speech on him.
But I’d liefer sweep th’ streets, if paupers had na’ got hold on that
work. Dunna yo’ hope, miss. There’ll be more chance o’ getting milk
out of a flint. I wish yo’ a very good night, and many thanks to yo’.”
“You’ll find your shoes by the kitchen fire; I took them there to dry,”
said Margaret.
He turned round and looked at her steadily, and then he brushed his
lean hand across his eyes and went his way.
“How proud that man is!” said her father, who was a little annoyed
at the manner in which Higgins had declined his intercession with
Mr. Thornton.
“He is,” said Margaret; “but what grand makings of a man there are
in him, pride and all.”
a
The text is taken from the following Project Gutenberg webpage: http://www.
gutenberg.org/files/4276/4276-h/4276-h.htm.

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 Texts

T.3 Walden
Here we’re giving you a sample of some non-fiction as well. Henry David
Thoreau’s Walden, first published in 1854, presents us with American En-
glish of the 19th century. Thoreau tells the readers about his life in a cabin
in the woods which he built on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s property (with the
encouragement and the permission of the latter, of course).a
I think that in the railroad car we are inclined to spend more on lux-
ury than on safety and convenience, and it threatens without attain-
ing these to become no better than a modern drawing room, with its
divans, and ottomans, and sun-shades, and a hundred other oriental
things, which we are taking west with us, invented for the ladies of
the harem and the effeminate natives of the Celestial Empire, which
Jonathan should be ashamed to know the names of. I would rather
sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a vel-
vet cushion. I would rather ride on earth in an ox cart with a free
circulation, than go to heaven in the fancy car of an excursion train
and breathe a malaria all the way.
...
I dug my cellar in the side of a hill sloping to the south, where a
woodchuck had formerly dug his burrow, down through sumach and
blackberry roots, and the lowest stain of vegetation, six feet square
by seven deep, to a fine sand where potatoes would not freeze in any
winter. The sides were left shelving, and not stoned; but the sun hav-
ing never shone on them, the sand still keeps its place. It was but two
hours’ work. I took particular pleasure in this breaking of ground, for
in almost all latitudes men dig into the earth for an equable temper-
ature. Under the most splendid house in the city is still to be found
the cellar where they store their roots as of old, and long after the su-
perstructure has disappeared posterity remark its dent in the earth.
The house is still but a sort of porch at the entrance of a burrow.
...
The next year I sometimes caught a mess of fish for my dinner, and

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once I went so far as to slaughter a woodchuck which ravaged my

bean-field,—effect his transmigration, as a Tartar would say,—and de-
vour him, partly for experiment’s sake; but though it afforded me a
momentary enjoyment, notwithstanding a musky flavor, I saw that
the longest use would not make that a good practice, however it
might seem to have your woodchucks ready dressed by the village
butcher.
...
There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we
tolerate incredible dulness. I need only suggest what kind of ser-
mons are still listened to in the most enlightened countries. There
are such words as joy and sorrow, but they are only the burden of
a psalm, sung with a nasal twang, while we believe in the ordinary
and mean. We think that we can change our clothes only. It is said
that the British Empire is very large and respectable, and that the
United States are a first-rate power. We do not believe that a tide
rises and falls behind every man which can float the British Empire
like a chip, if he should ever harbor it in his mind. Who knows what
sort of seventeen-year locust will next come out of the ground? The
government of the world I live in was not framed, like that of Britain,
in after-dinner conversations over the wine.
...
However, if one designs to construct a dwelling house, it behooves
him to exercise a little Yankee shrewdness, lest after all he find
himself in a workhouse, a labyrinth without a clue, a museum, an
almshouse, a prison, or a splendid mausoleum instead.
...
Many a forenoon have I stolen away, preferring to spend thus the
most valued part of the day; for I was rich, if not in money, in sunny
hours and summer days, and spent them lavishly; nor do I regret that
I did not waste more of them in the workshop or the teacher’s desk.
But since I left those shores the woodchoppers have still further laid
them waste, and now for many a year there will be no more ram-
bling through the aisles of the wood, with occasional vistas through

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which you see the water. My Muse may be excused if she is silent
henceforth. How can you expect the birds to sing when their groves
are cut down?
a
The text is taken from the following Project Gutenberg webpage: https://www.
gutenberg.org/files/205/205-h/205-h.htm.

T.4 David Copperfield

Here we give you a text sample from Charles Dickens. David Copperfield
is a novel that was first serialized and then published in 1850 as a book.
The following conversation is between two male speakers.a
I had not walked out far enough to be quite clear of the town, upon
the Ramsgate road, where there was a good path, when I was hailed,
through the dust, by somebody behind me. The shambling figure,
and the scanty great-coat, were not to be mistaken. I stopped, and
Uriah Heep came up.
“Well?” said I.
“How fast you walk!” said he. “My legs are pretty long, but you’ve
given ‘em quite a job.”
“Where are you going?” said I.
“I am going with you, Master Copperfield, if you’ll allow me the plea-
sure of a walk with an old acquaintance.” Saying this, with a jerk of
his body, which might have been either propitiatory or derisive, he
fell into step beside me.
“Uriah!” said I, as civilly as I could, after a silence.
“Master Copperfield!” said Uriah.
“To tell you the truth (at which you will not be offended), I came out
to walk alone, because I have had so much company.”

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3 Late Modern English (1700–1945)

He looked at me sideways, and said with his hardest grin, “You mean
mother.”
“Why yes, I do,” said I.
“Ah! But you know we’re so very umble,” he returned. “And hav-
ing such a knowledge of our own umbleness, we must really take
care that we’re not pushed to the wall by them as isn’t umble. All
stratagems are fair in love, sir.”
Raising his great hands until they touched his chin, he rubbed them
softly, and softly chuckled; looking as like a malevolent baboon, I
thought, as anything human could look.
“You see,” he said, still hugging himself in that unpleasant way, and
shaking his head at me, “you’re quite a dangerous rival, Master Cop-
perfield. You always was, you know.”
“Do you set a watch upon Miss Wickfield, and make her home no
home, because of me?” said I.
“Oh! Master Copperfield! Those are very arsh words,” he replied.
“Put my meaning into any words you like,” said I. “You know what
it is, Uriah, as well as I do.”
“Oh no! You must put it into words,” he said. “Oh, really! I couldn’t
myself.”
“Do you suppose,” said I, constraining myself to be very temperate
and quiet with him, on account of Agnes, “that I regard Miss Wick-
field otherwise than as a very dear sister?”
“Well, Master Copperfield,” he replied, “you perceive I am not bound
to answer that question. You may not, you know. But then, you see,
you may!”
Anything to equal the low cunning of his visage, and of his shadow-
less eyes without the ghost of an eyelash, I never saw.
“Come then!” said I. “For the sake of Miss Wickfield—”
“My Agnes!” he exclaimed, with a sickly, angular contortion of him-
self. “Would you be so good as call her Agnes, Master Copperfield!”
“For the sake of Agnes Wickfield—Heaven bless her!”

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“Thank you for that blessing, Master Copperfield!” he interposed.

“I will tell you what I should, under any other circumstances, as soon
have thought of telling to—Jack Ketch.”
“To who, sir?” said Uriah, stretching out his neck, and shading his
ear with his hand.
“To the hangman,” I returned. “The most unlikely person I could
think of,”—though his own face had suggested the allusion quite as a
natural sequence. “I am engaged to another young lady. I hope that
contents you.”
“Upon your soul?” said Uriah.
I was about indignantly to give my assertion the confirmation he
required, when he caught hold of my hand, and gave it a squeeze.
a
The text is taken from the following Project Gutenberg webpage: http://www.
gutenberg.org/files/766/766-h/766-h.htm#link2HCH0039.

T.5 Mary Barton

Mary Barton is another novel written by Elizabeth C. Gaskell (in 1848).

It is set in Manchester, in the north of England, in the 19th century. An
extract follows.a
Alice knew that before long she should go to that mother; and, be-
sides, the griefs and bitter woes of youth have worn themselves out
before we grow old; but she looked so sorrowful that the girls caught
her sadness, and mourned for the poor woman who had been dead
and gone so many years ago.
“Did you never see her again, Alice? Did you never go home while
she was alive?” asked Mary.
“No, nor since. Many a time and oft have I planned to go. I plan it
yet, and hope to go home again before it please God to take me. I

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3 Late Modern English (1700–1945)

used to try and save money enough to go for a week when I was
in service; but first one thing came, and then another. First, missis’s
children fell ill of the measles, just when th’ week I’d ask’d for came,
and I couldn’t leave them, for one and all cried for me to nurse them.
Then missis herself fell sick, and I could go less than ever. For, you
see, they kept a little shop, and he drank, and missis and me was all
there was to mind children, and shop, and all, and cook and wash
besides.”
Mary was glad she had not gone into service, and said so.
“Eh, lass! thou little knows the pleasure o’ helping others; I was as
happy there as could be; almost as happy as I was at home. Well,
but next year I thought I could go at a leisure time, and missis telled
me I should have a fortnight then, and I used to sit up all that winter
working hard at patchwork, to have a quilt of my own making to take
to my mother. But master died, and missis went away fra Manchester,
and I’d to look out for a place again.”
“Well, but,” interrupted Mary, “I should have thought that was the
best time to go home.”
“No, I thought not. You see it was a different thing going home for a
week on a visit, may be with money in my pocket to give father a lift,
to going home to be a burden to him. Besides, how could I hear o’
a place there? Anyways I thought it best to stay, though perhaps it
might have been better to ha’ gone, for then I should ha’ seen mother
again;” and the poor old woman looked puzzled.
“I’m sure you did what you thought right,” said Margaret, gently.
a
The text is taken from the following Project Gutenberg webpage: http://www.
gutenberg.org/files/2153/2153-h/2153-h.htm.

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T.6 The Dictionary

Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language has been

discussed in the main text of this chapter, and so needs no introduction!
This extract is from the preface to the 1828 edition. Enjoy.a
The United States commenced their existence under circumstances
wholly novel and unexampled in the history of nations. They com-
menced with civilization, with learning, with science, with consti-
tutions of free government, and with that best gift of God to man,
the christian religion. Their population is now equal to that of Eng-
land; in arts and sciences, our citizens are very little behind the most
enlightened people on earth; in some respects, they have no superi-
ors; and our language, within two centuries, will be spoken by more
people in this country, than any other language on earth, except the
Chinese, in Asia, and even that may not be an exception.
It has been my aim in this work, now offered to my fellow citizens,
to ascertain the true principles of the language, in its orthography
and structure; to purify it from some palpable errors, and reduce the
number of its anomalies, thus giving it more regularity and consis-
tency in its forms, both of words and sentences; and in this manner,
to furnish a standard of our vernacular tongue, which we shall not be
ashamed to bequeath to three hundred millions of people, who are
destined to occupy, and I hope, to adorn the vast territory within our
jurisdiction.
If the language can be improved in regularity, so as to be more eas-
ily acquired by our own citizens, and by foreigners, and thus be
rendered a more useful instrument for the propagation of science,
arts, civilization and Christianity; if it can be rescued from the mis-
chievous influence of sciolists and that dabbling spirit of innovation
which is perpetually disturbing its settled usages and filling it with
anomalies; if, in short, our vernacular language can be redeemed
from corruptions, and our philology and literature from degradation;
it would be a source of great satisfaction to me to be one among the

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3 Late Modern English (1700–1945)

instruments of promoting these valuable objects. If this object can-

not be effected, and my wishes and hopes are to be frustrated, my
labor will be lost, and this work must sink into oblivion.
This Dictionary, like all others of the kind, must be left, in some de-
gree, imperfect; for what individual is competent to trace to their
source, and define in all their various applications, popular, scien-
tific and technical, sixty or seventy thousand words! It satisfies my
mind that I have done all that my health, my talents and my pecu-
niary means would enable me to accomplish. I present it to my fellow
citizens, not with frigid indifference, but with my ardent wishes for
their improvement and their happiness; and for the continued in-
crease of the wealth, the learning, the moral and religious elevation
of character, and the glory of my country.
a
The text is taken from the American Dictionary of the English Language website:
http://webstersdictionary1828.com/Preface.

T.7 The travels of Dean Mahomet

The travels of Dean Mahomet, an eighteenth-century journey Through India
was published in 1794 by Dean Mahomet (1759–1851), who was an Indian
writer and traveller (and the person who introduced shampoo to Europe!),
and he therefore presents us with a sample of Indian English from the Late
Modern English period.a
The streets of Surat are irregularly laid out; and the stories of the
houses are carried up projecting over one another, in such a man-
ner, that the uppermost apartments on each side, are so close, as to
darken the streets below, without excluding a free circulation of air.
As to provisions I cannot imagine that there is in the universe a better
place. The great plenty of every article, which an unbounded influx
throws into the market, renders all kinds of eatables extremely cheap:
wild fowl and game can be had at an easy rate; and nothing can ex-

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 Texts

ceed their sallads and roots. Among the articles of luxury, which
they have in common with other parts of the East, there are public
hummums for bathing, cupping, rubbing and sweating, but the prac-
tice of champing, which is derived from the Chinese, appears to have
been known to the ancients, from the following quotations.
...
Having returned to Madapallam at the appointed time, we contin-
ued our voyage till we came within view of the Cape of Good Hope,
and met with no extraordinary occurrence on the passage. We saw
several kinds of the finny inhabitants of the liquid element, a de-
scription of which I must here omit, as uninteresting to a gentleman
of your information. A speck now observed in the mariner’s hori-
zon, was to him an evident sign of the impending storm, which col-
lected with rapid increase, and bursting with resistless impetuosity
over our heads, incessantly raged for three days. The howling of the
tempest, the roaring of the sea, the dismal gloom of night, the light-
ning’s forked flash, and thunder’s awful roll, conspired to make this
the most terrifying scene I ever experienced.
...
It is used by the people of every class, among the Hindoos and Ma-
hometans: the lower order take it, when they enter on any arduous
enterprise, to render them insensible of the danger; and the gentry,
who are fond of every thing that tends to a gratification of the pas-
sions, consider it as a great luxury. Its effects, however, are various,
according to the manner of preparing it. Opium in its original state,
is the produce of a species of poppy, the root of which is about the
thickness of a man’s finger, full of a bitter juice that runs through
the whole plant. The flower resembles a rose, and the stem which is
commonly pliable, grows to the height of two cubits, and produces
a kind of leaves (not unlike those of the lettuce) oblong, indented,
curled, and of a sea-green colour. When it is full of sap, a slight inci-
sion is made on the outside, from which flow some drops of a milky
nature. These drops soon congeal; and when moistened and kneaded
with warm water and honey, become more consistent and viscous
like pitch; after this process, the glutinous matter is made into small

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3 Late Modern English (1700–1945)

cakes fit for immediate use. The good kind is that, which is soft and
yielding to the touch. Patna is allowed to send the best to market: it is
there purchased at a cheap rate, though extremely dear in some parts
of India. It is nearly opposite qualities, stupifying, at one time, and
raising exhilarating ideas at another; it occasions drowsiness, and
vigilance; and taken to an excess, brings on a madness that ceases
only in death.
a
The text is taken from the University of California Press E-Books Collec-
tion, 1982–2004, website: https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=
ft4h4nb20n&chunk.id=ch2&toc.depth=100&toc.id=ch2&brand=eschol;query=jane#1.

T.8 Letter by Ignatius Sancho

The Late Modern English period is the earliest period for which we have
a significant number of English texts written by people of colour. Ignatius
Sancho was a Black writer, composer and slavery survivor living in Britain
during the eighteenth century. The letter below was written in July 1776
and addressed to a Mr. Sterne.a
REVEREND SIR,
It would be an inſult to your humanity (or perhaps look like it) to
aplogize for the liberty I am taking. – I am one of thoſe people whom
the vulgar and illiberal call “Negurs.” – The firſt part of my life was
rather unlucky, as I was placed in a family who judged ignorance the
beſt and only ſecurity for obedience. – A little reading and writing I
got by unwearied application. – The latter part of my life has been –
through God’s bleſſing, truly fortunate, having ſpent it in the ſervice
of the beſt families in the kingdom. – My chief pleaſure has been
books. – Philanthropy I adore. – How very much, good Sir, am I
(amongſt millions) indebted to you for the character of your amiable
uncle Toby! – I declare, I would walk ten miles in the dog-days, to
ſhake hands with the honeſt corporal. – Your Sermons have touched

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 Texts

me to the heart, and I hope have amended it, which brings me to the
point. – In your tenth diſcourſe, page ſeventy-eight, in the ſecond
volume – is this very affecting paſſage: – “Conſider how great a part
of our ſpecies – in all ages down to this – have been trod under the
feet of cruel and capricious tyrants, who would neither hear their
cries, nor pity their diſtreſſes. – Conſider ſlavery – what it is – how
bitter a draught – and how many millions are made to drink it!” –
Of all my favourite authors not one has drawn a tear in favour of
my miſerable black brethren – excepting yourſelf, and the humane
author of Sir George Elliſon. – I think you will forgive me; – I am
ſure you will applaud me for beſeeching you to give one half-hour’s
attention to ſlavery, as it is at this day practiſed in our Weſt Indies. –
That ſubject, handled in your ſtriking manner, would eaſe the yoke
(perhaps) of many; – but if only of one – Gracious God! – what a feaſt
to a benevolent heart! – and, ſure I am, you are an Epicurean in acts of
charity. – You, who are univerſally read, and as univerſally admired
– you could not fail. – Dear Sir, think in me you behold the uplifted
hands of thouſands of my brother Moors. – Grief (you pathetically
obſerve) is eloquent; – figure to yourſelf their attitudes; – hear their
ſupplicating addreſſes! – Alas! – you cannot refuſe. – Humanity muſt
comply – in which hope I beg permiſſion to ſubſcribe myſelf,
Reverend Sir, &c.
IGN. SANCHO.
a
The text provided here was taken from the Emerging Voices corpus (Walkden
2019), and is originally from the 1784 edition available at https://archive.org/details/
lettersoflateign00sanc_0/, pp. 89–91.

Recommended further reading

For a more in-depth discussion of Late Modern English, we recommend

Beal (2004) as an overall read with rich sociolinguistic discussions. Mug-

119
3 Late Modern English (1700–1945)

glestone’s (2003) Talking proper: the rise of accent as a social symbol is

another good read we strongly recommend, especially if you are inter-
ested in the history of Received Pronunciation. On prescriptivism and
its effects, take a look at Fixing English by Anne Curzan (2014).
For the history of American English, with a focus on the rise of some
of its distinct varieties, we recommend Chapter 6 in Wolfram & Schilling-
Estes (2015). For the linguistic situation in America vis-à-vis the War of
Independence, we refer the readers to Martin (2019), with book section
titles suggesting a thrilling read indeed (Part one: Noah Webster’s battles;
Part two: The Merriams at war).
If you’re interested in monographs focusing on other specific varieties
of English (and their histories, to a variable extent), we refer you to Fritz
(2005) for Australian English, Orkin (2015) for Canadian English, Fought
(2003) for Chicano English, Luke & Richards (1982) and Edwards (2015) for
Hong Kong English, Hickey (2007) for Irish English, Gordon et al. (2004)
for New Zealand English, Leimgruber (2013) for Singapore English, Lan-
ham & MacDonald (1985) and Lass (2002) – and other contributions in
Mesthrie (2002) – for South African English, Mesthrie (1992) for South
African Indian English, and Coupland & Thomas (1990) for Welsh English
(Chapters 1, 2, 6, and 14 in particular). Volumes 5 and 6 of The Cambridge
History of the English Language (Burchfield 1994 and Algeo 2001) offer
contributions on English in Scotland, English in Wales, English in Ireland,
English in Australia, English in the Caribbean, English in New Zealand,
English in South Africa, English in South Asia, and English in North Amer-
ica. And for Scots, see Jones (1997).
(And if you are, like us, enchanted with the history of the progressive,
we recommend Kranich 2010.)

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4 Early Modern English (1500–1700)
4.1 History and context
If you’re reading this book, you have some competence in English. At the begin-
ning of this chapter, take a moment to think about why that is the case. What
does English mean to you? Why and how did you learn it?
Those of you who consider yourselves native speakers of English probably
didn’t grow up in England. At least, there are around four hundred million speak-
ers of English in the world (Crystal 2006a), and the population of England is only
a small fraction of that, so statistically it’s unlikely. You’ve probably had occasion
to consider how and why the English language got to where you are.
Those of you who consider yourselves non-native speakers will, presumably,
have learned that language for a reason. Some people learn languages for the
sheer fun of it, but more often there’s some external motivation. In the case of
English, perhaps it’s because it’s useful for trade, or for international communi-
cation, or for science, or so that you can access English-language books, games,
films, websites, or TV shows. You’ve probably had occasion to consider how and
why the English language came to be so dominant in these domains.
The events of the Early Modern English period are crucial for answering these
questions. In 1500, English was spoken almost exclusively in England and Wales
(and crucially to a rather limited extent in the latter) – it was a language like
any other, with no special prestige or status, and no worldwide reach. By 1700,
English was well on the way to having the status it has today. In this chapter
we’ll see how that happened. But it’s not English per se that enjoys tremendous
worldwide prestige – rather, it’s a specific, fairly narrow set of varieties of En-
glish. How these standard varieties came to gain this status – the process of
standardization and the accompanying standard language ideology – will be
the guiding theme of this chapter.

4.1.1 Standardization
Academic linguists disagree about a great many things. One thing they agree on,
however, is that it’s meaningless to talk about one language being better or worse
4 Early Modern English (1500–1700)

than another, at least in any objective linguistic sense. And yet among the general
English-speaking public this attitude abounds. We all know someone who takes
great pleasure in “correcting” the “bad” grammar of others (where by grammar
they usually mean punctuation), or who delights in judging and shaming others
based on their “accent”. Even people who don’t actively correct others believe
very often that there is, when it comes down to it, a right or wrong way to use
English.1 We’ve talked about these prescriptive attitudes in detail in Chapter 3.
The ideal, for these people, is some sort of “perfect”, “accentless” English as laid
down by the great authorities. But what is this variety, and who speaks it? And
can any variety truly be said to be “accentless”?
People who think like this are in the grip of what Lippi-Green (2012: 67) terms
standard language ideology:

a bias toward an abstracted, idealized, homogenous spoken language which

is imposed and maintained by dominant bloc institutions and which names
as its model the written language, but which is drawn primarily from the
spoken language of the upper middle class.

In this sense a standard is more of an abstract entity than an actually spoken (or
even written) linguistic variety — though individual varieties may be perceived
as closer to, or further from, the abstract standard ideal. The stranglehold of stan-
dard language ideology is strong, and it’s probably fair to say that none of us are
completely immune to it.2 This is not the place for a full discussion of how it’s
maintained today or its pernicious consequences in society (see Lippi-Green 2012
for an excellent discussion of these issues in the US context). But it’s important
to note that there’s nothing universal about this ideology or the particular stan-
dard varieties associated with it. In fact, the Early Modern period played a crucial
role in the standardization process, not only for English but for several European
languages associated with emerging European world powers.
How, then, does a standard variety emerge? Norwegian sociolinguist Einar
Haugen’s model, though fifty years old now, is still a widely accepted theory of
standardization.3 Haugen observes that standard varieties are inextricably bound
up with nations and the rise of nation-states:
1
And although Míša is a sociolinguist, she often asks herself when she’s going to stop mak-
ing certain non-native “mistakes” she catches herself making every now and then. But these
“mistakes” could also be approached from the angle of identity features with a range of social
functions. The idea of “correct” vs. “wrong” is very deeply entrenched in our minds indeed!
2
Or none of us is, as particularly incurable prescriptivists will insist.
3
See Joseph et al. (2020) for a critical assessment of Haugen’s model after fifty years of research
and reflection on its enduring influence.

122
 4.1 History and context

The invention of printing, the rise of industry, and the spread of popular
education have brought into being the modern nation-state, which extends
some of the loyalties of the family and the neighborhood or the clan to
the whole state. Nation and language have become inextricably intertwined.
Every self-respecting nation has to have a language. Not just a medium of
communication ... but a fully developed language. Anything less marks it
as underdeveloped. (1966: 927)

Haugen is in agreement with many modern historians (e.g. Foucault 2007, Hobs-
bawm 1990) that developments in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were
crucial in leading to the nation-state as the main unit of political organization
on the world stage. Since language is a central part of identity, and it was in the
nation-state’s interest to foster a shared identity, “one nation, one language” poli-
cies and pressures (see Piller 2015) have historically been an important driving
force of standardization. Haugen also outlines a four-step model of how the stan-
dardization process unfolds, schematized in Figure 4.1. The four steps – better
thought of as overlapping subprocesses – are selection, elaboration, codifi-
cation and acceptance.

form function
Selection Acceptance
society

of norms by community
c. 1400–1600 c. 1500–now
language

Codification Elaboration
of forms of functions
c. 1600–1800 c. 1500–1800

Figure 4.1: Standardization according to Haugen (1966: 933). Dates for

English are approximate, and are our interpretation.

Selection gets to the heart of the question: whose variety becomes the basis
for the new standard? Standards, like the nation-states they belong to, are sup-
posed to be stable and unified, so variation is ruled out, and a single “correct”
form needs to emerge. William Caxton, who introduced the printing press into
England in 1476, was well aware that he needed to make choices at all linguistic
levels, not only spelling (see the next section, §4.2.1) and the lexicon (e.g. egges vs.
eyren ‘eggs’; see the text in §1), but also morphology, and syntax.4 The choices
4
For more discussion of the printing press itself and the physical process of printing, see van
Gelderen (2014: 159–162).

123
4 Early Modern English (1500–1700)

made by Caxton and other printers at the end of the Middle English period and
the start of the Early Modern period were certainly influential in selecting vari-
ants that would become part of the emerging standard, because they permitted
documents to be circulated on a much larger scale than ever before. At the same
time, it’s important not to overstate the role of printing in standardization. For
one thing, it wasn’t an accident that the printing presses were based in London,
which even then was the political and economic centre of England. They were
also just around the corner from the Chancery, the centre of royal document
production, which had to a certain extent established its own norms during the
fifteenth century (Fisher 1977), at least for spelling – and it is clear that these
Chancery norms affected the variety adopted by the printers.
A common narrative in history of the English language textbooks is based on
Samuels (1963) and Fisher (1977), and goes like this: migrating merchants from
the East and Central Midlands of England brought their English with them to
London, and this became the basis for the standard. This is at best an oversim-
plification. London was certainly a centre of immigration during the period, but
from all areas of the country, in particular the southern counties surrounding the
city.5 Not all of the features that eventually make it into Standard English have
their origin in the East Midlands, and not all of the spelling features found by
Fisher (1977) in Chancery texts make it into Standard English either: see Wright
(1996), the papers in Wright (2000), and Benskin (2004). Much still remains to be
understood about the process of selection, but we can at least say with confidence
that it was not a single variety that was “selected”: instead, selection seems to
have operated opportunistically, with individual linguistic features finding their
origin in Northern, Southern and Midlands varieties, Chancery spelling norms,
literary texts, the spoken and written usage of merchants, and beyond. Standard
English is a mongrel, not a purebred. And research in this area continues! See
Auer et al. (2016) for discussion of a recent project that aims to shed more light
on this issue.
Elaboration involves the spread of a variety to domains that had previously
been dominated by other languages: for instance, law, science, medicine, poli-
tics, religion, philosophy, and the like. The “one nation, one language” ideology
demands that a standard language should be usable for any purpose. But in or-
der to function well in these new domains, new lexical items need to be created.
These come from the usual sources: either lexical borrowing, or word formation
via derivation or compounding. The linguistic process and consequences of
elaboration are discussed in §4.5, on the Early Modern English lexicon.
5
These processes of migration may have been a crucial factor in determining the course of the
Great Vowel Shift: see §4.2.1!

124
 4.1 History and context

One important domain in which the English language was breaking new ground
during the Early Modern English period is that of religion. In the early sixteenth
century, in what is now Germany, Martin Luther was influentially propound-
ing the view that Christianity needed to return to its roots in scripture, dispens-
ing with many of the traditions of the Catholic church. This new perspective
– Protestantism – spread like wildfire across Europe, and was adopted by the
English King Henry VIII in the 1530s. Its linguistic importance lies in the fact
that Luther and the other reformers were insistent that the clergy use modern
European languages to communicate with the people rather than Latin. Luther
himself translated the Bible into German from Hebrew and Greek. Before the
Reformation, translating the Bible into English was illegal: William Tyndale pro-
duced a partial translation, but was convicted of heresy, sentenced to death by
strangulation, and finally burned at the stake in 1536. Myles Coverdale and John
Rogers completed the task, however, and their version became widely circulated,
with an important influence on other major translations such as the famous King
James Bible of 1611.
Natural philosophy (the origin of what we now call “science”) also saw an
increase in English-language texts, especially during the seventeenth century.
Robert Boyle’s Sceptical Chymist (published in 1661) was a seminal work in chem-
istry. Isaac Newton published his most famous work, Philosophiæ Naturalis Prin-
cipia Mathematica, in Latin in 1687, but his second major book Opticks (1704), on
the nature of light, was published in English.
If the goal of elaboration can be described as “maximal variation in function”,
the goal of codification is “minimal variation in form” (Haugen 1966: 931). In
Chapter 3 we’ve already seen how codification takes shape in the history of En-
glish: §3.1.1 mentions the grammars, dictionaries, and pronunciation and usage
guides that proliferate during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in partic-
ular. Nowadays we tend to take the existence of such books for granted – where
else would you check how to use the “correct” form? – but the fact is that many
languages that have not undergone standardization do not have grammars or
dictionaries written for them, and in the history of English there were no serious
attempts to write books like these before the Early Modern period. We’ll see an
example of the effects of codification and the prescriptivism it gives rise to in
§4.4.2, on preposition stranding. It’s also worth noting at this point that codifi-
cation took different paths in Britain and North America: see the text by Noah
Webster in §6 in the previous chapter for an early US perspective on standard-
ization. Millar (2012: chapter 4) has a good discussion of codification in English.

125
4 Early Modern English (1500–1700)

An English Academy?

Other countries went further than the United Kingdom and established
an official institution with responsibility for the country’s (standard) lan-
guage. The Accademia della Crusca was founded in 1583 in Florence, and
is the world’s oldest linguistic academy. The powerful Académie française
followed in 1635 in France. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth cen-
turies there were calls to set up a similar institution: in 1665 a group in-
cluding John Dryden (see §4.4.2) actually met at Gray’s Inn in London to
plan an academy, but their efforts came to nought. The most famous such
suggestion came from the political writer and satirist Jonathan Swift, in
his 1712 Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English
Tongue. This proposal briefly won royal support from Queen Anne, but
was nevertheless ultimately unsuccessful: Anne died in 1714, and subse-
quent monarchs did not return to the idea. See Millward & Hayes (2018:
236–238) for more.

Finally, “a standard language, if it is not to be dismissed as dead, must have a body

of users” (Haugen 1966: 933). The gradual orientation of a speech community to-
wards a single abstract standard is the process of acceptance. Far from being
an active, deliberate process, what Haugen describes as acceptance is driven by
a mixture of carrot and stick. On the one hand, users of the standard have access
to greater power and more influential positions, and a potent signifier of (na-
tional) group identity.6 On the other hand, those who cannot use the standard,
or choose not to, have reduced access to those opportunities, and will often face
overt scorn and prejudice. Thus, a complex web of conscious and subconscious
incentives keeps the ideal of a standard language enmeshed in people’s minds.
In this respect, very little has changed over the past centuries: once again, see
Lippi-Green (2012) on the toxic present-day effects of standard language ideol-
ogy.
Throughout this chapter we’ll come back to standardization and its effects,
which are felt at all linguistic levels.

6
Which also, of course, plays a central role in constituting that group identity.

126
 4.1 History and context

4.1.2 The Empire strikes

By itself, the standardization process doesn’t explain how English came to be a
world language. For that, we need a little history of empire.
At the beginning of the Early Modern period, England (with Wales), Scotland,
and Ireland were separate countries. The three kingdoms came to share a single
ruler when James VI of Scotland acceded to the thrones of England and Ireland in
1603, though they were not formally unified as a single “United Kingdom” until
1707. On the world stage, however, England in particular was flexing its military
and political muscles throughout the period. The “discovery” of the Americas by
Columbus in 1492 had opened the door for an international scramble to snap up
as much territory and as many resources as possible on this “new” landmass, and
elsewhere too; France, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain were other impor-
tant European actors. The fact that the territories being snapped up were already
occupied by other humans who had been there much longer didn’t stop colonies
from being established around the world. Jamestown, the first colony in what is
now the United States of America, was established in 1607, and Plymouth, Mas-
sachusetts, the first permanent colony, in 1620. The Massachusetts Bay Colony
was founded in 1629, and the well-known Harvard University emerged here in
1636.
Any good history book will tell you about the rise of the United States, and the
linguistic aspects of this rise have already been discussed in §3.1.2 in the previous
chapter. It’s useful to know that many of the colonists who made the long jour-
ney across the Atlantic did so for religious reasons: the founders of Plymouth –
the famous Pilgrim Fathers who sailed aboard the Mayflower – were Protestants,
Puritan separatists who wanted to live apart from the Church of England, and the
founders of the Massachusetts Bay colony were Puritans who wanted to reform
the Church. The Jesuits – an evangelizing Catholic society heavily involved in
the Counter-Reformation – also did their bit to spread English to the Americas
and the rest of the world. Jesuits set up missions all over the world, with edu-
cational goals that included teaching European languages to colonized peoples.
The Province of Maryland was founded in 1632 as a haven for Catholics, and the
Jesuits there played an important role in establishing relations between coloniz-
ers and Native Americans – attempting to teach the latter English and convert
them to Christianity, while also carrying out some of the earliest translations of
religious texts into the Algonquian languages.

127
4 Early Modern English (1500–1700)

Two queens

Figure 4.2: Mary Stuart and Elizabeth Tudor

Throughout the Early Modern period, Britain was dominated by two ra-
pacious dynasties, the Tudors and the Stuarts. During the second half of
the sixteenth century, two powerful women ruled England and Scotland:
Elizabeth Tudor (Elizabeth I of England) and Mary Stuart (“Mary, Queen
of Scots”). Mary, a Catholic, was forced to abdicate, and spent eighteen
years in captivity before eventually being executed: see Guy (2004) for a
scholarly but lively account.
The two women are linguistically very interesting. Mary Stuart grew
up in France, and was natively bilingual in French and Scots, as well as
able to write in English, Italian and Latin. Her letters are a linguistic trea-
sure trove. As for Elizabeth, she was described posthumously as having
spoken nine languages, including Cornish, Irish and Welsh, at near-native
level – though we probably shouldn’t take this glowing testimony at face
value. We know, however, that throughout her life she translated Latin
and Greek works: in 2019, a manuscript of a translation of Tacitus was
shown to be written by her (Philo 2020).

128
 4.2 Sounds

English colonizers also reached India, the Caribbean, and Africa during the Early
Modern period. The African situation was particularly important for the ongoing
developments in the United States, since this continent furnished the seaborne
Europeans with an almost inexhaustible supply of people to be enslaved. As peo-
ples, plants, products, diseases and ideas were taken from continent to continent
– called the Columbian Exchange after Christopher Columbus (Crosby 1972)
– the world changed irrevocably. Diseases such as smallpox (from Europe) and
yellow fever (from West Africa) are estimated to have killed 80–95% of the Na-
tive American population (Newson 2001: 167 and references cited there; Nunn &
Qian 2010: 165). Subsequently, the circulation of different forms of crops and live-
stock allowed for major population increases in all of these countries: tomatoes,
potatoes and maize were all brought back to Europe from the Americas (see §4.5
for the origins of words like these!), and farm animals such as cows, horses and
chickens were transported to the Americas from Europe, for instance. The most
obvious linguistic impact of the Columbian Exchange was the spread of English
(alongside other languages of Europe such as Spanish and Portuguese), but of
course English itself was dramatically changed by these events too, through lex-
ical innovations and the emergence of new varieties shaped by language contact
around the globe.
In what follows, you’ll learn about some of the main linguistic changes char-
acteristic of this period.

4.2 Sounds
In this section, you are going to learn about what is considered one of the most
important sound changes in the history of the English language: the Great Vowel
Shift (sometimes abbreviated to GVS). However, the fact that we only focus on
this sound change in the Early Modern English period should not leave you think-
ing that this is the only interesting aspect of Early Modern English phonology.
Because the Great Vowel Shift is a fairly complex phenomenon (as you will soon
find out for yourself), for practical reasons we will not cover all the other ex-
citing phonological and phonetic aspects of Early Modern English, such as the
loss of certain consonants (postvocalic /h/; some cases of /t/, as in castle /kɑːsɫ/;
some cases of /l/, as in talk /toːk/ and walk /woːk/); changes related to unstressed
vowels; changes in the quality of the vowels in words like TRAP and DRESS;
the change from /aʊ/ to /ɔː/, as in cause [kauz] > [kɔːz]; and certain diphthong
mergers.7
7
Check out Millward & Hayes (2018: 248–255) and Nevalainen (2006: Chapter 9) if you’re hun-
gry for more on these.

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4 Early Modern English (1500–1700)

4.2.1 The Great Vowel Shift

4.2.1.1 What is the Great Vowel Shift?
Early Modern English is full of variation, and long vowels are particularly inter-
esting. They show variation related to vowel quality, and some also show vari-
ation in whether or not this quality changes from the beginning to the end of
a vowel, i.e. whether they are monophthongs or diphthongs. Such variation in
long vowels is primarily due to the Great Vowel Shift. The Great Vowel Shift
presents us with a rather grand vowel change, as it affected the entire system of
long monophthongs of the language. As long as you were a long monophthong,
your quality eventually changed. Some of the variants were those we are familiar
with from standard Present Day English. However, other variants no longer sur-
vive in standard Present Day English – these are the historically older variants.
We can see the older variants in Figure 4.3, which shows you the very early Early
Modern English long monophthongs.

bite mouth
[iː] [uː]

beet boot
[eː] [oː]

beat boat
[ɛː] [ɔː]

name
[aː]

Figure 4.3: Early Modern English long monophthongal vowel system

You will notice the following. First, the words you will recognize from Present
Day English contained vowel qualities that differ from those they have in Present
Day English – these are the pre-shift vowel qualities. Second, there seems to be a
fairly neat correspondence between the vowel qualities implied by the IPA sym-
bols and the graphemes (letters). Thus, the word bite is spelt with an <i> and
pronounced with an [i] as well. You may be a bit puzzled about mouth, which
was pronounced as /mu:θ/ and spelt with an <ou> rather than an <u>. However,
as we will see in the next chapter (§5.2.2), <ou> and <u> both reflected [u] at the
time. You will also notice that there are two types of e and two types of o, corre-
sponding to [e] and [ɛ], and [o] and [ɔ], respectively. One thing not visible from

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 4.2 Sounds

the figure is that these long monophthongs have corresponding short monoph-
thongs, i.e. corresponding in vowel quality, but differing in vowel quantity (i.e.
duration, whether the vowel is long or short).
Now that we have established what the pre-shift long monophthongal system
was like, you are probably burning to find out just what exactly happened to get
us to the vowel qualities we are used to for the words in Figure 4.3 in standard
Present Day English. As indicated in Figure 4.4, the vast majority of the vowels
have changed in quality by being raised. Thus, the vowel in boat [bɔːt] was raised
to [boːt], and later also became a diphthong ([boʊt], [bəʊt]), although there are
still dialects of English that preserve the monophthongal quality, as we will see
below. Similarly, the vowel in boot was also raised, although this time the higher
quality is that of [u], giving us [buːt]. This is a nice example of a shift: a change in
the phonetic realization of one vowel phoneme is connected to a change in the
realization of another vowel phoneme. Importantly, the vowel phoneme in words
like boat did not become the same as that found in words like boot – speakers
today still produce and perceive these as two distinct categories.8 You may then
wonder what happened to Early Modern English /uː/, considering this vowel has
nowhere higher to go. What happened to /uː/ is diphthongization: the vowel in
mouth [muːθ] ultimately became [maʊθ].

bite mouth
[iː] [uː]
[aɪ] [aʊ]
beet boot
[eː] [oː]

beat boat
[ɛː] [ɔː]

name
[aː]

Figure 4.4: The Great Vowel Shift in a nutshell – vol. 1

The front vowels changed in a similar fashion, although they present us with
some complications in contrast to the back vowels. As you would expect by now,
the highest vowel, /iː/, diphthongized, giving us a change from bite [biːt] to (ul-
timately) [baɪt]. Also as you would expect, beet [beːt] was raised to [biːt]. So far
so good. But then we come across beat [bɛːt]. Again as expected, the vowel in
8
We saw the same process in Chapter 2 when the Northern Cities Shift was introduced.

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4 Early Modern English (1500–1700)

[bɛːt] was raised to [beːt], but this is not where the raising stopped. The raising
continued, so that the original /ɛː/ vowels were raised to [iː], taking a stop on
this journey at [eː]. And yes, if you were reading carefully, you may have come
to this realization: the vowel phonemes in words such as beet and beat merged
into a single category, into a single phoneme. This is no longer a phonetic change
whereby one vowel quality changes into another vowel quality. What happened
here is that one vowel phoneme was lost: we have a merger of the two.
We have not mentioned what happened to the vowel phoneme found in words
such as name yet. The vowel in name [naːm] got raised, just like most of the
other vowels, becoming [nɛːm] and ultimately diphthongizing into [nɛɪm]. The
final diphthongization change, however, did not take place in all dialects of En-
glish, and again, as we will see later on in this section, some dialects still have a
monophthong in words like name. Figure 4.5 sums these added observations up.

bite mouth
[iː] [uː]
[aɪ] [aʊ]
beet boot
[eː] [oː]
[ɔʊ]

beat boat
[ɛɪ] [ɛː] [ɔː]

name
[aː]

Figure 4.5: The Great Vowel Shift in a nutshell – vol. 2

Now that we have got the basics of the Great Vowel Shift off our shoulders, there
is no time to relax, because things are just getting started. First of all, the raising
phenomena and the diphthongization steps were presented to you in a way that
really simplified what took place during the shift. A change of this magnitude
takes time, and the Great Vowel Shift took centuries: some would even argue that
it may have never quite reached completion, at least in some dialects of English.
First of all, there are some exceptions, irregularities, to the Great Vowel Shift. The
vowels in words such as great, steak, yea, and break were not raised, and their
original [ɛ] therefore merged with the vowel in the name class, giving us homo-
phones such as break and brake. Another unexpected outcome of the shift is the
vowel qualities we get in words such as death and head, where the originally
long vowel [ɛː] became a short [ɛ] (Millward & Hayes 2018: 251). This serves as
a good reminder: the Great Vowel Shift only affected long monophthongs. If an

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 4.2 Sounds

originally long vowel became short before the Great Vowel Shift kicked in, it was
unaffected by the shift. An interaction of various vowel shortening processes and
the Great Vowel Shift has resulted in the “irregular” vowel pairs in words such as
sane /sɛɪn/ and sanity /sanɪti/, to the chagrin of non-native English speakers; the
spelling nevertheless reflects the pre-GVS stage. A related outcome of the shift
are seemingly illogical grapheme-phoneme correspondences, as in round /raʊnd/
but soup /suːp/, where <ou> corresponds to two different vowel phonemes. What
happened here? What explains this inconsistency is the fact that round was bor-
rowed into English in time to be affected by the shift, whereas soup wasn’t, and
hence the grapheme-phoneme discrepancy! There are more complexities, but we
believe you have had quite enough of those at this point.

Hotly debated

Some of the changes described above include intermediate stages. /iː/ and
/uː/ in particular have been a popular subject of discussions about the
GVS. To give a more specific example, one of the mainstream proposals
is that the [iː] in night [niːt] went through an [əɪ] stage before reaching
today’s standard [aɪ]. But the by far most passionate debate surround-
ing the shift concerns which vowel phonemes started changing first and
when, and which changes therefore motivated other changes that hap-
pened. If you’re particularly intrigued by any of these topics, we recom-
mend McMahon (2006) on the famous Stockwell & Minkova vs. Lass de-
bates. What is more, some researchers have even questioned whether all
the different vowel changes involved are in fact a single event, whether
the shift started already in Early Middle English, or actually even earlier,
and which phenomena should or should not be subsumed under the label
of the Great Vowel Shift (see e.g. Stenbrenden 2016: chapter 1 and again
McMahon 2006).

4.2.1.2 Further outcomes of the Great Vowel Shift

There are two important outcomes of the Great Vowel Shift which are useful
to know for anyone engaging with Present Day English phonetic variation. As
already mentioned, not all dialects of English have undergone all of the stages

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of the shift. Some dialects in the UK have monophthongs in words such as face
and name (the FACE lexical set) in contrast to the standard diphthong, and also
in words such as goat and boat (the GOAT lexical set). Similarly, in some di-
alects of English, the pre-shift /uː/ vowel did not diphthongize, giving us Present
Day English loud [luːd], cow [kuː], and mouth [muːθ] (the MOUTH lexical set).
Monophthongal variants of the vowels found in words such as FACE and GOAT
are typical of northern English dialects, for instance. You will be asked to explore
this regional variation in Exercise 1.
In this context, it is worthwhile to also mention accents such as Indian En-
glish and Welsh English in particular. These have features that at first sight look
like traces of the pre-Great Vowel Shift state of affairs. Namely, one of the tradi-
tional features of Indian English is monophthongal pronunciations of the vow-
els we find in words such as GOAT and FACE: /goːt/ for /gəʊt/, and /feːs/ for
/fɛɪs/ (Wells 1982b: 626). The same goes for traditional Welsh English accents as
well (Wells 1982c: 382–385). This raises interesting questions. Could these repre-
sent an older historical stage of the phonological system of English? Regarding
Welsh English, Wells (1982c: 382–383) strongly implies that the monophthongal
pronunciations are due to the influence of Welsh, rather than a historical left-
over of pre-GVS days. Furthermore, in some South Wales English accents, two
groups of words are attested where one group shows monophthongal pronunci-
ations and the other diphthongal ones: toe [toː] vs. tow [tou ∼ tɔu], nose [noːs] vs.
knows [nous ∼ nɔus].9 Wells (1982c: 384–385) proposes that all of these present
older borrowings, whose production is most likely based on the spelling. As non-
native English speakers (who aren’t necessarily widely exposed to native En-
glish), learners with near 1:1 grapheme-phoneme vowel correspondences in their
L1, as is the case in Welsh, can easily think that if a word is spelt as a <nose>,
the spelling surely indicates something like an o (i.e. a monophthong). Regarding
Indian English, one could speculate that the presence of monophthongs could be
put down to the vowel system of the native language(s) of the learners, or alter-
natively be a historical archaism (Wells 1982b: 626 for a tentative thought), or
possibly a mixture of the two.
The second important outcome of the Great Vowel Shift is the discrepancy
between the spelling system of Present Day English and the actual pronunciation
supposed to be reflected by this spelling system, as evidenced for instance by the
presence of webpages titled “Absolutely Ridiculous English Spelling”,10 as well
as by poems composed to illustrate the ambiguity of the English spelling system,
9
Welsh English traditionally lacks the voiced alveolar fricative /z/.
10
See here: http://www.say-it-in-english.com/SpellHome.html.

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 4.2 Sounds

such as The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité. Millward & Hayes (2018: 231) state
that “[t]he sixteenth century was perhaps the last time a thoroughgoing reform
of English spelling was possible. Soon thereafter, the spread of printed books
was to make the vested interest in older customs too great to be overthrown [...].”
Some have blamed the Great Vowel Shift for the numerous discrepancies between
the spelling and the pronunciation of the English language. It doesn’t take too
much online searching to come across claims such as “A lot of English’s “crazy”
spelling can be explained by the Great Vowel Shift.”11 And here’s the explanation
provided: “Because spelling was pretty much already established at the time the
Great Vowel Shift occurred, the pronunciation changed while the spelling did
not. And that is why English has such “crazy” spelling.” But is this really a good
enough explanation?
Irish playwright and social commentator George Bernard Shaw was one of
the individuals in support of a spelling reform during his times (1856–1950). To
illustrate the need of a spelling reform, Shaw referred to one of the rather absurd
examples invented to demonstrate the idiosyncracies of the English spelling: the
word fish might as well be spelt as <ghoti>. Why? 1. <gh> is not used just to signal
/g/ (ghost) but also /f/ (tough); 2. <o> corresponds to /ɪ/ in the word women; 3. and
<ti> corresponds to /ʃ/ in a number of words (e.g. pronunciation). As we can see
from the <ghoti> example, it is certainly not just the vowels that present us with
the lack of one-to-one spelling-pronunciation correspondence. This means that
the “crazy” English spelling cannot really be blamed solely on the Great Vowel
Shift.
There is another problem with the idea that the Great Vowel Shift alone is
responsible for the craziness of Present Day English spelling. As we’ve just seen,
there have in fact been individuals like Shaw who argued for a spelling reform.
If English spelling was so intolerably insane, we might have expected reform
efforts to succeed, putting an end to the craziness. So why didn’t they?
The answers put forward rely on a mixture of three factors. First, different
spelling standards existed before the printing press arrived; however, these stan-
dards were only standard in so far as different scriptoria (places where manu-
scripts were copied) had established spelling tendencies.12 Secondly, the arrival
of the printing press meant that the type-setters had to decide which spelling
one should choose – and there were plenty of options to choose from, as we

11
http://languagenerdadventures.blogspot.com/2009/06/great-vowel-shift.html.
12
We could think of these as the different formatting rules dictated by stylistic guidelines that
different university programmes and publishing houses may adopt, such as APA, Chicago, and
MLA, if we want to get a Present Day English approximation of the issue at hand.

135
4 Early Modern English (1500–1700)

shall see in Chapter 5. Moreover, since the printing press was brought to Eng-
land from the Low Countries, it was common for type-setters to be speakers of
Dutch, and so they introduced new ways to spell using Dutch conventions (e.g.
<gh> for /g/, as in ghost). The printing press was an important factor to consider,
and yet, even during the times following immediately after its introduction to
England, the presence of spelling variation was not socially frowned upon. This
stigmatization of spelling variation came later when dictionaries of English were
compiled, as we saw in Chapter 3. This step represents the codification stage of
standardization as discussed in §4.1.1 above. Once specific spellings were used in
dictionaries, they started gaining social prestige, and it has become difficult to
reform the spelling system as a result. We may of course ask why the creators
of dictionaries had not taken on the task to reform the spelling. Here, we may
refer to Marshall (2011: 113), who states that “[h]undreds of proposals have been
offered on how to reform the spelling of English”, and Crystal (2005: 268), who
sheds some light on the whole matter:

The new symbols and the conventions introduced by the different reformers
were unfamiliar, complex, idiosyncratic, and not entirely self-consistent.

Finally, there’s also the matter of variation to consider. If a spelling reform is sup-
posed to make the mapping between spelling and pronunciation clearer, whose
pronunciation should the spelling most closely mirror? British English? Ameri-
can English? Something else? No spelling reform would please everyone, and a
spelling reform adopted by only part of the English-speaking world would make
things worse rather than better.

Why did the GVS happen in the first place?

The traditional sociolinguistic account of what caused the Great Vowel

Shift is linked to the Black Death, which created a considerable labour
shortage. As a result, speakers from various parts of England moved to
the London area. It has been suggested that the inevitable dialect mixing
that this led to functioned as a cause of the vowel shift (Millward & Hayes
2018: 250). Smith (1993) discusses the differences between the phonolog-
ical systems of different social layers in London, including immigrants

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 4.3 Morphology

from East Anglia. What may have happened, Smith argues, is that speak-
ers who didn’t have a higher /eː/ and a lower /ɛː/ in their phonological
system may have overshot when trying (presumably hard) to produce
the fairly high /eː/. In doing so, they overdid this and reached something
that resembled /iː/ instead. Smith provides a more in-depth discussion of
the situation. More recently, Stenbrenden (2016: chapter 9) proposes an in-
triguing suggestion that there may be language-internal precursors to the
GVS, seeds that potentially provided the grounds for the GVS to be set in
motion. In particular, she speculates that certain prosodic changes in the
Germanic languages may have presented such precursors. See Chapter 7
for more on Germanic phonological innovations.

4.3 Morphology
4.3.1 Second person pronouns
All languages make a distinction between first person pronouns – referring to
the speaker – and second person pronouns, which refer to the addressee. English
is no exception, either today or at any point during its history. When it comes to
first person pronouns, Present Day English is pretty rich: there’s I, which is used
(mostly) for singular subjects, and we, for plural subjects, as well as me (singular)
and us (plural), which are the default pronouns in other contexts.
Most varieties of Present Day English aren’t as rich when it comes to second
person pronouns, though. Whether you’re dealing with singular or plural, sub-
ject or non-subject, there’s only one form that comes into question: you. This use
of you is enshrined in the standard (Wales 1983: 177) – so much so that people
who use a distinct form in the plural (e.g. yous(e) in Ireland and the southern
hemisphere, or y’all in the US – perhaps also you lot and gender-neutral you
guys for some speakers) face criticism and condemnation from prescriptivists,
even though the distinction is, if anything, a useful thing to have (Hickey 2003).
It wasn’t always this way. Before the Early Modern period, there were four dif-
ferent forms for second person pronouns, just as there are four different forms for
first person pronouns. In the plural, ye was used for subjects, with you restricted
to non-subjects. In the singular, we find two other forms: thou for subjects and
thee for non-subjects. Here are some examples from the King James Bible (1611).
(1) And he saith unto them, Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith?
(plural subject; Matthew 8:26)

137
4 Early Modern English (1500–1700)

(2) And Jesus answered and said unto them, I will also ask of you one question
(plural non-subject; Mark 11:29)
(3) And he said unto him, Lord, thou knowest all things.
(singular subject; John 21:17)
(4) And Abraham said unto God, O that Ishmael might live before thee!
(singular non-subject; Genesis 17:18)

Note that the subject pronoun thou comes with its own special verbal ending,
which is -est (with most verbs), as in example (3). Just as verbs in Present Day
English end in -s in the third person singular, verbs with second person singular
thou end in -est. There’ll be more on verbal endings in the next chapter (§5.3.1).
The pronouns ye, thou and thee, and the verbal ending -est, were lost between
1500 and 1800 in most varieties – though they survive in some British dialects,
and in some areas of religious discourse (Wales 2004; Beal 2008: 377–378). By the
time the King James Bible translation was composed in 1611, the use of thou must
already have been seen as archaic. What’s really interesting about these forms
in Early Modern English, though, is that “singular” and “plural” isn’t actually the
whole story. Instead, the use of thou (and thee) versus you (and ye) is a fascinating
reflection of social relations between speakers, and justifies a brief foray into the
domain of historical pragmatics.
Many languages have two different second person singular pronouns reflect-
ing different status relations. Latin had tu and vos, modern French has tu and
vous, German has du and Sie, Czech has ty and Vy, and Mandarin Chinese has
nǐ and nín. We can call these systems “T-V” systems, following Brown & Gilman
(1960). In each of these languages there’s a familiar pronoun (T) and a polite
pronoun (V), though exactly what determines the use of the two pronouns varies.
Brown & Gilman (1960) described two types of system: the “power semantic”, in
which a powerful person uses the familiar pronoun to address others and expects
to be addressed with the polite pronoun in return, and the “solidarity semantic”,
in which everyone uses the familiar pronoun with those who they perceive to
be social equals, but the polite pronoun to mark distance. They suggest that in
most languages of Europe the power semantic system has given way to the sol-
idarity semantic system, and that this language change reflects broader societal
changes.
Brown & Gilman’s model, and the power semantic explanation, is a useful
starting point for Early Modern English: thou is the T pronoun, and you is the
V pronoun. However, Wales (1983) argues that the power-or-solidarity model is
too simplistic to account for what we find in the Early Modern English period,

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 4.3 Morphology

especially because “there was always considerable fluctuation between T and V

forms” of a kind not found in, say, present-day German or French (Wales 1983:
114). In Early Modern English, the choice between thou and you seems often to
be determined by emotional or expressive factors, and to vary from context to
context. By the late sixteenth century, she argues, thou was already a relatively
rare and unusual form, and shifts to using the T-form were often motivated by
particular expressive considerations.
An example from Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night (1601–2) illustrates this
point. In Act III, scene 2, Sir Toby Belch is persuading Sir Andrew Aguecheek to
write a letter of challenge to a rival (the play’s protagonist). Belch comments that
“if thou thou’st him some thrice, it shall not be amiss”. The suggestion is not that
Aguecheek and his rival stand in a particular power relation to one another. In-
stead, Aguecheek uses the T-form rather than the V-form (you) because it serves
a particular expressive function, in this case most likely displaying contempt and
dismissiveness (Brown & Gilman 1960; Jucker & Taavitsainen 2013: 83).
The study of second person pronouns, terms of address, and historical prag-
matics more broadly is flourishing at the time of writing! If you’d like to find out
more, check out Jucker & Taavitsainen (2013), particularly chapter 5.

Pronoun iconoclasts: the Quakers

Not everyone was happy with the pronoun situation and the power rela-
tions they historically encoded. George Fox, the founder of the Quakers –
a Christian group focused on individual enlightenment and social equal-
ity – was a strong advocate for using thou with everyone, describing the
use of you as an “evill custome”. As he put it in his journal,
When the Lord sent me into the world, he forbade me to put off my
hat to any, high or low: and I was required to “thee” and “thou” all
men and women, without any respect to rich or poor, great or small.

Since people expected traditional social hierarchies to be respected, this

did not make the Quakers popular: Fox pointed out that priests and profes-
sors were likely to become particularly enraged. Sometimes violence was
used to enforce the system. Thomas Ellwood, a Quaker, noted ruefully in
1683 that when talking to his father,

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4 Early Modern English (1500–1700)

I durst not say “You” to him; but “Thou”, or “Thee”, as the occasion
required, and then would he be sure to fall on me with his fists.

The Quakers did not succeed in convincing everyone to use universal

thou: Leith (1997: 107) even suggests that the general disreputability of
the Quakers might instead have encouraged people to move away from
it! However, in Present Day English we mostly use universal you, and in
that respect George Fox’s wish for social hierarchies not to be represented
in language has come true.

4.3.2 Other morphology to look out for

The discussion in this subsection is brief, and is intended to mention only those
aspects that might trip you up when reading Early Modern English texts.
In §2.3.1 we discussed how there is variation in Present Day English as to
whether there is an -s at the end of third person singular verbs (e.g. standard she
likes vs. she like). In Early Modern English, another variant can be found: the -th
ending, as in she liketh. This ending is in fact very old, going all the way back to
Old English. At the beginning of the Early Modern English period, in 1500, it is
the most common form in the third person singular, but it declines dramatically
during the period, and by 1700 it is rarely found. Originally, -s was a regional
form used much more in the north of England than in the south, but during the
Early Modern period it becomes the norm almost everywhere (see Nevalainen &
Raumolin-Brunberg 2016: 67–68, 177–179). The -th ending survives longest with
the very common verbs HAVE (hath) and DO (doth). Shakespeare, for example,
normally uses the -s variant, but uses the forms hath and doth as exceptions for
these specific lexical items.
In Early Modern English you are also likely to see more irregular forms. This
is true both of verbs (e.g. holpen as the past participle of HELP rather than the
Present Day form helped) and of nouns (e.g. kine as the plural of COW rather
than cows). The verbs, and the notions of regular and irregular, are covered in
more detail in the next chapter, in §5.3.2. To find out how noun plurals worked
in earlier English you’ll have to wait longer, but we will cover this in §6.3.3. In
the meantime, don’t hesitate to look up unfamiliar forms in a dictionary if you
can’t figure out what they mean.

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 4.4 Syntax

Frequency effects

Why are some morphological forms regular and other forms irregular?
For instance, in Present Day English, why is the plural of SHOE shoes
while the plural of CHILD is children? Why is the past participle of PLAY
played while the past participle of EAT is eaten and the past participle of
DRINK is drunk? One explanation that has gained prominence in recent
years involves frequency effects. Simply put, words that are used more
often – lexical items which have a high token frequency – are more re-
sistant to regularization over time. So, all else being equal, it’s more likely
(for instance) for a very common noun to have an irregular plural than it
is for a rare noun. This type of approach doesn’t explain everything: why,
for example, is the plural of OX oxen, when this isn’t a high-frequency
word at all? Still, the token-frequency approach provides a good rule of
thumb for understanding patterns of regularity and irregularity. See By-
bee (2015: chapter 5) for a textbook explanation of frequency effects in
morphological change.

4.4 Syntax
4.4.1 Verbs and DO-support
Present Day English has a class of auxiliaries consisting of HAVE, BE, DO and
the modals (mainly CAN, MUST, SHOULD, WILL). These auxiliaries are set apart
from normal verbs by the NICE properties (see Huddleston & Pullum 2002: 92–
93):

• Negation. An auxiliary can be negated by a following not (or present-day

n’t; see §3.3.1). For instance, She must not or She is not are fine, but *She
plays not or *She eats not are impossible.

• Inversion. In questions, auxiliaries can precede the subject. Must she? or

Is she? are fine, but *Plays she? or *Eats she? are impossible.

• Code. This criterion is also referred to as ellipsis. In a sentence like Taylor

hasn’t had breakfast but Sam has, the understood meaning of the bolded

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4 Early Modern English (1500–1700)

part is “Sam has had breakfast”, and this meaning can be recovered from
the linguistic context. This property of allowing meaning to arise seem-
ingly out of thin air is unique to the auxiliaries, and normal verbs don’t
allow it: *Taylor likes eating breakfast but Sam doesn’t like, for instance –
with ellipsis of what follows LIKE – is ungrammatical, whereas Taylor likes
eating breakfast but Sam doesn’t – with ellipsis of what follows the auxil-
iary DO – is fine.
• Emphasis. When an auxiliary is heavily stressed, as in I DO play basket-
ball! or I HAVE been to Japan!, what is emphasized is the truth or falsity
of the whole clause. In this case, one’s presence in Japan (at some point in
the past) is being emphasized – perhaps to counter the implication that it
isn’t true. You can stress normal verbs too, e.g. I EAT snails!, but this has a
different effect on meaning: it serves to contrast different types of action
or state (e.g. eating snails rather than racing them or selling them, in this
example).
The NICE properties can be NICEly accounted for by assuming that auxiliaries
are elements of category I, occupying the head of the IP in a syntactic tree,
whereas normal verbs (henceforth lexical verbs) are of category V, occupying
the head of the VP (see Los 2015: §4.3).13
The strategy of assuming a difference between I elements and V elements
won’t work for Early Modern English, though. Examples like *Plays she? and
*She plays not are in fact grammatical and well attested here, as the following
examples illustrate.
(5) Looks it not like the king?
(Shakespeare, Hamlet, c. 1600)
(6) Came this out of Cobham’s Quiver?
(Proceedings of the trial of Walter Raleigh, 1600)
(7) I know not by what power I am made bold
(Shakespeare, Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1595–6)
(8) But I rendered not to him according to the benefit received
(Anne Bradstreet, To my dear children, c. 1656)
In the Early Modern English period and before, then, lexical verbs – just like
auxiliaries – occupied the I position, rather than the V position. This can be de-
scribed as involving movement of the verbs from V to I, and onward to C in the
case of inversion, since the subject is in the specifier of IP. Some trees illustrating
this are given in (9) and (10).
13
If you don’t recall what terms like “I”, “V” and “head” mean, take another look at §1.2.3.

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 4.4 Syntax

(9) IP (10) CP

I I′ C IP

I VP Know you I′

know not VP I VP

V know (not) VP

know V

know?
The loss of this V-to-I movement is a long process, stretching from 1400 to 1800,
and involving substantial variation both within and between individuals (see e.g.
Haeberli & Ihsane (2016) for details). At the same time as this fundamental change
in the positioning of lexical verbs occurred, new auxiliaries were emerging. One
of these is the emergence of what’s called DO-support.14 The DO of DO-support,
like the other auxiliaries, is an I element, and bears its name because it’s seman-
tically empty: it simply has to be inserted in order to form a negative statement
or a question, as in the Present Day English trees (11) and (12). Because this DO
is an I element, it exhibits the four NICE properties discussed above.

(11) IP (12) CP

I I′ C IP

I VP Do you I′

do not VP I VP

V do (not) VP

know V

know?
14
Also known in the literature as periphrastic or dummy DO.

143
4 Early Modern English (1500–1700)

Among the Germanic languages, DO-support is completely unique. In Old and

Middle English, DO was simply a lexical verb with the semantic content of ‘make’
or ‘achieve’ (as in e.g. I am doing my homework). But what’s striking when you
compare the trees in (9) (Early Modern English) and (11) (Present Day English)
for negation, or in (10) (Early Modern English) and (12) (Present Day English) for
questions, is that DO seems to play the same role as V-to-I movement: it fills the
I “slot”. If that’s true, the rise of DO-support should take place at the same time
as the fall in V-to-I movement – and this seems to be correct (Roberts 1985, 1993,
Kroch 1989).15

Figure 4.6: The rise of DO-support in a variety of linguistic contexts.

The dip after 1575 is clearly visible. From Ecay (2015: 54), used with
author’s permission; data are taken from the Penn Parsed Corpora of
Historical English, replicating Ellegård (1953).

15
Why DO, of all verbs, becomes an auxiliary with no semantic content is another question. One
prominent suggestion is that influence from the Celtic languages of Britain (see §6.1.2) may
have played a role. Present Day Welsh offers us sentences such as Dwi’n hedfan hefo alarchod
‘I fly/I’m flying with swans’, where the auxiliary verb BE is the dwi component in this case
(‘am’, literally). The Welsh dwi is phonologically quite close to the Present Day English DO.
See van der Auwera & Genee (2002) for references and an evaluation.

144
 4.4 Syntax

Sociolinguistic and stylistic factors also play a role in the change. In negative
declarative clauses like (9) and (11), the use of DO-support increases up until 1575,
then levels out for a while (see Figure 4.6). Warner (2005) shows that, before 1575,
texts that contain a more complex vocabulary also contain more DO-support, but
after 1600 the picture is reversed: texts with a more complex lexicon use less DO-
support. The rate of DO-support increases steadily in texts with a less complex
lexicon, but rises and then falls after 1575 in texts with a more complex lexicon.
After 1600, older people also use DO less. How to explain this? Warner (2005)
suggests that after 1600 a strong stylistic dispreference for DO-support in higher
register texts emerged. It’s plausible to think that this is linked to the rise of a
standard language ideology (§4.1.1) and of an increasingly judgemental behaviour
around written norms during the same period: perhaps what was perceived as
more formal/standard at the later stage reflected a “pre-DO” stage.

The modals
The core modals – can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will, and
would – have properties in Present Day English that are odd even by aux-
iliary standards: for instance, they can’t have non-finite forms (e.g. *I want
to can). See §5.4.2 of this book for discussion of the morphosyntactic prop-
erties of the modals, and also §3.4.2 on the more recently emerging “semi-
modals”.

For more detail on the changes discussed in this subsection, and fuller versions
of the arguments developed here, see Los (2015: Chapter 4, especially §4.6).

4.4.2 Preposition stranding

Is a preposition something you’d end a sentence with? If not, what are you afraid
of? Preposition stranding – i.e. the placement of a preposition apart from, usu-
ally after, the noun phrase it belongs to – is one of the grammatical features of
English that prescriptivists most love to complain about (Crystal 2006b: 107–115).
Nevertheless, it has been part of the English language since before the earliest
texts were written.16 All three of the opening sentences of this paragraph con-
16
Though not in exactly the same contexts in which it appears in Present Day English. See
Fischer et al. (2000: 64–67) for a discussion of preposition stranding in Old English, and a
syntactic analysis.

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4 Early Modern English (1500–1700)

tain preposition stranding. Here are some more examples from Early Modern
English:
(13) Sulphur like unto the common one, and more combustible than perhaps
you will at first take notice of
(Robert Boyle, The Sceptical Chymist, 1661)
(14) Oroonoko was first seized on, and sold to our overseer
(Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, 1688)
(15) The mawes, and dens of beasts could not receiue
The bodies, that those soules were frighted from
(Ben Jonson, Catiline his Conspiracy, 1611)
(16) What were you talking of when I came?
(Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, 1609)
The more standard option for preposition placement is called pied-piping, and
has the preposition next to its complement, e.g. Of what were you talking?
Where did the proscription against stranded prepositions come from, then, and
how did it enter into the standard language? The first person to explicitly con-
demn stranding seems to have been John Dryden, an English literary critic and
poet. In an essay of 1672 criticizing the “errors” of earlier writers, Dryden seizes
upon example (15),17 describing it as “[t]he preposition in the end of the sen-
tence; a common fault with him [Jonson], and which I have but lately observed
in my own writings.” When revising his own work after 1668, Dryden attempted
to “correct” stranded prepositions (Bately 1964; Yáñez-Bouza 2015: 157–158, 188–
194). Dryden also rewrote Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, a play which he
described as a “heap of Rubbish”, in 1679, and corrected talking of in example
(16) to a talking.
Dryden clearly saw himself as someone trying to improve the English lan-
guage. However, why Dryden disliked stranded prepositions so much, and con-
sidered them a “fault”, is not entirely clear. Bately (1964: 275) suggests that he
is trying to “force the mother tongue into a Latin mould”: Latin does not allow
separation of a preposition from the noun phrase that follows it.18 Many writ-
ings on English grammar from the same period were heavily influenced by the
17
Ironically, Dryden actually makes an error in his citation of Jonson, writing waves rather than
the original mawes.
18
Note that this is not a prescriptive rule of Latin. Rather, Latin native speakers (and writers)
simply didn’t strand prepositions, just as modern French or German or Czech native speakers
don’t today. In these languages, we’re talking about a part of the mental grammar that is largely
below the level of consciousness, not a taught prescriptive rule. See Freidin (2019: 75–83) for
discussion of the difference.

146
 4.4 Syntax

regularities of Latin. But the fallacy in this way of thinking is patently obvious:
English simply isn’t Latin.
The proscription against preposition stranding may originate with Dryden,
but makes its way into the standard as part of the process of codification (see
§4.1.1) during the eighteenth century. Robert Lowth, who is known to have read
Dryden, discusses stranding in his extremely influential 1762 Short Introduction
to English Grammar, and says the following (Lowth 1762: 127–128):

[Stranding] is an Idiom, which our language is strongly inclined to; it pre-

vails in common conversation, and suits very well with the familiar style in
writing; but the placing of a Preposition before the Relative is more graceful,
as well as more perspicuous; and agrees much better with the solemn and
elevated Style.

“Bishop Lowth” has been demonized as the arch-prescriptivist, but more recent
research has shown that this is not really fair (Beal 2004: 111; Tieken-Boon van
Ostade 2010). In this quote we see Lowth making a distinction between speech
and writing, and between “familiar” and “solemn” styles (Yáñez-Bouza 2015: 214–
218).
Lowth also uses stranding himself here (“strongly
inclined to”). Still, Lowth gives no reason for con-
sidering stranding to be less graceful or perspic-
uous. And all of the nuance in Lowth’s careful
statement is stripped out by later grammarians,
who adopt much of Lowth’s work almost verbatim
(norms around authorship, attribution, and plagia-
rism were not the same in the eighteenth cen-
tury as they are today). Yáñez-Bouza (2015: 218)
is able to trace Lowth’s influence in twenty dif-
ferent texts by fifteen different authors of the pe-
riod. Lindley Murray’s (1795) English Grammar is
one notable example, reproducing Lowth’s text al-
most exactly but changing the text to get rid of
Figure 4.7: Robert Lowth
the stranding (“an idiom to which our language is
strongly inclined”). Traces of Lowth’s passage can
also be found in the works of the female grammarians of the period, such as Ellin
Devis.
Dryden’s and Lowth’s remarks and the codification of stranding as outside
the standard had a real effect on usage. Yáñez-Bouza (2015: chapter 4) and Sairio

147
4 Early Modern English (1500–1700)

(2009) show that the frequency of preposition stranding in written texts sinks
dramatically during the second half of the eighteenth century, even in the usage
of individuals over their lifespan. Still, preposition stranding is alive and well
in Present Day English, even if still frowned upon by some prescriptive authori-
ties, suggesting that even the strongest prescriptive condemnation is unlikely to
extirpate a syntactic feature entirely.

4.5 Lexicon
Three phenomena are particularly noteworthy when it comes to the lexicon of
Early Modern English. Two are related to borrowings: as we saw in §4.1, Early
Modern English is marked by English becoming standardized and by coloniza-
tion. The former, as we shall see here, is closely tied to lexical borrowings from
Latin, French, and Greek, and caused quite a stir-up at the time (the so-called
inkhorn controversy). The latter meant that English speakers came into contact
with speakers of many other languages, on an unprecedented scale at the time.
Finally, when contrasted with the older periods, Early Modern English saw a rise
in a derivational process called conversion. Let’s have a look at these one by
one in what follows.

4.5.1 Conversion
We have seen a process known as conversion already in Chapters 1 and 2. It is
also known as zero shift, functional shift, or zero derivation (or a derivation by
a zero morpheme, to add one more term to the menagerie). Conversion involves
a process whereby a word of a specific word class is used as a word of another
word class without its structure being changed in any way. For instance, the word
bottle would come to our mind most likely as a noun by default, as in There’s a
bottle on the table. However, if we put this word in a different syntactic context,
it becomes a verb, as in Let’s bottle some wine! and She had been bottling wine
for as long as she could remember, introduced to the art by her father.19
We can find some remarkable cases of conversion already in Early Modern
English, e.g. in Shakespeare’s Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle from
Richard II, where the nouns grace and uncle are unconventionally used also as
verbs. In Present Day English, we can occasionally find even entire clauses used
as verbs or modifiers, as in “Don’t “I told you so” me,” Martin snapped. (Clark-Platts
2016).
This has nevertheless not always been the case throughout the earlier history
of the English language. This word-formation strategy became “the third most
19
OED, s.v. bottle, v.1.
148
 4.5 Lexicon

common way of expanding the vocabulary” only in the period of 1500–1700 (Mill-
ward & Hayes 2018: 283), following affixing and compounding.

I’d be bumblebeed
Some internet searching gives us cases of conversions such as the follow-
ing:a
• however we were now short of a header tank for the heating/stove and
as its 40 miles to town I was bumblebeed if I was going to buy one
[...]

The word bumblebee, historically and by default used as a noun, can ap-
parently also be used as a verb, albeit extremely marginally so. Well, I’d
sure be bumblebeed...
a
https://www.navitron.org.uk/forum/index.php?topic=7443.15.

4.5.2 Colonial borrowings

Encounters with new cultures and new
fauna and flora typically require new la-
bels for new concepts. These concepts are
typically nouns (e.g. a wombat, a rather
cute marsupial native to Australia; see Fig-
ure 4.8), which makes sense considering
new labels are typically needed for fairly
specific objects, unknown to the explor-
ers.
If we use the advanced search option in
the Oxford English Dictionary and limit
Figure 4.8: Wombat: a marsupial native
to Australia (photo by Stygiangloom, li- our search to loans from Australian Abo-
censed under CC-BY 2.0) riginal languages between the years of
1500–1700, we find no results. Considering
what we said about the history of Australian English (in the box in §2.1.3), this
makes sense: Anglophone presence in Australia dates back to 1788. It therefore

149
4 Early Modern English (1500–1700)

also makes sense that extending the period to 1800 produces 11 loanwords, such
as dingo and wombat (from Dharug) and kangaroo (from Guugu Yimidhirr). Ten
of these are nouns and ten refer to the fauna and flora of Australia, and Aus-
tralian culture. This trend is confirmed by searches restricted to other groups of
non-European languages: loanwords are often nouns necessary to label newly
encountered objects and entities.
Searching within 1500–1700, we get 46 loans from Austronesian languages of
the Asia-Pacific region and Oceania, all of which are nouns (three of these are
nouns as well as another word class). One Austronesian loan is babirusa, ‘a long-
legged wild pig’, from Malay. Considering the longer colonial history in North
America (in contrast to Australia), it is not surprising that Native American lan-
guages give us 106 results. Of these, all can function as nouns, and some as other
word classes as well. Some of these loans include maize and potato (both from
Taíno via Spanish), tomato (from Nahuatl via Spanish), jaguar, moccasin, moose,
raccoon, squash, and terrapin. Limiting the search to contact with languages of
the Indian subcontinent, 239 results are provided. This high number also makes
sense: the Indian subcontinent was heavily exploited by the colonizers. Again,
all but three of these loans can function as nouns. Some of these include Buddha
(from Pali), dungaree, ghee, guru, pukka, pundit, and yogi (from Hindi/Urdu), and
mongoose (from Telugu via Portuguese). Central and Eastern Asian languages
result in 131 entries, including for instance baklava, harem, and yoghurt (from
Turkish), cha (related to Present Day English chai and tea; from Chinese), Islam
(from Arabic), jackal (from Persian and Turkish), ketchup, litchi and kumquat
(from Chinese), lama (from Tibetan), soy (from Japanese), and tulip (multiple
languages). Middle Eastern and Afro-Asiatic languages lead to 357 entries and
African languages give us 15 loans (such as okra, a type of edible plant, from a
Niger-Congo language, probably Igbo).
These trends are by no means limited to Early Modern English. If we did sim-
ilar searches for the languages relevant for Late Modern English or Present Day
English, we would also find plenty of borrowings necessary for unknown objects,
perfectly known in the newly explored locales. Typically, as we shall see in the
chapters to follow, the type of linguistic materials borrowed from a language
depends on the nature of the cultural contact and very much on the situational
power relationships. Studying where which words come from can thus provide
interesting evidence related to the relationships of different cultures through
times.

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 4.5 Lexicon

4.5.3 Latin and Greek borrowings: the inkhorn controversy

By the start of the Early Modern period in 1500, the Renaissance was in full flow
in Europe. A philosophical movement originating in what is now Italy, the intel-
lectual roots of the Renaissance were in Classical Latin and Greek thought, par-
ticularly the Greek philosophers, who had been “rediscovered” in Europe shortly
before. Its effect upon the intelligentsia of early modern Europe was profound:
from 1450 onwards, universities began to spring up in great numbers all around
Europe.
Comparison with Latin and Greek no doubt played an important role in the
emerging standardization of the modern languages of Europe. In the lexicon of
English, this is particularly evident in the borrowing of many new words from
Latin and Greek during the Early Modern period. According to the data from the
third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary in Durkin (2014: 23–28), Latin is
by far the most prolific donor language in the history of English to date, respon-
sible for over thirteen thousand borrowings into English.20 English has always
borrowed words from Latin, but the peak of these borrowings is just after 1600.21
Greek, meanwhile, is in third place after French (on which see §5.5.1 in the next
chapter), responsible for well over two thousand borrowings, almost all dating to
after 1500. Together, Latin and Greek account for over half of all lexical borrow-
ings in the history of English. Admittedly, the vast majority of these Latin and
Greek borrowings are highly learned and/or technical terms which only appear
very rarely and in specific registers. Nevertheless, the impact of these classical
languages on the lexicon of English during the Early Modern period was clearly
immense. The second half of the seventeenth century saw more borrowings enter
English than any other period in history (Durkin 2014: 299–301). Perhaps even
more strikingly, these new Latin and Greek words were ready input to further
word-formation processes, which continued robustly in English during the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries, especially in the scientific domain (Durkin 2014:
340–347).
As we’ve seen in the section on standardization (§4.1.1), one of the processes
involved is elaboration: the new standard language is used in new domains,
or used increasingly in domains where other languages were dominant, and this
brings with it a need for new words. These words can be formed using the lan-
guage’s own word-formation strategies, such as conversion (§4.5.1 above), or
they can simply be borrowed. Since the discourse in many of these new domains

20
The total number of headwords in the OED3 is 92,500.
21
If you have access, you can check this for yourself at http://www.oed.com/timelines.

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4 Early Modern English (1500–1700)

Table 4.1: Some borrowings from Latin in Early Modern English

(Durkin 2014: chapter 14)

celebrate communicate contemplate

describe fact frivolous
national pulsate reconciliatory
resonate subsidiary supervise

was previously dominated in usage by Latin in particular, borrowing words from

Latin was the most obvious fix.
This influx of borrowings from classical languages did not sit well with every-
one. The incipiently standardizing English language was becoming a source of
pride: headmaster Richard Mulcaster commented in 1582 that “I take this present
period of our English tung to be the verie height thereof”. Mulcaster also com-
mented on the number of words being borrowed into the language, “either of
pure necessitie in new matters, or of mere brauerie, to garnish it self withall”.
Here brauerie means ‘showiness’ or ‘ostentatiousness’, implying that some of
these borrowings were for reasons of fashion, not because they were needed. The
prestige of classical languages meant that using Latin and Greek words in English
could be taken as a mark of education, or of (perceived) social superiority. In turn,
people could be mocked for this. The teacher Holofernes in Shakespeare’s Love’s
Labours Lost peppers his language liberally with Latin and Latinisms (e.g. when
reading a letter, he says “I will overglance the superscript”), and is intended as
a figure of ridicule. Thomas Wilson’s influential Arte of Rhetorique (1553) puts it
like this:

Among all other lessons this should first be learned, that wee neuer affect
any straunge ynkhorne termes, but to speak as is commonly received ...
Some seeke so far for outlandish English, that they forget altogether their
mothers language.

Wilson writes of “inkhorn terms”, which became a catchphrase for Latin and Lati-
nate words that were perceived to be unnecessary or affected. This influenced
the first generation of dictionaries in the seventeenth century, such as Thomas
Blount’s (1656) Glossographia: these works were lists of explanations of words
thought to be difficult, not dictionaries in the sense we’re more familiar with
today. Although it’s easy to laugh at the supposed pretentiousness of the Early
Modern writers criticized, the darker side of the inkhorn controversy is linguis-
tic purism (Thomas 1991, Langer & Nesse 2012), the desire to preserve languages

152
 4.6 Final note

from foreign elements, and the view that inherited words are better than bor-
rowed ones. Linguistic purism goes hand in hand with standard language ideol-
ogy and with ethnonationalism, and so it is not surprising to see it on show in
the Early Modern period.
The critics of inkhorn terms were not, on the whole, successful in suppressing
Latin words. All of the words in Table 4.1 are still found in English today, with
no particular negative connotations. Still, in some quarters the sentiment behind
the inkhorn critics persists. As recently as 1946, George Orwell’s essay Politics
and the English Language complains that “unnecessary words like expedite, ame-
liorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous, and hundreds of
others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon opposite numbers”. Need-
less to say, Orwell provides no evidence for this claim, nor any argument for the
superiority of their inherited Germanic “opposite numbers”.22

4.6 Final note

It’s the Early Modern period more than any other that explains how and why
the English language got to where it is today – both in terms of its geographical
distribution and its social status. We’ve seen that the process of standardization
– closely linked to the rise of nationalism – really took off during this period,
as did the spread of English worldwide via colonialism and imperialism. Some
of the linguistic changes we see during this period are also connected to this
emerging sense of British self-importance: the rise of borrowings from the pres-
tige languages Greek and Latin (and the pushback against these borrowings) is a
case in point. But, just like in every other period, we also see structural changes
that bear no obvious relation to social or cultural developments, such as the rise
of DO-support and the Great Vowel Shift. These are good indications that stan-
dardization – for all its centrality to the way we think about language today –
can never prevent a language from developing in new and unexpected ways.

22
For more on the inkhorn controversy, see https://shakespeareandbeyond.folger.edu/2019/04/
05/inkhorn-controversy-latin-greek-english-words/ and Barber (1997: Chapter 2) – also make
sure to have a go at Exercise 7!

153
4 Early Modern English (1500–1700)

Suggested exercises

E.1 Reflexes of the Great Vowel Shift

You will be using a dataset created as part of the project called “Seeing
Speech” (Lawson et al. 2015).a

A.
Listen to the production of FACE, GOAT, MOUTH of the speakers from
the following places:
1. Greater Manchester

2. Kent

3. London

4. Newcastle

5. North Yorkshire

6. Co. Tipperary

7. Orkney

8. Perthshire

Note whether the vowel is a monophthong, a diphthong, or somewhere

in between. Is it always easy to decide?

B.
Which of these speakers show more conservative vowel features? In
other words, which speakers’ accents reflect older stages of the language?

Tip for the teachers: This can be assigned as a written exercise practising
summarizing skills. Give the students a maximum word count and a
deadline for the written exercise.

154
 Suggested exercises

Tip for the students: If you’re asked to submit your answers as a writ-
ten assignment, your answer should be structured as follows: 1. What’s
the question/problem? (setting up the context); 2. Show us how you an-
swer this question/tackle the problem. (argumentation); 3. What’s your
answer/conclusion? (sum up clearly)
a
The dataset is available here: https://www.dynamicdialects.ac.uk/accent-chart/.

E.2 For I thou thee, thou traitor!

Look at the 2nd person pronouns in the two passages below. The
pronouns are highlighted for you. The first passage comes from the Trial
of Sir Walter Raleigh, Knight, for High Treason, by a Special Commission
of Oyer and Terminer, at Winchester, 17th November, 1603. 2 James I
(Jardine 1832: 408–410). The second bunch of excerpts is taken from
Shakespeare’s Hamlet. We give you a snippet of a conversation between
Hamlet and the Queen, his mother, and also a conversation between
Hamlet and the Ghost, who turns out to be his dead (murdered) father.
Your tasks are presented following the excerpts.a

A.
Sir Walter Raleigh. All this while you tell me news, Mr. Attorney.
Attorney General. Sir Walter, I cannot blame you, though you be
moved.
Sir Walter Raleigh. Nay, you fall out with yourself; I have said noth-
ing to you; I am in no case to be angry.
[...]
Attorney General. After Raleigh understood that he was accused by
my Lord Cobham, it was contrived that the Lord Cobham should
retract his accusation, and that he might make his retraction known
and believed, the course was this: [...]. Came this contrivance, think

155
4 Early Modern English (1500–1700)

you, out of Cobham’s quiver? No, but out of Raleigh’s devilish and
Machiavelian policy. You shall hear that it was after Cobham had had
intelligence with this viper in the Tower, that he devised this false
artifice. But Sir Thomas Fane would be no party in such a business,
and sent the letter to the Council.
Sir Walter Raleigh. What is that to me? I do not hear yet that you
have spoken one word against me; here is no treason of mine done;
if my Lord Cobham be a traitor, what is that to me?
Attorney General. All that he did was by thy instigation, thou viper,
for I thou thee, thou traitor! I will prove thee the rankest traitor in
all England.
Sir Walter Raleigh. No, no, Mr. Attorney, I am no traitor. Whether I
live or die, I shall stand as true a subject as any the King hath; you
may call me traitor at your pleasure; yet it becomes not a man of
quality and virtue to do so; but I take comfort in it, it is all that you
can do, for I do not yet hear that you charge me with any treason.
Lord Chief Justice. Sir Walter Raleigh, Mr. Attorney speaks out of
the zeal of his duty for the service of the King; and you for your life;
be patient on both sides.

B.

QUEEN. Let not thy mother lose her prayers, Hamlet. I pray thee
stay with us; go not to Wittenberg.
HAMLET. I shall in all my best obey you, madam.

[...]

HAMLET. Angels and ministers of grace defend us! Be thou a spirit

of health or goblin damn’d, Bring with thee airs from heaven or
blasts from hell, be thy intents wicked or charitable, thou com’st
in such a questionable shape that I will speak to thee. [...] What may
this mean, that thou, dead corse, again in complete steel, [...] say,
why is this? Wherefore? What should we do?

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 Suggested exercises

HORATIO. It beckons you to go away with it, as if it some impart-

ment did desire to you alone.

[...]

HAMLET. Whither wilt thou lead me? Speak, I’ll go no further.

GHOST. Mark me.
HAMLET. I will.
GHOST. My hour is almost come, when I to sulph’rous and torment-
ing flames must render up myself.
HAMLET. Alas, poor ghost!
GHOST. Pity me not, but lend thy serious hearing to what I shall
unfold.
HAMLET. Speak, I am bound to hear.
GHOST. So art thou to revenge, when thou shalt hear. [...] I am thy
father’s spirit, doom’d for a certain term to walk the night, [t]ill the
foul crimes done in my days of nature are burnt and purg’d away.
[...] List, list, O, list! If thou didst ever thy dear father love—
HAMLET. O God!
GHOST. Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.
HAMLET. Murder! [The Ghost/Father tells him how he was mur-
dered by Hamlet’s uncle, the Ghost’s/former King’s brother.] O my
prophetic soul! Mine uncle!
GHOST. Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast, with witchcraft of
his wit, with traitorous gifts,— o wicked wit, and gifts, that have the
power so to seduce!—won to his shameful lust the will of my most
seeming-virtuous queen. [...] Adieu, adieu, adieu. Hamlet, remember
me.
HAMLET. O all you host of heaven! O earth! What else? And shall
I couple hell? O, fie! Hold, my heart; And you, my sinews, grow not
instant old. But bear me stiffly up. Remember thee? Ay, thou poor

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ghost, while memory holds a seat in this distracted globe. Remember

thee?

And here are your tasks:

1. Identify instances where the same speaker switches from you (or
yourself ) to thou (or thyself or thee), and the other way round. Why
do you think these switches take place?

2. Looking beyond pronouns, how do the speakers address each

other? Give specific noun phrases (e.g. lovely bumblebee) or deter-
miner phrases (e.g. my precious jewel). Are these forms of address
negative, positive, or neutral? Can this help to shed any light on the
pronominal switches you’ve identified?

3. The Chief Lord of Justice makes a mention of the emotional state

of the Attorney General. How does this relate to the pronominal
switches, if at all?

4. This time you were given fairly long passages to look at. Why
weren’t you given just those sentences that contain 2nd person pro-
nouns?
a
These passages are taken from the following Project Gutenberg webpage, accessed in
February 2020: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1524/1524-h/1524-h.htm.

E.3 Shakespearean syntax

Examine the Shakespearean quotations below and describe how they dif-
fer from Present Day English morphologically and syntactically. Pay par-
ticular attention to what the finite verb is doing.
1. What says he of our marriage? What of that? (Romeo and Juliet 2.5)

2. Put up your swords; you know not what you do. (Romeo and Juliet

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 Suggested exercises

1.1)

3. A crutch, a crutch! why call you for a sword? (Romeo and Juliet 1.1)

4. O, where is Romeo? saw you him to-day? (Romeo and Juliet 1.1)

5. Fear me not. (Romeo and Juliet 1.1)

E.4 Preposition stranding in your own daily life?

1. Find 3 examples of preposition stranding

• on the social media you engage with
• in spoken interactions you have with others

2. Was it difficult to find these 3 examples for each context?

3. Now rewrite these examples so that they don’t contain any prepo-
sition stranding.

4. Finally, try this exercise in reverse! Find three examples of pied-

piping – perhaps in academic articles or textbooks. Now rewrite
them so that they contain preposition stranding!

Acknowledgement: this exercise was suggested to us by Nicole Tamer.

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4 Early Modern English (1500–1700)

E.5 Whence synonymity?

The following 20 words represent 10 pairs of synonyms. You need to iden-

tify these 10 pairs:
bless, break, chew, cogitate, consecrate, depart, disintegrate, drink,
emancipate, flood, free, go, imbibe, inundate, job, lie, masticate, posi-
tion, prevaricate, think

One word in each pair is Latin- or French-derived and one is Germanic.

Sort the individual words into two categories: one with all the Germanic
words and one with all the Romance words.

1. What differences (e.g. number of syllables, semantics, etc.) do you

notice between the two sets?

2. Discuss the language styles in which the use of one or the other is
more appropriate.

Acknowledgement: this exercise was taken and slightly adapted from Jo-
hanna Wood’s 2016 teaching materials.

E.6 Irregular plurals in Present Day English

Sometimes borrowed words keep their foreign plurals. This often happens
with Latin and Greek words used in specialized areas by educated people.
Among such loan words are the following:
analysis, cherub, index, matrix, medium, nucleus, species, stigma, and
stratum

For each, give the foreign plural and the language from which it derives.
(You will need a good dictionary, such as the online OED.)

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 Suggested exercises

Sometimes two different plural forms may be used with different func-
tions. Are you aware of any of these words above using both a regular
and irregular plural with different meanings?

E.7 Inkhorn controversy

Note: for this exercise you will need access to the online Oxford English
Dictionary (OED) via your library or university.

In 1557, Sir John Cheke wrote the following:

I am of this opinion that our own tung shold be written cleane
and pure, unmixt and unmangeled with borowing of other tunges,
wherin if we take not heed by tiim, ever borowing and never payeng,
she shall be fain to keep her house as bankrupt. For then doth
our tung naturallie and praisablie utter her meaning, when she
bouroweth no counterfeitness of other tunges to attire her self with-
all, but useth plainlie her own, ... and if she want at ani tiim (as being
unperfight she must) yet let her borow with suche bashfulness, that
it mai appear, that if either the mould of our own tung could serve
us to fascion a woord of our own, or if the old denisoned wordes
could content and ease this neede, we wold not boldly venture of
unknowen wordes. (in Wells 1973: 31)

Look up the etymology of the following words in the OED: opinion, clean,
pure, unmixed, unmangled, borrow, tongue, never, paying, fine, keep, house,
bankrupt.
Having looked up the etymology, what would you say to Sir John Cheke
as a trained linguist?

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E.8 Food for thought

• If the English spelling was reformed so that the grapheme-phoneme

correspondence was a 1:1 correspondence, what immediate pros and
cons would we have to deal with and why?

• Which English accent should a spelling reform be based on and

why?

• Are chain shifts such as the Northern Cities Shift or the Short Front
Vowel Lowering to blame for the inconsistencies in Present Day
English spelling?

• Find a speaker of a language with T and V pronouns (widely-spoken

languages with a T-V distinction include Bengali, Chinese, French,
Hindi/Urdu, Russian, Spanish, and some varieties of Arabic). Try
to understand how their T-V distinction works. Is the distinction a
useful one? Why (or why not)?

E.9 Investigating y’all, youse, you guys, and you lot

As mentioned in the chapter, new second person plural forms have

recently emerged, such as y’all, youse, you guys, and you lot. How
would you design a project whose aim would be answering one of the
following questions?
• How old is the 2nd person pronoun construction?

• Is it used in a specific region?

• Is it used by a specific generation?

• Is it sex and/or gender sensitive?

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 Suggested exercises

• Is the pronoun stigmatized in any way, or is it viewed positively?

When thinking about your project design, consider the type of language
you’d analyse (e.g. spoken, written, formal, informal), and whether you’d
have to collect your own data (and how you would do that) or whether
you could use already existing materials (corpora, evidence online, etc.).
Don’t be afraid of the power of imagination!

T.1 A narrative of the captivity and removes of Mrs Mary

Rowlandson
Captivity narratives were a popular genre of literature in colonial North
America. Here, Mary Rowlandson (c. 1637–1711) describes her capture by
Native Americans (she was later ransomed and released). Texts like these
are useful as sources on Native Americans and their encounters with the
colonists at the time, though they are far from neutral, and tell us as much
if not more about the Puritan morality of the writers.a
ON the 10th of February, 1675, came the Indians
with great numbers upon Lancaſter: their firſt com-
ing was about ſun-riſing; hearing the noiſe of ſome
guns, we looked out: ſeveral houſes were burning
and the ſmoke aſcending to heaven. There were five
perſons taken in one houſe, the father and mother,
and a ſucking child they knocked on the head, the
other two they took and carried away alive. There
were two others, who being out of their garriſon
upon occaſion, were ſet upon; one was knocked
on the head, the other eſcaped: Another there was
who running along was ſhot and wounded, and fell
down; he begged of them his life, promiſing them begged them to let
him live
money (as they told me) but they would not hear-
ken to him, but knocked him on the head, ſtript hearken: listen;
stripped

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4 Early Modern English (1500–1700)

him naked, and ſplit open his bowels. Another ſee-

ing many of the Indians about his barn, ventur’d
and went out, but was quickly ſhot down. There
were three others belonging to the ſame garriſon
who were killed; the Indians getting up upon the
roof of the barn, had advantage to ſhoor down upon ſhoor: shower

them over their fortification. Thus theſe murther- murderous

ous wretches went on burning & deſtroying all be-

fore them.
...
Then I took my children (and one of my ſiſters her’s)
to go forth and leave the houſe: but as ſoon as we
came to the door, and appear’d, the Indians ſhot ſo
thick, that the bullets rattled againſt the houſe, as if
one had taken a handful of ſtones and threw them,
ſo that we were forced to give back. We had ſix ſtout
dogs belonging to our garriſon, but none of them
would ſtir though at another time, if an Indian had ſtir: move

come to the door, they were ready to fly upon him

and tear him down. The Lord hereby would make us
the more to acknowledge his hand, and to ſee that
our help is always in him. But out we muſt go, the
fire increaſing, and coming along behind us roaring,
and the Indians gaping before us with their guns,
ſpears, and hatchets to devour us.
...
My eldeſt ſiſter being yet in the houſe and ſeeing
thoſe woeful ſights, the infidels halling mothers one woeful: awful; halling:
hauling
way and children another, and ſome wallowing in
their blood: And her eldeſt ſon telling her that her
ſon William was dead, and myſelf was wounded, ſhe
ſaid, and Lord let me die with them: which was no
ſooner ſaid. but ſhe was ſtruck with a bullet, and fell
down dead over the threſhold. I hope ſhe is reaping
the fruit of her good labours, being faithful to the
ſervice of God in her place. In her younger years

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 Suggested exercises

ſhe lay under much trouble upon ſpiritual accounts,

till it pleaſed God to make that precious ſcripture
take hold of her heart, 3 Cor. 12. 9. And he ſaid unto
me, My grace is ſufficient for thee. More than twenty
years after, I have heard her tell how ſweet and com-
fortable that place was to her. But to return; The In-
dians laid hold of us, pulling me one way, and the
children another, and ſaid, Come, go along with us:
I told them they would kill me; they anſwered, If I
were willing to go along with them, they would not
hurt me.
a
The text is taken from the Emerging Voices corpus (Walkden 2019), and
is originally from the 1791 edition available at https://archive.org/details/
narrativeofcapti00inrowl/, pp. 3–5.

T.2 Anne Bradstreet, A Dialogue between Old England and

New

Anne Bradstreet (1612–1672) has the distinction of being the first pub-
lished writer of the English colonies in North America. Born in England to
a well-off family, she emigrated to America in 1630, where she remained
for the rest of her life, becoming a poet widely read on both sides of the
Atlantic.
This poem, written in 1642 and taken from her collection The tenth muse
lately sprung up in America, has as its subject matter the unease that was
to lead to the English Civil War. An extract is presented here.a
New England.
ALas, deare Mother, fairest Queen, and best,
With honour, wealth, and peace, happy and blest, blessed

What ayles thee hang thy head, and crosse thine ails
armes?

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4 Early Modern English (1500–1700)

And sit i’th dust, to sigh these sad alarms? in the

What deluge of new woes thus over-whelme troubles

The glories of thy ever famous Realme?

What meanes this wailing tone, this mourning
guise?
Ah, tell thy Daughter, she may simpathize.
Old England.
Art ignorant indeed, of these my woes?
Or must my forc•d tongue these grief•s disclose?
...
Well, to the matter then, there’s grown of late,
‘Twixt King and Peeres a question of state, between

Which is the chief, the law, or else the King,

One saith its he, the other no such thing. says it is him

My better part in Court of Parliament,

To ease my groaning land shew their intent, show

To crush the proud, and right to each man deal.

To help the Church, and stay the Common-Weal, shared good

So many obstacles comes in their way,

As puts me to a stand what I should say,
Old customes, new Prerogatives stood on,
Had they not held law fast, all had been gone,
Which by their prudence stood them in such stead,
They took high Strafford lower by the head, Earl Strafford and
Archbishop Laud, two
And to their Laud be’t spoke, they held i’th’ Tower, prominent Royalists
All Englands Metropolitane that houre,
This done, an Act they would have passed fain, fain: gladly

No prelate should his Bishoprick retain; prelate: bishop

Here tugg’d they hard indeed, for all men saw,

This must be done by Gospel, not by law.
Next the Militia they urged sore,
This was deny’d, I need not say wherefore. wherefore: why

The King displeas’d, at York himself absents,

They humbly beg return, shew their intents, show

The writing, printing, posting to and fro,

Shews all was done, I’ll therefore let it go.

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 Suggested exercises

But now I come to speak of my disaster,

Contention’s grown ‘twixt Subjects and their Mas-
ter:
They worded it so long, they fell to blows,
That thousands lay on heaps, here bleeds my woes.
a
From https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo2/A77237.0001.001/1:11?rgn=div1;view=
fulltext, pp186–187, accessed May 2020.

T.3 King James Bible

The King James Bible translation was commissioned by James I of England

and translated between 1604 and 1611. Despite the availability of newer,
more readable translations, the King James version has not lost its rele-
vance: in 2011, to mark its 400th anniversary, British Education Secretary
Michael Gove sent a copy to every school in the country, a gesture that
met with mixed responses. The section presented here is from the Book
of Obadiah.a
THe viſion of Obadiah: Thus ſaith the Lord GOD, concerning Edom;
Wee haue heard a rumour from the Lord, and an ambaſſador is ſent
among the heathen: Ariſe yee, and let vs. riſe against her in battell.
2 Behold, I haue made thee ſmall among the heathen: thou art greatly

deſpiſed.
3 ¶ The pride of thine heart hath deceiued thee: thou that dwelleth
in the clefts of the rocke, whoſe habitation is high, that ſaith in his
heart; Who shall bring me downe to the ground?
4Though thou exalt thy ſelfe as the eagle, and though ſet thy neſt
among the ſtarres, thence will I bring the downe, ſaith the Lord.
5 If theeues came to thee, if robbers by night (how art thou cut off?)
would they not have ſtollen til they had enough? if the grape gather-
ers came to thee, would they not leaue some grapes?

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4 Early Modern English (1500–1700)

6 How are the things of Eſau ſearched out? how are his hid things
ſought up?
7All the men of thy confederacie haue brought thee euen to the bor-
der: the men that were at peace with thee, haue deceiued thee, and
preuailed againſt thee: they that eate thy bread haue laide a wound
vnder thee: there is none vnderſtanding in him.
8Shal I not in that day, ſaith the Lord, euen deſtroy the wiſe men
out of Edom, and vnderſtanding out of the mount of Eſau?
9And thy mightie men, O Teman, ſhall be diſmayed, to the end that
euery one of the mount of Eſau may be cut off by ſlaughter.
a
From https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bible_(King_James_Version,_1611)/Obadiah, ac-
cessed May 2020; marginalia removed. For a version in Present Day English see
http://web.mit.edu/jywang/www/cef/Bible/NIV/NIV_Bible/OBAD+1.html.

T.4 Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

The Bard of Avon is famous enough that we don’t need to dwell on him
here. A Midſommer nights Dreame was written in 1595–1596. Pay attention
to the use of the second person pronouns in this text.a
HERMIA What’s this to my Lyſander? where is he?
Ah good Demetrius, wilt thou giue him me?
DEMETRIUS I’de rather giue his carkaſſe to my hounds.
HERMIA Out dog, out cur, thou driu’ſt me paſt the bounds
Of maidens patience. Haſt thou ſlaine him then?
Henceforth be neuer numbred among men.
Oh, once tell true, euen for my ſake,
Durſt thou a lookt vpon him, being awake?
And haſt thou kill’d him ſleeping? O braue tutch,
Could not a worme, an Adder do ſo much?
An Adder did it: for with doubler tongue
Then thine (thou ſerpent) neuer Adder ſtung.

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 Suggested exercises

DEMETRIUS You ſpend your paſſion on a miſpris’d mood,

I am not guiltie of Lyſanders blood:
Nor is he dead for ought that I can tell.
HERMIA I pray thee tell me then that he is well.
DEMETRIUS And if I could, what ſhould I get therefore?
HERMIA A priuiledge, neuer to see me more;
And from thy hated preſence part I: ſee me no more
Whether he be dead or no. Exit.
DEMETRIUS There is no following her in this fierce vaine,
Here therefore for a while I will remaine.
So ſorrowes heauineſſe doth heauier grow;
For debt that bankroute ſlip doth ſorrow owe,
Which now in ſome ſlight meaſure it will pay,
If for his tender here I make ſome ſtay. Lie downe.
a
The text above was transcribed from the First Folio (1623) edition at https://commons.
wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:First_Folio, pp. 151–152. For a translation into Present
Day English see https://www.sparknotes.com/nofear/shakespeare/msnd/page_88/.

T.5 texts
Letter from Bess of Hardwick to Elizabeth I
Elizabeth Cavendish (c. 1527–1608), better known as Bess of Hardwick,
Countess of Shrewsbury, was one of the most powerful individuals in Tu-
dor England – a successful businesswoman who rose through the ranks
of the nobility through a series of judicious marriages. This letter of 1577
is from her to Queen Elizabeth I.
Letters are a great source for historical linguists, as they give us in-
sight into a less “policed” register than that which we find in printed
and literary texts – and, if investigated appropriately, can even give us
insight into the spoken language. For an in-depth investigation of Eliza-
beth Cavendish’s letters from this perspective see Marcus (2018).a

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4 Early Modern English (1500–1700)

To the quenes moust excelente magystye moust: most;

magystye: majesty
16. March 1577 The Countes of Shrewsbury to the
Quenes majestie
may yt plese your moust exelente magystye I am
outterly onhabyll to expresse the monyfolde causus utterly unable;
monyfolde: many;
I haue to yelde your magystye my moust humbyll yelde: yield, give;
thankes and presently yn that I vnderstand by my humble

vary good lorde of lescester that yt hath plesed

your magystye of your moust especyall and gracy- special

ous goodnes to grante vnto my poure dowter lenex poor daughter Lennox

the costody of har chylde nott withstandynge that

ther were dyuers meanes yoused to your heghnes diverse; used

for the conterary someche the more am I bounden contrary; so much

to rest your faythefoull and thanfoull saruante for faithful; thankful

the same / and I do beseche your magystye that I beseech, ask; commit
wholly
may commette wolly vnto your moust Gracyous
Consederacyon my sayde poure dowteres case of
whoyes only goodnes I repouse my wolle troust repose, leave; whole
trust
/ besechinge your magystye also to haue yn re-
membrance the forder sutte of my lord and me one further suit

theyes two owre chylderyne behalfe, and so as we on behalf of these two,

our children
are moust bowden we wyll neuer seasse to prey to
the almyghte god longe to prosper your magystye
yn all joy perfytt healthe and selycyte with longe perfect; happiness;
Sheffield
and happy reyne ouer vs. at shefelde the xvij of
marche
your magystyes moust bouden subgett and saruant
bound, obligated;
subject; servant
EShrouesbury
a
The text is taken from the Emerging Voices corpus (Walkden 2019), and is origi-
nally from the online edition of Bess of Hardwick’s letters available at https://www.
bessofhardwick.org/letter.jsp?letter=120.

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 Suggested exercises

T.6 Anne Askew, Examinations

Anne Askew (1521–1546) was tortured and burned at the stake for “heresy”
(she was a Protestant). Unusually, Askew provided a first-person account
of her experiences, and the following is an excerpt from this account.
Askew’s narrative belongs to the broad category of egodocuments –
“those historical sources in which the researcher is faced with an “I” [...]
as the writing and describing subject with a continuous presence in the
text” (Presser 1958) – whose value as source is increasingly recognized in
both history and historical sociolinguistics (van der Wal & Rutten 2013,
Mascuch et al. 2016).a
Then would they nedes know of me, what I saide nedes: necessarily
to the sacrament. I answeared, þt I already had said þt: that
that I could say, Then after diuers wordes, they bad diuers: diverse; bad:
told, ordered
me go by, Then came my Lord Lisle, my Lord of Es-
sex, and the Bishop of Winchester, requiringe me
earnestlye that I should confesse the sacrament to
be flesh bloud and bone, Then said I to my lord
Parr and my Lorde Lisle, that it was greate shame
for them to councell contrarye to theyr knowl- councell: advise
edge, Whervnto in few words they did saye, that Whervnto: to which
they would gladly all thinges were well, Then the
bishop said, he wold speake with me familierly, I
sayde, so did Iudas whan he vnfrendly betrayed
Christ, Then desyred the byshop to speake with desyred: desired,
wanted
me alone, But that I refused, He asked me why? I
said: that in þe mouthe of two or thre witnesses, eu-
ery matter shoulde stand, after Christes and Paules
doctrine, Mathew xviii. ii. Corinth. xiii. Then my
Lord Chauncelor began to examine me again of
the Sacrament, Then I asked him how longe he
would hault on bothe sides? Then woulde he neades
know where I found that, I said in the scripture,
iii. Regum, xviii. Then he went hys way, Then the Regum: Kings

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4 Early Modern English (1500–1700)

Bishop said I should be brent: I answered that I had brent: burnt

searched all the scryptures, yet coulde I neuer finde,

that eyther Christe or his Apostles putte anye crea-
ture to death, Well well said I, God will laugh your
threatninges to skorne, Psalme, ii. Then was I com-
maunded to stande aside, Then came to me Doc-
tor Cox, and Doctor Robinson, In conclusion we
coulde not agree, Then they made me a bil of the
sacrament: willing me to set my hand thervnto but thervnto: to it

I would not, Then on the sonday I was sore sicke,

thinkinge no les then to die, Therfore I desired to
speake with Latimer, it wold not be, Then was I sent
to Newgate in my extremity of sicknes, For in al my
life afore was I neuer in such pain, Thus the lord afore: before

strēgthen you in þe truth, pray, pray, pray. þe: the

a
The text is taken from the Emerging Voices corpus (Walkden 2019), and is originally
from the 1563 edition of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments available at https://www.
johnfoxe.org.

Recommended further reading

Barber (1997) and Nevalainen (2006) are textbook introductions to Early

Modern English specifically, providing more detail on most topics than
this chapter does. The study of Early Modern English, particularly from
a sociolinguistic perspective, has flourished over the past twenty years:
see Nevalainen & Raumolin-Brunberg (2016) for a range of sociolinguistic
investigations focusing on England during this period.
On standardization in the history of English, Millar (2012: Chapter 3)
and Tieken-Boon van Ostade (2017) provide overviews, and for more de-
tailed discussion see the papers in Wright (2000). Haugen (1966), which
laid the groundwork for discussion of standardization cross-linguistically,
is still worth a read.

172
 Suggested exercises

If you wanted to read more about the complexities of the Great Vowel
Shift, including the debates on which individual changes are or are not
part of this change and whether the Great Vowel Shift is indeed a single
overarching change, we strongly recommend McMahon (2006) to start
with. McMahon (2006) also presents a very clear summary of the debates
related to the relative chronology of the individual changes subsumed
under the Great Vowel Shift. If you are hungry for even more, we recom-
mend reading the references in McMahon (2006) and also Stenbrenden
(2016), an entire monograph devoted to a range of hotly debated issues
surrounding the Great Vowel Shift.
Any textbook on Early Modern English will give an overview of
the morphological changes the language underwent. The historical-
pragmatic approach taken in the section on second person pronouns is
engagingly presented in Jucker & Taavitsainen (2013), which deals with
a range of pragmatic issues, many with reference to the Early Modern
period.
When it comes to syntax, Los (2015: Chapter 4) is excellent on the
changes to the verbal system and constituent order discussed in this chap-
ter. Fischer et al. (2017) take a thematic approach to syntactic changes in
the history of English, with lots of critical discussion. On the relation be-
tween syntax, rhetoric, and standardization during the period, the book
by Yáñez-Bouza (2015) on preposition stranding will not leave you hun-
gry.
Durkin (2014: Chapter 14) is about the Latin and French lexical impact
on English after 1500; Barber (1997) has a good discussion of the inkhorn
controversy. Finally, Nevalainen (1999) provides a detailed overview of
additions to the lexicon and semantic change during the period.

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5 Middle English (1150–1500)
5.1 History and context
Conveniently, the Middle English period maps quite neatly onto what is called
the (High and Late) Middle Ages in European history. This is popularly known
as the age of knights, castles and chivalry. More prosaically, it’s also a period
of growing populations, booming trade, and (during the Late Middle Ages) terri-
ble catastrophes such as the Black Death. As we will see in this chapter, Middle
English is also a period typically seen as a transition during which the English
language underwent some of its most major changes. While the earliest Middle
English texts can seem incomprehensible without training, texts from the end of
the period look a lot more familiar to most readers.

5.1.1 Dividing lines

The dividing line between Middle English and
Early Modern English is the year 1500. Like all
dividing lines, it’s arbitrary: people didn’t wake
up on New Year’s Day 1500 speaking a com-
pletely different language. Still, 1500 is a rela-
tively good dividing line because of two major
events.
The first is Caxton’s introduction of the print-
ing press to England in 1476. The consequences
of this were discussed in the previous chap-
ter, §4.1.1, but it’s worth reflecting on the situa-
tion before printing as well. Without the ability
to quickly and automatically reproduce texts,
it wasn’t at all easy to reach a wide audience,
since every single copy had to be made by hand. Figure 5.1: An illuminated folio
This was time-consuming and expensive, and from British Library Additional
manuscript 37049, f. 32v
it’s not surprising that the literacy rate was ex-
tremely low during the Middle English period:
even as late as 1451–1500, Buringh & Van Zanden (2009) estimate that only 5%
5 Middle English (1150–1500)

of the population was able to read or write. This literacy was also very unevenly
distributed across the population, with most of those able to write being part of
the (Christian) clergy, especially in the first half of the period. The physical na-
ture and cultural context of our written records from the Middle English period
and before is thus very different. We are dealing with handwritten manuscripts,
which were extremely rare and valuable objects in their own right, increasingly
so the further we go back in time. The introduction of the printing press towards
the end of the Middle English period therefore represents a fairly important event
in the history of the language, for several reasons, but also for the historical lin-
guist!
The second convenient turning point is Christopher Columbus’s discovery of a
reliable sailing route from Europe to the Americas and his voyages there between
1492 and 1501. Columbus himself wasn’t English: he was born in Genoa (now part
of Italy), and his travels were funded by the Spanish monarchy. He also wasn’t the
first European to travel to the Americas, but his experiences were instrumental
in setting the scene for the colonial expansion of various European states during
the Early Modern and Modern periods (see §4.1.2). Before 1500, although some
English speakers travelled widely, there were no substantial, stable communities
of English-speaking people outside Britain and Ireland. When we talk about the
English of the Middle English period and earlier, we are talking about the English
spoken and written in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland: English had simply
not reached the rest of the world during this period.

Scots
The West Germanic variety spoken at present in Scotland, today known as
Scots, has its origins in Northumbrian Old English. It’s sometimes treated
as an English dialect and sometimes as a language in its own right. As
you know by now, there are no systematic and accepted linguistic crite-
ria for distinguishing between “dialects” and “languages”: the question is
a sociopolitical one. Between 1150 and 1500, the variety was known by its
users as Inglis (English), just like the English of England; the term Scottis
(Scottish/Scots) is first recorded in 1494. We can’t do justice to the fasci-
nating history of Scots in this book, but see Jones (1997), Smith (2012), and
Millar (2012: Chapter 3) if you’re interested in finding out more.

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 5.1 History and context

What about the dividing line at the start of the Middle English period, 1150? Here
the key event is one that’s probably the most famous date in British history: 1066
and the Norman Conquest.

5.1.2 The Norman Conquest and French influence

Any history of Britain will give an account of the events of 1066. In brief, upon the
death of King Edward the Confessor, three rulers scrambled to assert dominance
over England: Edward’s brother-in-law Harold Godwinson; the king of Norway,
Harald Hardrada; and the duke of Normandy, William the Conqueror. As his
name suggests, William the Conqueror was victorious: his army defeated Harold
Godwinson’s at the Battle of Hastings in October 1066. (Harald Hardrada’s forces
had been defeated three weeks earlier by Godwinson’s at the Battle of Stamford
Bridge.)

Figure 5.2: Norman knights and archers at Hastings, from the famous
Bayeux Tapestry

It’s easy to overplay and essentialize the differences between these three men:
Harold the “Saxon”, Harald the “Norseman”, and William the “Norman”. In re-
ality, they had plenty in common. Godwinson’s mother was the Scandinavian
Gytha Thorkelsdóttir, a noblewoman from Denmark. William was descended
from Rollo (or Hrólf), a Scandinavian Viking leader of the ninth and tenth cen-
turies who eventually settled and established Normandy as a political entity: the
terms Norman and Normandy originated in reference to the northern origins of
these settlers. Even Edward the Confessor was half-Norman through his mother
Emma.
Nevertheless, the linguistic impact of William’s conquest was dramatic. Wil-
liam was brought up in Normandy, now part of France, where the dominant

177
5 Middle English (1150–1500)

language was the Norman dialect of Old French. As part of the conquest, on be-
coming king, he appointed several of his French-speaking allies to positions of
power within England. William himself died in 1087, but his successors for the
next four hundred years were monarchs whose ties to France were at least as
strong as their ties to England. In particular, the House of Plantagenet held the
throne of England from 1154 until the death of Richard III in 1485. This quite
naturally led to French – first Norman French, then Parisian French – becom-
ing the language with the most overt prestige in England, and being used for
a wide range of political, literary and other functions. Among the literate mi-
nority, in particular, there was widespread English-French-Latin trilingualism
(Durkin 2014: §11.2). Throughout this chapter we’ll see evidence of French influ-
ence on Middle English, especially as regards the lexicon. This situation certainly
had important effects on the vocabulary of the language, but also on some of its
structural properties.

Anglo-Norman

The variety of Norman French spoken in Britain during the Middle En-
glish period is known as Anglo-Norman, and rapidly developed its own
linguistic features, distinct from those found in Normandy itself. Intro-
duced as the language of a relatively small elite, Anglo-Norman was never
ubiquitous among the population of England. The dominant view until
recently was that Anglo-Norman died out in England fairly rapidly from
about 1160 onwards, but Ingham (2012), following Rothwell (2001), makes
a powerful case that the language was still being transmitted and learned
by children until at least the beginning of the fifteenth century, and that
Middle English and Anglo-Norman continued to influence each other as
living languages throughout.

5.1.3 Middle English texts

The Middle English period has been described as having “by far the greatest di-
versity in written language of any period before or since” (Milroy 1992: 156). Just
take a look at the text samples at the end of this chapter! Certainly the limited

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 5.1 History and context

Old English records that have survived to us, and the more-or-less standard-
ized written language of the period 1500–1900, are more homogeneous. Only the
present day, with its superdiversity of Englishes around the world, might be said
to have a better claim to this title.
Nevertheless, the Middle English textual records are skewed and limited in
certain important ways. For a start, as we’ve seen, Middle English is exclusively
a language of Britain and Ireland. The majority of texts that have come down
to us are also written by men rather than women. On the other hand, the first
named female authors to enjoy a wide reception also date from this period: the
mystics Julian of Norwich, whose Revelations of Divine Love was written in the
14th century, and Margery Kempe, who wrote her semi-autobiographical Book
of Margery Kempe in the early 15th century. We also have letters written by the
Paston family of Norfolk, both men and women, from the 15th century – though
we can’t be sure to what extent these documents reflect women’s language, as the
scribes who were employed to write the letters were all male.1 This highlights
another important limitation: basically all Middle English writers were part of
the church, the nobility, or both.
The early and late parts of the Middle English period also differ in terms of
what texts have come down to us. Traditional scholarship has often stated (or
at least implied) that English as a written language died out entirely after the
Norman Conquest, later rising phoenix-like from the flames during the 13th and
14th centuries. Under this view, the transition from Old to Middle English is very
abrupt. However, Treharne (2012: Chapter 5) shows convincingly that this inter-
pretation is not justified: hundreds of texts were produced in English during this
early period, and these are catalogued online in Da Rold et al. (2010). The disre-
gard shown to these texts by scholarship until relatively recently may be due to
the fact that these were generally not brand-new literary texts, instead building
on and reworking earlier Old English material. This also means that it is difficult
to know to what extent these texts reflect the spoken language of the period. In
the 12th century, however, a few texts like the Peterborough Chronicle, a his-
torical record kept by monks in the east of England, and the Ormulum, another
East Midlands text dealing with the interpretation of the Bible (and written in a
unique phonetically-inspired orthography), give us an indication of some of the
changes that the language had undergone.
The texts aren’t evenly distributed geographically, especially during the early
part of the period. For the 12th century, most of our localizable texts are from
1
See Conde-Silvestre & Hernández-Campoy (2004) and Bergs (2011) for studies investigating
the Paston letters from a sociolinguistic perspective.

179
5 Middle English (1150–1500)

the East Midlands. In the 13th century this shifts, with a proliferation of West
Midlands texts attested, such as Layamon’s Brut, a poem about the history of
Britain. The 14th and 15th centuries are better attested, and our first texts from
north of the Humber estuary date from this later part of the period. This is also
when the texts emerge that have been most intensively studied as works of liter-
ature: Arthurian romances such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and poetry
by such writers as William Langland, John Gower, and Geoffrey Chaucer. Figure
5.3 gives an overview of some important texts and writers and where they were
from (or where they wrote).

Northern
West Midlands Richard Rolle
Sir Gawain Cursor Mundi
Ancrene Wisse

East Midlands
Ormulum
Kildare
Poems York
Paston Letters

Kentish
Southern Ayenbite
John of Trevisa London
of Inwyt
Caxton
Canterbury
Chaucer

Figure 5.3: Some key texts and authors during the Middle English pe-
riod

180
 5.1 History and context

Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–1400) is one of the most famous English-

language writers of all time. Born into a family of merchants, he trav-
elled Europe as a young adult, and later spent twelve years working as
a high-ranking customs official in London. Best known for his literary
output, especially the Canterbury Tales, he also produced philosophical
and astronomical texts. Like other key figures of the period (e.g. Gower,
Caxton), Chaucer was multilingual, and his writings show him expertly
navigating the space between English, French and Latin (Davidson 2010,
Hsy 2013). An introduction to Chaucer’s life and works can be found in
Minnis (2014), and the recent biography by Turner (2019) foregrounds his
European travels.

For many readers, Middle English is the period when the texts really start to feel
like they’re written in a different language. On the other hand, it’s not quite as
alien-looking as Old English is, as we will see in Chapter 6. Early Middle English
texts in particular are difficult to understand if you’re not aware of the peculiar-
ities of morphology and syntax in this language stage, closer to Old English in
its appearance. Don’t worry, though: in this and the following chapter we’ll be
including details that will help you to make sense of what you see.
To keep things relatively simple, in this introductory chapter we’ll present you
with what could be seen as Chaucer’s English, since that’s the type of Middle En-
glish you’ll most likely encounter in your literature classes. This is not to imply,
however, that Chaucer’s English is either the only type of Middle English or a
variety of Middle English more prestigious than other Middle English varieties –
neither is the case. We have evidence of Middle English varieties used from the
far north to the far south of England, from the west coast to the east coast, and
spanning a period of four hundred years – though not all areas or centuries are
equally well represented. If you want to get your hands dirty and dive into Mid-
dle English in all its glorious diversity, we recommend the Linguistic Atlases of
Late Middle English (LALME) and Early Middle English (LAEME), both available
online for anyone to use.2
2
LALME: http://www.amc.lel.ed.ac.uk/amc-projects-hub/project/elalme/. LAEME: http://www.
amc.lel.ed.ac.uk/amc-projects-hub/project/laeme/.

181
5 Middle English (1150–1500)

Figure 5.4: An illuminated folio from the British Library from Cotton
MS Caligula A IX, ff. 322 r., showing the beginning of The Owl and the
Nightingale

5.2 Sounds
In this section, we’ll first provide a general overview of the phonological sys-
tem of Middle English. We will also introduce you to some graphical features of
Middle English to be aware of when approaching texts. Finally, we will take you
through the main sound changes of this period as well. As we will see, Middle
English is full of variation on every corner, and this variation stands out already
at the first glance at most texts written in the language of the time, for Middle
English can indeed be considered the period associated with the least standard-
ized spelling in the entire history of the English language as used in Britain. This
is not surprising considering the sociocultural changes happening during this
period. Read on to discover more!

5.2.1 General properties of Middle English phonology

Looking at the phonological system of Middle English, we’ll notice several dif-
ferences in contrast to the phonological system of standard Present Day English
varieties:
• there is no phoneme /ŋ/; the sound [ŋ] does exist, but only as an allo-
phone of /n/
• there is no phoneme /ʒ/
• there is an additional phoneme, the velar fricative /x/ (still found in Scottish
English in Present Day English)

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 5.2 Sounds

iː wif ‘wife’, min ‘my’ uː nu, now ‘now’

ɪ lyuien ‘to live’ ʊ cue ‘cut’ (past participle)

eː meten ‘to meet’ oː mood ‘mood’

ɛ, ɛː heed ‘head’, mete ‘mete’ ɔ, ɔː hoot ‘hot’, boot ‘boat’

a, aː ram ‘ram’, name ‘name’

Figure 5.5: Chaucerian Middle English monophthongs, based on
Horobin & Smith (2002: 48)

• the vowels look rather different from those found in Present Day English
as well as Early Modern English
– we distinguish short and long vowels in stressed syllables
– unstressed syllables carried important morphosyntactic functions
– we find diphthongs not necessarily like those in Present Day English

Middle English monophthongs are shown in Figure 5.5. In addition to these

twelve monophthongs, there were also five diphthongs: /aɪ/ day, /ɔɪ/ joye, /aʊ/
saugh ‘saw’, /ɔʊ/ knowe ‘to know’, and /ɪʊ/ newe ‘new’. But this is not where the
differences end, as we shall see in what follows in this section. However, we need
to learn a little bit about some of the aspects of Middle English spelling first.

5.2.2 Graphical features to look out for

When dealing with texts written in Middle English, it’s important to be aware
of some graphical differences between Middle English and Present Day English
which may startle you at first. To begin with, Middle English is typically seen
as the period of spelling and phonetic variation (Strang 1970: 224) in the his-
tory of the English language. For instance, Horobin & Smith (2002: 33) mention
that the Present Day English word though is attested in more than 500 spelling
variants between the years 1350 and 1450. We find a considerable degree of varia-
tion across different regions, but we also find variation across individual scribes
– irrespective of the region. In addition, even a single scribe frequently shows
variation: not just across different manuscripts but also within a single one. To
illustrate the point, let’s have a look at how the word when is spelt in the Cot-
ton Caligula manuscript version of The Owl and the Nightingale. In line 620, we
find <wan>, alongside variants such as <wane> (line 420), <wone> (line 687),

183
5 Middle English (1150–1500)

<wanne> (line 1446), <won> (line 324), <wonne> (line 38); and in line 1566 we find
<hwon>, and yet other variants can be seen in the same manuscript: <hwanne>
in line 1244; <hwan> in line 1537, <hwon> in line 1566.

Books were expensive

If you’re reading this book, it’s rather likely you come from or have found
yourself in a society where a range of individuals from different social
groups can produce texts of various types online or offline via digital soft-
ware. Chances then also are that it’s not a problem to grab a piece of paper
and scribble down whatever your heart desires. This was far from being
the case in the Middle English period. Paper was to arrive in Britain only
in the 15th century (Horobin & Smith 2002: 9). Prior to this, parchment
was used for writing: scribes used animal skin to pass down what was
considered worth the effort and the materials. The costs associated with
obtaining enough parchment formed just one rather small part associated
with the book making process (Overty 2008).

Considering how much spelling variation there is in Middle English texts, we

can’t discuss all the spelling variation that awaits anyone who intends to read
texts in Middle English. However, here are at least some general, more obvious
graphical differences between Present Day English and Middle English. First, in
Middle English we still find a letter called thorn, which looks like this: <þ>.3
This letter was ultimately replaced by the Present Day English <th>, but we find
it frequently both in Middle English and Old English texts (see Chapter 7, §7.2.2,
for more details). Just like the Present Day English <th>, thorn could be used to
represent either the voiced dental fricative /ð/ or the voiceless dental fricative
/θ/. We also encounter a letter known as yogh /jɒx/, which is written this way:
<ȝ>. This letter was used primarily for the sounds /j/ and /x/ (the latter being a
voiceless velar fricative).
We should also comment on how, under the influence of the Norman scribal
traditions, the sound /u/ came to be spelt with <ou>. If you speak or learn French,
this will make a lot of sense to you, as French textbooks often tell the learner that
3
You may have seen this unfamiliar letter already in the previous chapter if you read the text
sample from Anne Askew’s Examinations.

184
 5.2 Sounds

<ou> is to be pronounced as /u/. As mentioned in Chapter 4 (§4.2.1), in some

Present Day English dialects in the north of Britain words such as mouth can
be pronounced with a vowel resembling /u/, which is the vowel we also find in
these words in Middle English (and Old English). This is reflected by the <ou>
spelling in such words, coexisting with an older simple <u>, as in <mouth> and
<muð> for mouth /muːθ/, and <hous> and <hus> for house /huːs/.

Ye Olde Shop

Where does the phrase ye olde shop come from? The strangely looking
letter <y> in phrases of this type has descended from the letter thorn,
<þ>. Thorn could be hand-written in a number of ways. Think for instance
of how you write a word such as the: is it always shaped in exactly the
same way and does your handwriting match that of others? Once we start
looking at manuscripts more closely, we find a range of shapes that thorn
came in. One of the shapes found could be interpreted as the letter <y>
instead. This ambiguity opened the window to reinterpreting one letter
(thorn) with another (<y>). So, the standard Present Day English version
of the definite article, <the>, represents a substitution of thorn with the
digraph <th>, whereas the version spelt as <ye> represents a substitution
of thorn with the letter <y>. See Figure 5.6 if intrigued.

5.2.3 /h/-clusters and /h/-dropping

Remember instances of words such as house being pronounced variably either
as /haʊs/ or /aʊs/ from Chapter 3? Indeed, we’ve already seen the phenomenon
of /h/-dropping and the social stigma attached to it in LModE and Present Day
English in §3.2.1. This phenomenon is attested already in Old English, but cru-
cially primarily in pronouns and unstressed words. /h/-dropping in unstressed
syllables is common for all varieties of English today, standard and non-standard,
and is not stigmatized (Minkova 2014: 104). On the other hand, omission of <h>
in words such as house, i.e. words that contain at least one syllable with primary
stress, is sporadic in Old English: it is only in Middle English when initial /h/ in
stressed syllables is attested more frequently. In this context, it’s interesting that
French loans which in writing started with an initial <h> did not contain an /h/

185
5 Middle English (1150–1500)

Figure 5.6: An illuminated folio from the British Library from Cotton
MS Caligula A IX, ff. 322 r., showing three close-ups

in pronunciation in the source language – this may have only contributed to an

overall confusion as to whether one should or should not pronounce an /h/ in
words such as honour (of Romance origin) or house (of Germanic origin).
/h/-dropping is not the only feature that’s of relevance to the changes linked
to this consonant in Middle English. What we variably find in Middle English is
also the presence of /h/ in clusters that no longer survive in Present Day English:
/hl/, /hr/, and /hn/; and also one cluster which has survived in some Present
Day English dialects: /hw/ or /ʍ/. Similarly to /h/-dropping, we also start seeing
the loss of /h/ in these clusters in Middle English. We’ll see that Old English
had these four clusters by default. Although traces of this cluster reduction do
show up in Old English, the process properly kicks in only in Middle English.
This cluster reduction change had swooshed through these clusters by the end
of Middle English, simplifying them to /l/, /r/, and /n/ and giving us lofe for the
older hlaf ‘loaf’, raven for the older hræfn ‘raven’, and nut for the older hnut
‘nut’. This cluster simplification process has never really reached completion in
the case of /w/ and /ʍ/. And just like in Present Day English, where we find

186
 5.2 Sounds

variation between /w/ and /ʍ/, as in /wɛɪlz/ vs. /ʍɛɪlz/ whales (see Chapter 1), in
Middle English we also find variable forms reflected in the spelling, even within
a single manuscript. These cluster simplifications lead to a language which is
phonologically closer to Present Day English.

gnats /gnats/ and knives /kniːvәs/

In Middle English, the word-initial <gn> and <kn> were pronounced as

consonantal clusters: /gn/ and /kn/, respectively! This is still preserved in
the Present Day English spelling, although these clusters were simplified
to /n/ over the course of time.

5.2.4 Reduction of vowels in unstressed syllables

Some of the spelling and phonological variation typical of the Middle English pe-
riod is related to the vowels found in unstressed syllables. Look at the following
spelling variants of the same words (OED; s.v. ‘book, n.’, ‘feel, v.’, and ‘see, v.’):

(1) ‘to see’: <sien>, <sie>, <sy>

(2) ‘books’: <bowkes>, <buckys>
(3) ‘felt’: <felede>, <felide>, <feled>, <felid>, <feld>

These are just a couple of representative examples taken from the OED. However,
these variants do not merely reflect orthographic variation. Rather, this variation
is representative of phonological variation as well. Thus, a form such as <sien>
indicates that the nasal consonant /n/ was part of the infinitive form of the verb,
but a form such as <sie> indicates a lack of this consonant. Next, if we contrast
<sie> and <sy>, we could suggest that the former may contain a schwa, i.e. be
pronounced as /siːə/ rather than /siː/.
These instances of vowel reduction are attested in some dialects of Old English
already, but the process takes up speed as we transition into and throughout the
Middle English period. As we’ll see in §5.3.2 and §6.3.3, this vowel reduction
process was to have massive consequences for the morphological system of the
language.

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5 Middle English (1150–1500)

Middle English poetry: to schwa or not to schwa?

Words ending in <e> in Middle English manuscripts feature in many hot

debates over whether these <e>s were realized as schwas or nothing at
all. This seemingly innocent issue has implications for our understanding
of the metrical system of the poetic works at hand, since the numbers of
syllables are at stake. If you’d like to know more, we refer you to Duffell
(2000) as a sample case study.

5.2.5 A note on vowel lengthening and shortening

Have you ever wondered how come the word pairs below show the irregularities
they do? At least two consonants in each pair indicate that the two words on each
line are related: keep and kept both contain the letters <k> and <p>, correspond-
ing to the sounds /k/ and /p/. And the spelling representing the vowel in each
pair is not too dissimilar either: e.g. <ee> vs. <e>. In Present Day English, these
pairs contain different vowel phonemes, and that’s what makes them irregular.
So how did these vowel differences come about?

• keep ~kept • breathe ~breath

• leave ~left
• steal ~stealth
• lead ~led
• divine ~divinity
• speed ~sped
• breed ~bred • child ~children

In Chapter 4, we’ve seen the effects of the Great Vowel Shift on the long vowels of
the language (§4.2.1), which were thereby qualitatively transformed (e.g. Middle
English /eː/ became Early Modern English /iː/). Sticking to the keep ~kept pair,
in Present Day English keep contains an /iː/, whereas kept contains an /ɛ/. What
happened here is that the vowel in keep is long, and was long also in Middle
English; so as a long vowel, it underwent the Great Vowel Shift: /keːp/ > /kiːp/.
But the vowel in kept was short and thus remained unaffected. This vowel length

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 5.3 Morphology

difference, combined with the effect of the Great Vowel Shift, explains why keep
shows /i:/ whereas kept shows /ɛ/, i.e. a different vowel quality as well as quantity.
In Middle English, before the Great Vowel Shift kicked in, most pairs such as
keep and kept didn’t differ in vowel quality, but all of these pairs did differ in
vowel quantity, i.e. whether the vowel was long or short. It’s really crucial to
remember that only long vowels underwent the Great Vowel Shift.4
As shown in Figure 5.5 above, vowel length presented a dimension of vowel
contrasts that could have implications for the lexical meaning of a word so that
if for example the word name /naːm(ə)/ ‘name’ was pronounced with a short
vowel, this would result in a different word, nam /nam/ ‘took’ (past tense, sin-
gular). Several processes related to vowel length took place in Middle English,
known under the rather complex names of lengthening before voiced homor-
ganic consonant groups, shortening before non-homorganic consonant groups,
open syllable lengthening, and trisyllabic shortening. Don’t worry, we’ve given
you enough Middle English phonology at this stage and won’t discuss these pro-
cesses individually (though much ink has been spilt debating these four fascinat-
ing and intricate processes; see Millward & Hayes 2018: 156–159 and Minkova
2014: §7.5).
It is useful, however, to know that there were a number of shortening and
lengthening processes operating in Middle English, which resulted in the irreg-
ular pairs given above. Sound change and phonological variation can therefore
have clear connections with – and implications for – the morphological system
of a language. And Middle English morphology is the topic of the next section.

5.3 Morphology
5.3.1 Verbal endings
As we saw in §2.3.1, Present Day English varieties don’t have much variation in
the form of verbs. In most varieties there’s an extra -s in the third person singular,
e.g. she plays and she loves as opposed to I/you/they play/love. We’ve also seen
in Chapter 4 that Early Modern English has an extra second person singular
ending -(e)st, which goes with the second person singular pronoun thou, as in
thou playest and thou lovest (see §4.3.1). In Middle English, the verbal endings
become even more complicated. Table 5.1 gives an overview. The terms weak and
strong verbs are explained in the next section (§5.3.2) – be patient.
4
And if you wonder about the difference between the Present Day English [ɛ] and the Middle
English [e], this is a phonetic one. [e] has been lowering in many varieties. See our discussion
of vowel shifts taking place in Present Day English in §2.2.2.

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5 Middle English (1150–1500)

Table 5.1: Finite verb endings in Middle English: to love (weak) and to
bind (strong)

Person and number Present tense Past (weak) Past (strong)

First singular loue, binde louede bounde
Second singular louest, bindest louede bounde
Third singular loueth, bindeth louede bounde
Plural (all persons) loue(n), binde(n) louede(n) bounde(n)

Table 5.1 is an example of a paradigm, which is simply a table listing all the
possible forms of a given word. For verbs, we also need the non-finite forms:
infinitives such as loue(n) and binde(n), present participles such as louyng(e) and
bindyng(e), and past participles such as (y)loued(e) and (y)bound(e). These are
given in Table 5.2.
Table 5.2: Non-finite verb endings in Middle English: to love (weak) and
to bind (strong)

Form Weak Strong

Infinitive loue(n) binde(n)
Present participle louyng(e) bindyng(e)
Past participle (y)loued(e) (y)bound(e)

You’ll notice that both weak and strong verbs have the same endings for person
and number in Middle English. The only difference, at this stage, is how they
form their past tense and past participle forms: with -ed after the stem (weak
verbs) or with a vowel change (strong verbs). There are only a few exceptions
to the paradigms in Tables 5.1 and 5.2, though they mostly involve very high-
frequency verbs like be and the modals.

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 5.3 Morphology

Subjunctive and imperative

Table 5.1 only gives indicative forms (see §6.3.1 for the difference between
indicative and subjunctive mood). There are not many distinct subjunc-
tive forms in Middle English. In all persons of the singular, the subjunc-
tive form is always the same as the first person singular indicative, i.e.
loue, binde in the present and louede, bounde in the past. Again, be and
the modals are exceptions. The imperative is the bare stem in the singular
(bind!), sometimes with an -e added (loue!), and ends in -eth in the plural
(loueth, bindeth).

Table 5.1 is valid for a roughly “Chaucerian” Middle English (following Horobin
& Smith 2002: 115–116), but there is substantial variation.5 For instance, the third
person singular form ending in -s (e.g. loues, bindes) is present in Northern Mid-
dle English texts, and competes with -th, without replacing it entirely until well
into the Modern English period (see §4.3.2). In the Early Middle English period,
an even greater variety of forms is found, anticipating what we’ll see for Old En-
glish in Chapter 6. The Northern Subject Rule (as discussed in the box in §2.3.1)
can also be found in Middle English texts, and affects the distribution of verb
endings (de Haas & van Kemenade 2014).
Past participles deserve special mention as well. In Present Day English, past
participles are not distinct from finite past tense forms of weak verbs (e.g. I have
played vs. I played. In Middle English, on the other hand, a prefix y- is often found
on past participles. Chaucer, for instance, has he was ypreved (‘he was proved’;
from the General Prologue, line 485. There’s variation here too, though: Chaucer
doesn’t always use y-. For example, in line 2 of the General Prologue Chaucer
writes hath perced (‘has pierced’), not yperced. Older texts have more use of y-.
The general trend is that the further we go back in time, the more complex
morphology we observe. Middle English, then, is somewhere in between Old
English and Present Day English in terms of the complexity of its morphological
system.

5
See Mossé (1952) if you’re interested in the gory details of morphological variation in Middle
English.

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5 Middle English (1150–1500)

5.3.2 Strong verbs vs. irregular verbs

The terms weak, strong, regular and irregular are important when dis-
cussing the history of English verbs. This section will give you an overview of
what they mean and how to use them.
Regular verbs are verbs whose inflected forms are completely predictable
using the paradigms. An example of a regular verb in Present Day English is play,
which has the third person singular form plays, the past tense form played, etc.
By contrast, irregular verbs are verbs whose inflected forms are not predictable
using the paradigms. Modern verbs like sing and keep are irregular (with past
tense forms sang and kept respectively), and so are all of the auxiliaries and
modals discussed in the previous chapter (§4.4.1).
Weak and strong are historical terms that describe how a verb forms its past
tense. Weak verbs historically formed their past tense solely by adding a suffix
containing a coronal consonant (normally /d/), as in play vs. played. Strong verbs
historically formed their past tense by changing the vowel in the stem, as in sing
vs. sang. For more on the origins of weak and strong verbs, see §7.3.1 and §7.3.2
respectively. The terms strong and weak, which are not very helpful, were coined
by the linguist Jacob Grimm in the 19th century. However, you are bound to come
across these two terms in any account of the history of English verbs. As such,
it is important that you know what these mean.
Often, people use the terms strong and irregular synonymously when talk-
ing about verbs. Especially when discussing the history of the language, though,
the two terms need to be kept apart because not all irregular verbs are strong,
and (at least in the early history of the language) not all strong verbs are irregu-
lar. Similarly, not all weak verbs are regular, and (at least in the early history of
the language) not all regular verbs are weak.
The tricky part is that not all verbs that have a vowel change in the past tense
are strong. For keep and kept, for instance, Present Day English has the vowels
/iː/ and /ɛ/, but this is due to a shortening process of the type mentioned in §5.2.5
above. Originally, in Middle English, these words would have been pronounced
/keːp/ and /keːptə/, with the same long vowel, but a shortening process affected
vowels followed by consonant clusters, so /keːptə/ became /keptə/. The two dif-
ferent vowels now underwent different processes. For instance, the long /eː/ in
/keːp/ was subject to the Great Vowel Shift, like other long vowels, and was raised
to [iː], while the short /e/ in /kepte/ was not. In this way, a historically weak verb
acquired a vowel alternation in the past tense and became irregular. It can still
be identified as a weak verb, though, because of the coronal consonant /t/ in the
past tense.

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 5.3 Morphology

The take-home message here is that strong and irregular do not mean the same
thing! Whether a verb is regular or irregular depends on whether it fits the usual
verb paradigms of English or not. Whether a verb is weak or strong, on the other
hand, is a historical question, and is best resolved by looking in a good dictionary
such as the OED. Some verbs that were regular and weak at the beginning of the
Middle English period ended up irregular and weak due to the Great Vowel Shift
and other changes.

5.3.3 Pronouns
For a long time these little words languished in obscurity. At the time of writing,
however, the usage of personal pronouns in Present Day English is a hot topic.
Middle English also possessed a flourishing ecosystem of pronouns, with various
uses and origins. We’ll start with the first and second person pronouns. The full
paradigms for these are given in Table 5.3.
Table 5.3: First and second person pronouns in Middle English

Person and number Nominative Accusative Genitive

First singular I, ich me myn(e)
First plural we us our
Second singular thou the(e) thy(n)(e)
Second plural ye you your(e)(s)

A notion we need to explain in order to understand Table 5.3 is case. Case is

a category for morphological forms, and is related to a word’s function – or,
more precisely, to the function of the phrase to which the word belongs. Many
of the world’s languages, including Indo-European languages like German, Latin,
Russian and Sanskrit, make use of morphological case in order to signal meaning
distinctions (more on this in Chapter 6, §6.3.3). In Chaucer’s Middle English, case
is really only important for pronouns. There are three cases here: the nominative,
which is used for subjects; the accusative, which is used for (all) objects; and the
genitive, which is used for possessors. On the genitive, see §5.4.3 below. We’ll
encounter more cases, and more distinct case forms, in Chapter 6, as we travel
deeper into the history of the language.
Just like in Early Modern English (§4.3.1), the distinction between the forms
marked as “second singular” and those marked as “second plural” is more than

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5 Middle English (1150–1500)

just number. Use of the different forms is good evidence for social status and rela-
tionships, and was also heavily dependent on the pragmatic context.6 If you’re a
literature fan, try reading a Chaucerian work like the Knight’s Tale while keeping
an eye out for second-person pronouns. You may be surprised about how much
it can tell you about the characters and how they relate to one another! See Reiff
(2010) and Jucker (2010) for more on this.
As for the third person pronouns, the forms for these are given in Table 5.4.
Table 5.4: Third person pronouns in Middle English

Number and gender Nominative Accusative Genitive

Masculine singular he hym his
Feminine singular s(c)he hir(e) hir(e)(s)
Neuter singular (h)it (h)it his
Plural (all genders) they hem hir(e)(s)

Again, this quite uniform table, representing Chaucerian usage, actually masks
substantial variation. Several ongoing changes affected the third person pronoun
system during the Middle English period, in ways that – unsurprisingly perhaps
– make the language more similar to Present Day English. The three most impor-
tant of these are:

1. Feminine nominative s(c)he ‘she’. This form spread from the northeast of
England, displacing the older form heo, which by regular sound change
in southern Middle English had become he. As a side point, interestingly,
some traditional English dialects have hoo (from heo) instead of she, even
today! An example is hoo’s in there ‘she’s in there’ (Belper, Derbyshire,
recorded 2004–5; Braber & Robinson 2018).
2. Neuter genitive its. The original form was his, just as in the masculine.
The new form its was probably created by analogy with pairs like he/his,
her/hers, and nouns forming the possessive with s. It spreads and replaces
neuter his during the late Middle and Early Modern periods. Meanwhile,
the nominative and accusative form (h)it loses its initial /h/ through the
process of /h/-dropping discussed in §5.2.3 and §3.2.1.
6
In the terms of Brown & Gilman (1960), Middle English was closer to a “power semantic” than
Early Modern English was. As Jucker & Taavitsainen (2013: Chapter 5) point out, however,
even in Middle English there is contextual variation in whether the T or the V pronoun is
used.

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 5.3 Morphology

Why she?

Different explanations have been given for the emergence of the pronoun
s(c)he. Samuels (1965) argues that the replacement of he(o) by s(c)he was
caused by the fact that the masculine and feminine pronouns had become
homophonous and there was consequently a communicative need to dis-
tinguish them. However, in all varieties of modern spoken Chinese, spo-
ken by over a billion people, the masculine and feminine pronouns are ho-
mophonous (e.g. Mandarin tā for both), and communication is (of course)
not a problem. This suggests that Samuels’s explanation is unlikely to be
correct, or at least it cannot be the whole story. Some argue that s(c)he is
derived from a (perhaps Scandinavianized) pronunciation of he(o) in the
north and east of England, with /hj/ becoming /ʃ/; others argue that s(c)he
is derived from the earlier demonstrative pronoun seo or related demon-
strative forms. See Jüngling (2001) for extensive discussion: you can weigh
up the evidence and make up your own mind!

3. Plural they, them, their(s). These forms beginning in th- also originate in the
north and east, and replaced the older forms hie, hem, hir(e)(s). As you can
see in Table 5.4, Chaucer’s usage had a new th-form in the nominative, but
the older h-forms in all other cases. Eventually, the th-forms won out com-
pletely in formal written usage, but many varieties of spoken English still
have the object form ‘em, as in give ‘em a chance, which is descended from
hem via loss of h- (see §5.2.3 on /h/-dropping). For many years the text-
book wisdom was that these new th-forms were borrowed directly from
Norse, but Cole (2018) has recently made a powerful case that they could
just as well have originated as demonstratives in late Northumbrian Old
English: demonstratives becoming personal pronouns is a common path-
way of grammaticalization cross-linguistically.

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5 Middle English (1150–1500)

Singular THEY

The pronoun THEY is widely used in singular contexts in Present Day En-
glish, as in Someone lost their bag, where it’s used with a single unknown
or unspecified antecedent. Prescriptivists and style guides often discour-
age the use of singular THEY, and it’s treated as a recent error. In fact,
it’s well attested as early as the 14th century: an example is Eche on in þer
craft ys wijs ‘Each one in their craft is wise’, from Wycliffe’s Bible. The
proscription against singular THEY, on the other hand, is much younger,
dating to the 19th century. Today, singular THEY can also be used to refer
to a single, known individual who identifies as nonbinary. Conrod (2019:
Chapter 3) shows that this use is accepted more readily by younger speak-
ers, suggesting that its emergence is a change in progress.

5.3.4 Other morphology to look out for

The discussion in this subsection is brief, and is intended to mention only those
aspects that might trip you up when reading Middle English texts.
Nouns and adjectives in Middle English behave in roughly the same way as
they do in Present Day English, at least by Chaucer’s time. Often you’ll see an
extra -e on the end of the word, but this doesn’t usually affect the readability
of the text all that much. One thing to look out for is that there are a lot more
irregular plurals in Middle English than in Present Day English: for example, the
plural of berye ‘berry’ was berien rather than berries (but compare berien to the
present-day oxen).
The present-day definite article the, which always has the same form re-
gardless of number, case, etc., is a grammaticalized form of a demonstra-
tive. However, in Middle English the difference between demonstratives (e.g.
Present Day English that, those, this, these) and the definite article is not fully
clear, and there is variation. As well as the (or þe), we find forms like accusative
þane and genitive þas, especially in the early period – for instance, in the Caligula
manuscript of the early poem The Owl and the Nightingale. By the end of the pe-
riod, Middle English has fully transitioned to the invariant definite article that
we know and love in today’s language (see van Gelderen 2011: Chapter 6).

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 5.4 Syntax

5.4 Syntax
Three examples of syntactic change are discussed in this section: the loss of verb-
second (§5.4.1), the development of the modals as dedicated functional elements
(§5.4.2), and the emergence of the modern s-genitive (§5.4.3). All three of these
changes involve Middle English losing features that are still found today in many
other Germanic languages, and striking out in its own direction. In this respect,
again Middle English appears as the transitional period in which major changes
in the structure of English are afoot.

5.4.1 The verb-second rule

The word order of Middle English differs substantially from that of the present
day. In particular, many Middle English texts are governed by something called
the verb-second rule (V2 for short). The verb-second rule simply states that one,
and only one, syntactic constituent must precede the finite verb. Sometimes this
is the subject, just like in present-day Mary loves John or John doesn’t like dogs.
When a constituent other than the subject is in first position, however, we see
subject-verb inversion, with the subject following the finite verb. Here’s an
example from the Prose Rule of St. Benet:

(4) Þis sais sain benet.

this says Saint Benet
‘Saint Benet says this’

(5) In þis sentence mustirs sain benet us hu we sal lede ure lif.
in this sentence shows Saint Benet us how we should lead our life
‘In this sentence Saint Benet shows us how we should lead our life’

In Example (4), the subject sain benet follows the finite verb sais, because the
object Þis is in first position. Example (5) is similar, except that a prepositional
phrase is in first position. This verb-second rule is really not too different from
what we see in wh-questions in Present Day English such as Which book did
you read? or What will you say? – the main difference is that Middle English
texts have V2 not just in wh-interrogative clauses, but also in normal declarative
main clauses. Middle English also makes much more use of the first position for
constituents other than the subject.
There’s a simple way to capture V2 in a syntactic tree: see (6) and (7). Whatever
constituent is in the first position is in the specifier of CP, the finite verb is in the
C head position, and the subject is in the specifier of IP.

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5 Middle English (1150–1500)

(6) CP

DP C′

Þis C IP

sais DP I′

sain benet ...

(7) CP

PP C′

In þis sentence C IP

mustirs DP I′

sain benet us ...

This syntactic analysis of V2 goes back to den Besten (1989), who applied it to
German and Dutch. Indeed, all the Present Day Germanic standard languages
other than English exhibit the verb-second rule, making (Present Day) English
quite exceptional in this regard.
This sort of strict V2 is very widespread in Middle English. However, an-
other system seems to be at work in the south and west, which we can call
information-structure V2 (IS-V2). In this variety, whether we find the verb
in second position or not (in clauses with an initial non-subject) depends on the
discourse status of the subject. If the subject is given information, i.e. refers
to something that was mentioned in the previous discourse, it may precede the
finite verb, giving rise to a V3 word order, as in Example (8). If it is new infor-
mation, it must follow the finite verb, giving rise to a V2 word order, as in (9)
and (10).

(8) With þe girdill þei girt his nek

with the girdle they girt his neck
‘They dressed his neck with the girdle’ (Capgrave, Life of Saint Gilbert)

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 5.4 Syntax

(9) This did his seruauntis

this did his servants
‘This his servants did’ (Capgrave, Life of Saint Gilbert)

(10) Thus is an avaricious Man, that loveth his tresor biforn god
thus is an avaricious man who loves his treasure before God
‘Thus is an avaricious man who loves his treasure before God...’
(Chaucer, Parson’s Tale)

Personal pronouns, like þei ‘they’ in (8), are always given information, and thus
always occur in V3 structures.7

The subject position

Present Day English is a language that firmly requires a subject in the

specifier of IP – even when the subject doesn’t refer to anything, as in It
is raining, It seems that she left, or There is a problem. You can find dis-
cussion of these facts in any generative syntax textbook, e.g. Carnie (2013:
Chapter 8). This requirement developed by the end of the Middle English
period: Old and Middle English weren’t as rigid, and in many cases the
subject could be left out entirely. As in many other things, Middle English
was a crucial transitional period – though this change was already well
underway during the Old English period. See §7.4.1 for more on subject
expression.

The existence of three different types of grammatical system among the popu-
lation – the strict V2 type, the IS-V2 type, and the newer Early Modern English
SVO type with the verb in I – was, of course, accompanied by sociolinguistic
variation. Strict V2 was most common in the north and east, IS-V2 in the south,
and towards the end of the period both systems decrease in frequency in favour
of strict SVO. Individual writers often had command of more than one system,
though, just as today. For example, Eitler & Westergaard (2014) show that the
15th-century historian John Capgrave used a different syntax depending on who
7
We don’t discuss how to represent IS-V2 and V3 in a tree here, as this is more complicated. See
Los (2015: Chapter 7) for discussion, if you’re interested.

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5 Middle English (1150–1500)

he was writing for. For his local East Anglian audience, he used exclusively strict
V2, but when writing for a wider audience – as in Examples (8) and (9) above,
from the Life of Saint Gilbert – he uses much more IS-V2. This may indicate that
southern variants were more strongly associated with supralocal prestige.

5.4.2 The English modals

The modals in modern English (can/could, may/might, must, shall/should, will/-
would) are often described as “modal verbs”, but in reality they are not at all like
other verbs. For a start, they display all of the NICE properties discussed in §4.4.1
in the previous chapter. They also have a number of other special properties that
set them apart from lexical verbs:

• They don’t have non-finite forms. It’s not possible to say, for instance, *I
expect him to can speak English – despite the fact that it’s obvious what
such a sentence would mean.

• You can’t have more than one of them in the same clause (at least in most
varieties, including the standard varieties). A sentence like *I must can do
it or *I might should do it is not possible – again, despite it being obvious
what they should mean.

• They always take verb phrase complements. Sentences like *I must my home-
work or *I can English are not grammatical.

• They don’t show agreement with the subject, even in the third person
singular. *He musts or *Jan mays are not possible.

Multiple modals

Some modern varieties in southern Scotland, Northern Ireland, Northern

England, and the southern United States allow multiple modals to a lim-
ited extent. A handful of examples are given in §1.2.3; see Huang (2011)
for more discussion and references.

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 5.4 Syntax

These properties show that the modals are not like other verbs at all. Rather,
they’re elements of category I, occupying the head of IP, and behave completely
differently to verbs of category V.
This wasn’t always the case, though. First of all, the difference between I el-
ements and lexical verbs was not so clear in Early Modern and Middle English:
lexical verbs could also occupy I, as discussed in §4.4.1. More importantly, we
can find Middle English examples without some of the special properties listed
above. In (11) we see an example of a non-finite form of can, and in (12) we see
more than one modal in the same clause.8

(11) but it sufficeþ too hem to kunne her Pater Noster

but it suffices to them to can their Pater Noster
‘but it is enough for them to know their Lord’s Prayer’ (Lollard Sermons, c.
1425)

(12) Who this booke shall wylle lerne

who this book shall will learn
‘whoever wishes to master this book’ (Caxton’s Dialogues, c. 1483)

There are also examples of modals taking nominal objects. All these properties
are typical of other present-day Germanic languages, such as German: in fact,
the only thing that’s special about the modals in German (as in Old and Middle
English) in general is that they are part of a class of verbs with weird morphology,
known as the preterite-presents. The special properties of the modern modals
emerge, on the whole, some time around the transition between Middle and Early
Modern English, circa 1500.
The historical development of the English modals has been heavily debated,
and used as a battleground for competing theories of syntactic change: “When
it comes to great controversies in the field of English historical linguistics, the
development of the modals is hard to beat” (Fischer et al. 2017: 111). Lightfoot
(1979) influentially claimed that all of the modals suddenly changed at the same
time, around 1600, as part of the innovation of the category I. Subsequent re-
search has established that individual modals did behave differently: there are
no non-finite forms attested for the forerunners of must and shall in Old or Mid-
dle English, for instance (Warner 1993). This has been taken as support for the
idea that the change proceeded one lexical item at a time, rather than affecting
all of the modals at once. This is not the place to enter into the debate: see Fis-
cher et al. (2017: 111–113) for a brief discussion, Fischer (2007: 159–209) for a more
8
Examples are taken from Denison (1993: 310).

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5 Middle English (1150–1500)

extensive (and critical) overview, and Lightfoot (2006: §5.2) for a revisiting of his
original position. All agree, however, that the emergence of a new class of modals
in the Early Modern English period was a dramatic and important change, and
it is striking that all the modals grammaticalize in a similar direction, even if
their trajectories are not exactly parallel.
For more on this development, and further references, see Los (2015: Chapter
4, especially §4.5 and §4.8), and Fischer et al. (2017: §6.2.2).

5.4.3 Possessives: of and ’s

There are two main ways of expressing possession in Present Day English: with
the preposition of, as in The car of the assistant lecturer, or with the phrasal
affix or phrasal clitic ’s, as in The assistant lecturer’s car. There has been a lot
of research into variation and change in this genitive alternation in recent
years, and various factors have been shown to influence the choice between the
two. According to one overview (Rosenbach 2014) these include:

• Animacy (e.g. human vs. thing): more animate possessors favour ’s

• Definiteness/topicality of the possessor: more definite/topical possessors

favour ’s

• Semantic relation (concrete possession, e.g. my hat, vs. more abstract

relation, e.g. my loyalty): more concrete possessors favour ’s

• Syntactic weight (length of possessor): shorter possessors favour ’s

• Variety (e.g. British vs. American English): American English favours ’s

• Modality (e.g. spoken vs. written): spoken language favours ’s

The term “genitive” itself comes from the classical grammatical tradition for talk-
ing about different cases (see §5.3.3 above and also §6.3.3), along with nominative
(e.g. I, she), accusative (e.g. me, her), and dative. These terms traditionally refer
to word forms that differ by their function in a sentence: for instance, we know
that I must be a subject because it never has this form in any other function in
standard Englishes (I is the nominative case form) and that my marks possession
because this is the general function of this specific form (the genitive case). How-
ever, the term genitive isn’t really an appropriate one for Present Day English,
since neither the of -construction nor the ’s-construction involves a morpholog-
ical case: morphological case endings are attached to a noun and can’t stand on

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 5.4 Syntax

their own. While the of -construction clearly involves a prepositional phrase, the
’s-construction at first sight looks like a morphological ending. Things are not so
simple, though: the ’s always attaches to the end of the possessor, regardless of
the part of speech of that word, as shown by the examples in (13)–(16).

(13) The man’s car

(14) The man I met’s car
(15) The man I met yesterday’s car
(16) The man I talked to’s car

In these examples, the ’s attaches to a noun (13), a verb (14), an adverb (15), and a
preposition (16).9 This behaviour is completely unexpected for a case ending, as
these normally only attach to nominal categories such as nouns and adjectives. In
addition, case endings are normally found on every nominal word in a possessor
phrase, not just at the end of the phrase. These facts strongly suggest that ’s is
not a case ending but something else entirely, and this “something else” has been
referred to as a phrasal clitic or phrasal affix which attaches to the right
edge of the possessor phrase (see Anderson 2013, Börjars, Denison, Krajewski,
et al. 2013 and other papers in Börjars, Denison & Scott 2013 for discussion). In
other words, English possessive ’s belongs to the syntax of the language, not its
morphology.
In early Middle English (and Old English), on the other hand, the genitive
behaves like a completely normal morphological case, as shown in Example (17).

(17) þas castles ȝæte

the.gen castle-gen gate
‘the castle’s gate’ (Layamon, Brut)

In this example, the -s ending is found on both the demonstrative/definite article

þas and the noun castles. Also, in early Middle English the -s ending is only found
on nominal words, and never (for example) on a verb as in (14) or an adverb as in
(15). This development, which took place mainly during the Middle English pe-
riod, has attracted particular attention from historical linguists because it seems
to fly in the face of the commonly observed tendency of grammaticalization
(see §1.4.5), in which more independent items (like free words and clitics) tend
to develop into less independent items (like bound morphemes), not vice versa.

9
Not all of the examples in (13)–(16) are equally favoured by speakers (see e.g. Börjars, Denison,
Krajewski, et al. 2013), but they are all unquestionably grammatical possibilities.

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5 Middle English (1150–1500)

If the Present Day English ’s really is a phrasal clitic, then the direction of the
development has been from affix to clitic, which is at the very least unusual (and
some theories predict that this sort of degrammaticalization should not hap-
pen at all: see e.g. Lehmann 2015: 22). Opinions vary on whether this is a real
example of degrammaticalization, and if so what the implications of this are. We
won’t be able to resolve the question in this textbook, but see Allen (2008), Norde
(2009), Szmrecsányi (2013) and Rosenbach (2014) for some perspectives.

The apostrophe

The correct use of the apostrophe in Present Day English can stir up
strong reactions:a
The Apostrophe Protection Society was started in 2001 by John
Richards with the specific aim of “preserving the correct use of this
currently much abused punctuation mark” in all forms of text writ-
ten in the English Language. However John has recently decided,
for the reasons he gives below, to close the APS. His announce-
ment in November 2019 brought an enormous amount of interest
both from the media and other folk worldwide, most of whom were
shocked by his decision. Indeed this resulted in a massive 600-fold
increase in demand on this website which caused the bandwidth
of our Server to be exceeded, with us temporarily having to with-
draw the site. We apologise for any inconvenience or disappoint-
ment caused.

The apostrophe is nevertheless a relatively recent orthographic develop-

ment in the history of English, getting established only in the latter half
of the 17th century (Nevalainen 2006: 74).
a
http://www.apostrophe.org.uk/; accessed April 2020.

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 5.5 Lexicon

5.5 Lexicon
5.5.1 Lexical borrowing: French
Since the Middle English period was kickstarted by the Norman Conquest (§5.1.2),
it’s not surprising that French was a major source for borrowed words during
this period.10 In fact, among the headwords listed in the third edition of the Ox-
ford English Dictionary, French ranks second after Latin in terms of number of
words borrowed (over 6,000 of a total of 92,500; Durkin 2014: 25). Many Latin
borrowings are very rare, and if we look only at more frequent words French
often emerges as the number one donor language overall. Also, it’s often hard to
distinguish French borrowings from Latin borrowings, as the two languages are
closely related. Of the 1,000 most frequent words in the British National Corpus,
Durkin (2014: 37) finds that just over half (529) are borrowings, and 487 of these
are from either Latin or French or both.
Durkin emphasizes that these figures need to be approached with caution,
since it’s never clear whose English (or which English) is involved, and esti-
mates from different sources can vary dramatically (cf. Scheler 1977, Dekeyser
1986). Still, it’s clear that the lexical impact of French was massive. Very many of
these words were borrowed during the Middle English period, with 1300–1350
the high point. Throughout the period, French was by far the largest source of
new words, except in the 15th century when Latin emerged as a serious contender
(Durkin 2014: 35). Uncontroversial borrowings from French include words like
choice, government, company, age, very, peace, chance, and city. Other words like
action, colour and person may be borrowings from either French or Latin, and are
likely to have developed through long-term influence from both languages. All
these borrowings occur across a very wide range of semantic domains.
French was a high-status language during the Middle English period, and so
it’s not surprising that prestige motivated many borrowings. One commonly-
mentioned case study involves words for animals (e.g. pig/swine, cow, sheep) and
the corresponding meat (pork, beef, mutton). In each of these cases, the word
for the animal is inherited from Old English, and the word for the meat is a
borrowing from French (porc, boeuf, mouton). This case was made famous by
the first chapter of Walter Scott’s 1819 historical novel Ivanhoe, set in the 12th
century, in which two “Saxon” workers Gurth and Wamba resentfully discuss
these word-pairs and their service to their “foreign masters”.
10
There are some borrowings from Norse in this period, too, including some extremely common
words. However, we’ll defer discussion of those until Chapter 6, where that contact situation
is dealt with in more detail.

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5 Middle English (1150–1500)

Scott’s view of the 12th century, and of Saxons and Normans as distinct races,
is shaped more by 19th-century nationalism than by historical fact. In any case,
nothing like the episode with Gurth, Wamba and the word-pairs could possi-
bly have happened, because Middle English porc ‘pork’, beof ‘beef’ and motoun
‘mutton’ are recorded as borrowings for the first time around 1300. Even more
importantly, during the Middle English period these words didn’t just refer to
the meat, but could also refer to the animals themselves – as could the inher-
ited words for pig, cow and sheep. It’s only much later, after 1500, that the sharp
distinction between inherited animal-words and French meat-words was estab-
lished (see Őrsi 2015). Still, the fact that this distinction was established at all is
a testament to the enduring prestige of the French language in England, many
centuries after the Norman Conquest.

Guard your wardrobe

Contact situations can result in rather wonderful lexical doublets. The

Present Day English words garderobe, wardrobe, guarantee, and war-
ranty are indeed used as four different words in the language. How-
ever, wardrobe and warranty were borrowed from the Norman dialect of
French, which shows /w/ where other French dialects show /g/, whereas
garderobe and guarantee were borrowed from another dialect of French.
Curiously, these doublets don’t mean the same, so we’re observing some
interesting semantic differentiation here! More on this in Exercise 7.

5.5.2 Word formation

The French lexical influence on English wasn’t limited to words borrowed as
a whole. Derivational suffixes are also borrowed into Middle English. Some
of these suffixes are among the most productive in Present Day English: -ation,
-ment, -age, -ity – and those are just the suffixes that form nouns. The French-
origin suffixes competed (and still compete) with inherited suffixes of similar
meaning such as -dom, -hood and -ship. These morphological new arrivals bring
Middle English strikingly closer to what we’re used to in the present day.
These derivational suffixes don’t seem to have been borrowed from French
as isolated chunks. Instead, words containing these suffixes were borrowed as

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 5.5 Lexicon

Table 5.5: Some derivational suffixes in Middle English

Type French suffixes Inherited suffixes

Abstract nominal -(a)cioun, -ment, -age, -ite -dom, -hede, -ship
Agent nominal -ant, -ard, -our -er(e), -end, -ling
Adjectival -able, -al, -ive, -ous -fold, -ful, -ward, -wise
Verbal -ify, -ize -nen, -sian

unanalysed wholes, and the suffixes became productive only later, when they
were recognized as such. Crucial evidence for this comes from work by Dalton-
Puffer (1996), who looked for “hybrid” words containing an inherited base and
a French suffix. If the French suffixes were truly productive, they should have
been able to occur with any base, not just French ones. However, such hybrid
words constitute a minuscule proportion of the total number of derived words in
her data: for abstract nouns, it’s less than 0.5%.11 She therefore concludes (1996:
220) that “it is impossible to believe that the Romance suffixes were productive in
Middle English without unduly stretching the notion of productivity”. Another
more recent study with a focus on suffix semantics, Lloyd (2011), broadly agrees,
but suggests that a few suffixes – particularly -age and -ment – were in fact
productively used in the 14th century (see also Trips & Stein (2008) on -able).
The main sources for new words in the Middle English period, then, were (i)
direct borrowing from French and Latin, (ii) compounding, and (iii) derivation
using existing inherited suffixes. As regards derivation, it’s worth noting that
some of these inherited suffixes have fallen out of use today. For instance, adverbs
could be formed from adjectives with the suffix -e, as in brighte ‘brightly’ or
hearde ‘severely/bravely’. The -ly ending, which is the most common adverb-
deriver today, is also found in Chaucerian Middle English, but had yet become
dominant at that time.

5.5.3 Meaning change: the case of indeed

Middle English, just like the other periods, offers many examples of nuanced
interaction between semantics and pragmatics in meaning change. One such ex-
ample from the Middle English period is the development of the word indeed.
The discussion here is based on Traugott & Dasher (2002: 159–165).
11
An example of such a rare hybrid word is knowable, with the inherited verb stem know- and
the French adjective-forming suffix -able (Dalton-Puffer 1996: 183).

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5 Middle English (1150–1500)

An early example of the phrase in dede is (18), from the Middle English fable
The Fox and the Wolf, where it means ‘by (one’s) actions’.

(18) “Vuolf,” quod þe vox him þo, “Al þat þou hauest her bifore I-do,
Wolf said the fox 3sg-dat then All that you have here before done
In þohut, in speche, and in dede, ... Ich þe forȝeue.”
in thought in speech and in action I you forgive
‘“Wolf,” said Fox to him then, “All that you have done before this, in
thought, in speech, and in action ... I forgive you for it.”’ (Fox and Wolf, c.
1300)

Here, and in many other examples from the same period, the phrase in dede
is used to contrast actions (on the one hand) with thoughts and words (on the
other). Traugott & Dasher (2002) point out that, in context, it was possible for the
hearer to infer that the event or action to which in dede was attached was actually
observable. The phrase could then be used as a sort of evidential marker, to
mean ‘in actuality’, as in (19).

(19) ofte in storial mateer scripture rehersith the comune opynyoun of

often in historical matters scripture repeats the common opinion of
men, and affirmeth not, that it was so in dede.
men and affirms not that it was so in actuality
‘often where matters of history are concerned, scripture repeats men’s
common opinion, but does not affirm that it was so in actuality [rather
than opinion].’ (Purvey, Wycliffe Bible prologue 56; 1388)

Another potential inference here is that it is the whole statement that is true “in
actuality”, and not just the event being described. The intended interpretation is
then ‘in truth’. By the mid-14th century, clear uses of in deed that can only mean
‘in truth’ can be found, such as (20).

(20) The men of þe town had suspecion to hem, þat her tydyngis were
the men of the town had suspicion to them that their tidings were
lyes (as it was in dede), risen.
lies as it was in truth rose
‘The men of the town, being suspicious that their reports were lies (as
was certainly true), rose.’ (Capgrave, Chronicle p216; 1452)

Here we can see originally pragmatic elements of meaning becoming an inextri-

cable part of the semantics of the lexical item. From the 16th century onwards

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 5.5 Lexicon

(Early Modern English), we also see indeed used as an adverb in clause-initial

position. At the same time it also starts to pick up another usage, as a discourse
marker with a meaning of roughly ‘in addition’ or ‘what’s more’. This is what
we see in Example (21).

(21) For he that has been used to have his will in every thing as long as he
has been in coats, why should we thinke it strange that he should desire
and contend for it still when he is in breetches. Indeed as he grows more
towards a man, it shows his faults the more, soe that there be few parents
then soe blinde as not to see them, soe insensible as not to feele the ill
effects of their owne indulgence. (Locke 1693: p. 51)

These last two meanings are how the word is generally used in English today.
For Traugott & Dasher (2002), this is just one of many examples of a general
trend in semantic change, whereby nonsubjective meanings give rise to subjec-
tive meanings. If Traugott & Dasher (2002) and much subsequent research is
on the right lines, then semantic change is not completely random and unpre-
dictable, nor is it totally dependent on quirks of individual cultures: rather, there
are general tendencies of meaning change that hold across all human languages.
If you’re interested in following this up, we recommend taking a look at Traugott
& Dasher (2002).
Of course, indeed isn’t the only word that changed its meaning during the
Middle English period. See Sylvester (2017) for a broad overview of semantic
change and other lexical topics. The word crafty, for instance, goes from mean-
ing ‘strong, powerful, mighty’ to ‘skilful, dextrous, clever’ to the pejorative
‘cunning, wily, deceitful’ during the same period – an example of subjectifi-
cation, as the speaker’s subjective evaluation of the person or thing described
as crafty becomes increasingly central to the word’s meaning, as we saw in §3.5.1
of Chapter 3 as well.

Birds, birds everywhere!

The Middle English period is full of prominent literary works featuring

birds. At least two of these have been known under titles which even con-
tain birds: Chaucer’s The Parliament of Fowls, and The Owl and the Nightin-

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5 Middle English (1150–1500)

gale by an anonymous author. The words bird and fowl are celebrities in
the world of historical semantics. Bird used to refer to a young bird, e.g.
a chick, whereas in Present Day English it refers to a winged creature in
general, irrespective of age. Fowl, on the other hand, used to refer to a
winged animal generally (so today’s bird), but today we use it to refer to
domestic types of birds, such as hens. Find out more about birds in Middle
English literature in our sample texts at the end of this chapter.

5.5.4 Other words to look out for

Several other Middle English words are worthy of mention here – in particular,
words that occur very frequently in texts and straddle the borderline between
lexical and functional words.
Middle English, unlike Present Day standard English, had a three-way system
of spatial deixis (/daɪksɪs/ or /dɛɪksɪs/). Alongside the proximal form this, for
things near the speaker/writer, and the medial form that, for things near the
addressee, we also find a distal form ȝon, for things far away from both. The
spatial adverbs here, there and ȝonder reflect the same system. In modern English,
the distinction between proximal and distal has mostly been lost, though this
semantic nuance is retained in a number of varieties along with the forms yon
and yonder themselves.
The most common Middle English word for ‘same’ was ilk, as in Chaucer’s
This ilke worthy knyght ‘This same worthy knight’. When ilk and the definite
article þe/the are used together, they are often univerbated into a single word
þilk. Usage of these forms declines dramatically after the Middle English period.
Finally, a word on ordinal numerals. In Middle English (and Old English), the
word for ‘second’ was oþer/other. The form seconde was borrowed via French,
and derives from a Latin verb, sequor ‘to follow’. The word other was not lost,
but became restricted to its present-day meaning ‘alternate, alternative’.

5.6 Final note

We’ve tried to highlight throughout this chapter that Middle English is a lan-
guage in transition: as Geoffrey Chaucer puts it, in forme of speche is chaunge!12
This is true for every language, of course, but the diversity of Middle English
12
This line is found in book II of his epic poem Troilus and Criseyde.

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 Suggested exercises

texts available to us makes these transitions particularly apparent. You’ll see this
when you engage with the text samples, if you haven’t already.
You will likely find that some Middle English texts, particularly the early ones,
are still challenging to read. But fear not! In the next chapter, we will introduce
those features that have survived from Old into Early Middle English and that
make these texts particularly tricky for the modern reader. Steel yourself as we
plunge deeper into the history of the language! But right now, it’s time for you
to do some of the exercises below and check out the sample texts that follow.

Suggested exercises

E.1 North vs. South in Present Day English landscape

In this chapter, we mentioned a couple of times that Middle English is a

period famous for the abundance of spelling variation. Much of this (and
other) variation could be predicted by region: are we dealing with a text
from the south or the north of England? This north-south divide is very
much relevant even when approaching Present Day English variation. In
this exercise, you will be using the website created for a project titled
“Our dialects: mapping variation in English in the UK”.a The focus is on
Present Day English regional variation. In Exercise 2 we do something
similar with a focus on Middle English.

Questions to answer:
1. Is there a clear north-south divide for any/all of the lexical vari-
ables explored in the project? [Those are ‘bread’, ‘evening meal’,
‘footwear’, etc., which open up once you click on the “Lexical Vari-
ation” button.]

2. Is there a clear north-south divide for any/all of the phonological

variables explored in the project?

3. Is there a clear north-south divide for any/all of the syntactic vari-

ables explored in the project?

211
5 Middle English (1150–1500)

4. Once you have answered questions 1–3, you can answer the follow-
ing question: based on the linguistic evidence provided on the web-
site, is the north-south divide visible in just any linguistic variable
and uniformly across different linguistic levels?

If it’s difficult to decide, say why.

If you’re interested in north-south variation in Middle English, you

could look at the LALME and LAEME atlases mentioned in §5.1.3 and
try to find linguistic variants that show a similar regional distribution.
a
Available here: http://ourdialects.uk/.

E.2 North vs. South in the Reeve’s Tale

As mentioned in the previous exercise (which you may or may not have
looked at), in this chapter, we mentioned a couple of times that Middle
English is a period famous for the abundance of spelling variation. Much
of this (and other) variation could be predicted by region: are we dealing
with a text from the south or the north of England? This north-south
divide is very much relevant even when approaching Present Day English
variation. In the previous exercise, you focused on Present Day English
regional variation. In this exercise, we look into the linguistic correlates
of the north-south divide in Middle English.
Here’s an overview of typically southern vs. northern Middle English
features:
• the verb shall: with a <sh> or <sch> /ʃ/ in the south, but <s> /s/ in
the north

• such and which: with a <ch> /tʃ/ in the south, but <k> /k/ in the
north

• <o> /ɔ/ in the south, but <a> /a/ in the north

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 Suggested exercises

• 3rd person singular present tense verbal ending: -th in the south,
but -s in the north

• 3rd person plural pronouns: hi, hem, and hir in the south, but they,
them, and their in the north

• prepositions: to and from in the south, but til and fra in the north

Now look at the extract from The Reeve’s Tale presented later in this chap-
ter – focus on the words in italics.a And tackle the following questions:

1. Do the characters labelled as southern use southern features?

2. Do the characters labelled as northern use northern features?

3. How much consistency is there in features being associated either

with the north or the south in The Reeve’s Tale?

4. What does Chaucer’s use of southern vs. northern features suggest

about dialect awareness in the Middle English period? (You can con-
sider this question in the context of the previous exercise on the
north-south divide in Present Day English if you did this exercise
as well.)

Acknowledgement: this exercise is heavily inspired by Johanna Wood’s

2016 teaching materials.
a
If you want an intro to the tale, you can watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=Zux6z2d9CKo.

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5 Middle English (1150–1500)

E.3 Middle English manuscripts

Figure 5.7: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Although the text samples in this chapter may have seemed a bit alien-
looking, the truth is that once we inspect the manuscripts, this effect
grows much stronger. In Figure 5.7, we show you some of the final lines
of one of the sheets of the Sir Gawain and the Green Knight manuscript
(folio 112 recto, or f. 112r).

1290 þenne ho gef hym godday ⁊ wyth aglent laʒed

1291 ⁊ as hostod ho stonyed hym wyth ful stor wordez
1292 now he þatt spedez vche spech þis disport ʒelde you
1293 bot þatt ʒe be Gawan hit gotz in mynd
1294 querfore quoþ þe freke ⁊ freschlya he askez
1295 ferde lest he hade fayled in formeb of his castes
1296 bot þe burde hym blessed ⁊ biþis skyl sayde

Here are your tasks:

1. Can you match any of the words we typed ourselves here to any-
thing in the manuscript? (If so, which ones?)

2. Try to formulate the reasons why you may be struggling reading

the manuscript itself. Be as precise as possible.

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 Suggested exercises

3. Try to transliterate one of the lines above using the letter shapes
available to you through your regular keyboard. Put yourself in
George and Míša’s shoes – we had to make certain decisions when
presenting the Middle English text samples to you. How would you
go about picking one way to transliterate your line – what decisions
would you make and why?
a
This word is particularly difficult to read.
b
Modern editors often interpret this as <fourme>, e.g. Tolkien & Gordon (1967).

E.4 Middle English look-ups

Let’s take a closer look at one of the most famous sentences written in
Middle English:
(22) sumer is icumen in
summer is come in
‘summer has arrived’

Your task will be very practical here: it’s useful to know that Middle En-
glish dictionaries exist, and it’s useful to try using them. You’ll be working
with the Middle English Look-Ups.a

1. First, search for “sumer”. Does the dictionary give you any entries?
(Sometimes it doesn’t!) If so, the next step is checking if the entry
suggested by the dictionary makes sense for your Middle English
text. If there are more entries, you simply have to go through them
to see which could be the most optimal. (We do make your task
much easier by providing you with a translation above.)b

2. Now do the same for “icumen”. This time, click on the entry which
you deem appropriate. Does it provide you with any useful infor-
mation? Why and/or why not?

215
5 Middle English (1150–1500)

3. Can you imagine using this dictionary? Give reasons why and/or
why not.
a
Available here: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary.
b
You may be wondering why the dictionary doesn’t always give you any entries when
looking some words up. There’s a fairly good reason for this. Remember that there is
a lot of spelling variation in Middle English, and searching for words in this period
therefore comes, sometimes, with the headache of trying out different spelling vari-
ants to get an entry that matches your sentence in terms of its meaning. The webpage
provides you with more details if you decide to delve into Middle English beyond this
book.

E.5 Which pronoun?

We’ve seen that there was substantial variation in pronoun use during the
Middle English period. In this exercise, try to put yourself in the shoes of
people from around medieval England and decide which pronoun would
be most appropriate!
1. A 15th-century woman from the north of England talking about
another woman
2. A 14th-century man addressing his lord directly
3. A 13th-century man from the south of England talking about a
group of people
4. A 14th-century lord addressing one of his subjects directly
5. A 14th-century man from the Midlands talking about a group of
people
6. A 14th-century lady addressing a group of her subjects directly
7. A 13th-century owla talking about itself
8. A 15th-century woman talking about an unknown or unspecific an-
tecedent

216
 Suggested exercises

9. A 14th-century man from the south talking about a woman

In all examples, the nominative case form is what we’re looking for.
a
Talking birds were not uncommon in Middle English literature; see the sample texts
in §6 and §7.

E.6 Chaucer and V2 and V3

Look at the following clauses from texts by Geoffrey Chaucer. The Treatise
on the Astrolabe was written for his son, Lewis. The Parson’s Tale is one
of the Canterbury Tales.
(23) ther-for have I geven thee a suffisaunt Astrolabe (Astrolabe)
(24) Thus seyn some auctours (Astrolabe; “some authors” = new infor-
mation)
(25) Alwey he maketh a “but” atte laste ende (Parson’s Tale)
(26) the amiable tonge is the tree of lyf (Parson’s Tale)
(27) in helle hir sighte shal be ful of derknesse (Parson’s Tale; “her sight”
= given information)
(28) by the azimut in which he stondeth, maystoua seen in which partie
of the firmament he is (Astrolabe)

Here are your tasks:

1. For each clause, state whether it shows a) strict V2 or b)

information-structure V2 (IS-V2) word order, or whether c) it’s im-
possible to tell.

2. Is there a generalization about where you find strict V2 and IS-V2?

3. If so, why do you think this generalization holds?

a
mayst thou

217
5 Middle English (1150–1500)

E.7 Guard your wardrobe

Look up the Present Day English meaning of the following doublets. What
is the key semantic difference, if any? Is this result in any way surprising?
• guardian vs. warden

• garderobe vs. wardrobe

Additional doublets/triplets if you’d like more:

• guard vs. ward (as nouns)

• guaranty vs. warranty vs. warrant

E.8 Contrasting Present Day English with Middle English:

The Owl and the Nightingale

This exercise involves an extract from The Owl and the Nightingale
(Early Middle English). Look at the nine expressions in bold and ex-
plain how they differ from their Present Day English equivalents. Pay
attention to as many differences as possible.
The Owl and the Nightingale (ll. 101–142), adopted and adapted from
Cartlidge (2001):
Middle English Present Day English
And Þat oþer ȝer a faukun bredde And some years ago, a falcon
was breeding;
his nest (1) noȝt wel he ne bihedde: and she didn’t take good care
of her nest: (1)
Þo hit bicom þat he haȝte, When it turned out that the
falcon had hatched her eggs,

218
 Suggested exercises

& of his eyre (2) briddes wraȝte (3); and from her eggs (2) birds
were produced (3);
ho broȝte his brides (4) mete (5), she brought her chicks (4)
some food (5),
hit was idon (6) ov a loþ[e] [cu]ste. It was done (6) by a horrible
farting.
& nom (7) þat fule brid amidde, she dragged (7) that nasty
chick from their midst,
& warp hit of þan wilde bowe (8), and tossed him out off that
wild branch (8),
Herbi men segget a bispel, This illustrates a fable that
people tell
þeȝ hit ne bo fuliche (9) spel; though it’s not entirely (9) a
fable;

E.9 Contrasting Present Day English with Middle English:

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Look at the expressions in bold in the text below and explain how
they differ from their Present Day English equivalents. You are ex-
pected to comment only on phenomena covered as part of the course.
ME Present Day English
And þe assaut (1) watz sesed at Troye and the assault (1) was ceased at Troy
Þe tulk þat þe trammes of tresoun (2) the man that the plots of treason (2)
Þe trewest on erþe (3) the truest on earth (3)
And his highe (4) kynde (5) and his high (4) kin (5)
Þat burʒe he biges (6) vpon fyrst that he builds a castle (6) first

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5 Middle English (1150–1500)

E.10 Improve these statements

What’s unfortunate about these statements?

• “The Old English <hw> spellings changed to <wh> by the time of
Present Day English, resulting in a sound change.”

• “In Middle English, we see the adoption of the pronoun them, which
has a definite initial dental sound.”

• “Perspire is a completely different word than sweat and it is there-

fore a lexical word.”

Texts

T.1 Caxton, Preface to Eneydos

William Caxton, who introduced the printing press to Britain, was acutely
conscious of language variation and change. In this text, the 1490 preface
to his translation of the Eneydos (Virgil’s Aeneid), he reflects on the di-
versity of English, using the two plural forms of the word for ‘egg’ – the
older eyren and the newer egges – as an example.a
And certaynly our langage now used varyeth ferre
from that whiche was used and spoken whan I
was borne: for we Englysshe men ben borne un- are
der the domynacyon of the mone, which is never domination; moon
stedfaste but ever waverynge, wexynge one sea- waxing
son and waneth & dyscreaseth another season, and
that comyn englysshe that is spoken in one shyre common
varyeth from a nother. shire

In so moche that in my dayes happened that certayn

220
 Texts

marchauntes were in a ship in tamyse for to have Thames

sayled over the see into zelande and for lacke of Zeeland

wynde they taryed atte forlonde, and went to lande foreland (the coast)

for to refreshe them. And one of theym named Shef-

felde a mercer cam in to an hows and axed for mete, textile merchant. Note
that at this period the
and specyally he axyd after eggys. And the goode word meat referred to
wyf answerde that she coude speke no Frenshe. food in general, not
just meat
And the marchaunt was angry, for he also coude
speke no Frenshe, but wolde have hadde egges, and
she understode hym not.
And thenne at laste a nother sayd that he wolde
have eyren. Then the good wyf sayd that she un-
derstod hym wel. Loo what sholde a man in thyse
dayes now wryte, egges or eyren? Certaynly it is
harde to playse every man by cause of dyversite &
chaunge of langage.
a
Transcribed from the manuscript image at https://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/
item126611.html; accessed April 2020; modern punctuation and paragraph breaks
added.

T.2 Paston Letters

Figure 5.8: A Paston letter

221
5 Middle English (1150–1500)

The Pastons were a noble family in Norfolk, and we are lucky enough
to have many surviving letters to and from members of the family. This
letter was written in February 1477 by Margery Paston (née Brews) to her
husband John Paston III.a
Ryght reverent and wurschypfull and my ryght
wellbeloved Valentyne, I recomande me unto yowe,
ffull hertely desyring to here of yowr wellfare,
which I beseche Almyghty God long for to preserve
unto his plasyre and yowr hertes desyre.
And yf it please yow to here of my wellfare I am
not in good heele of body nor of herte, nor schall be health

tyll I here from yowe, ffor there wottys no creature knows

what payn that I endure, and for to be deede I dar it dead; discover

not dyscure. And my lady my moder hath labored

the mater to my ffadur full delygently, but sche can
no more gete than ye knowe of, for the which God
knowyth I am full sory.
But yf that ye loffe me, as I tryste verely that ye do, verily, i.e. truly

ye will not leffe me therefor. For if that ye hade not

halfe the lyvelode that ye hafe, for to do the grettyst livelihood

labure that any woman on lyve myght, I wold not

forsake yowe. And yf ye comande me to kepe me
true wherever I go, I wyse I will do all my myght
yowe to love and never no mo. And yf my freendys i.e. no one else

say that I do amyse, thei schal not me let so for to do amiss, i.e. to make
a mistake/go astray
do.
Myne herte me byddys ever more to love yowe
truly over all erthely thyng. And yf thei be never
so wroth I tryst it schall be better in tyme comyng.
No more to yowe at this tyme, but the Holy Trinite
hafe yow in kepyng. And I besech yowe that thys
bill be not seyne of none erthely creature safe only letter

yorselfe &c.
And thys letter was indyte at Topcroft with full indyte: written

hevy herte &c.

222
 Texts

Be your own MB. by

a
Transcribed from the manuscript image in Figure 5.8 from http://www.bl.uk/
manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Add_MS_43490, f. 23r; accessed April 2020; mod-
ern punctuation and paragraph breaks added.

T.3 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a chivalric romance from the 14th
century. It employs alliteration, like Old English poetry, and represents
the North West Midland dialect of the Middle English period. The follow-
ing excerpt is a scene in which Lady Bertilak approaches Sir Gawain’s
bed with romantic intentions in mind. We follow the line numbering of
Tolkien & Gordon (1967).a
þenne ho gef hym godday ⁊ wyth aglent laʒed glance; laʒ̇ ed: smiled

⁊ as hostod ho stonyed hym wyth ful stor wordez surprised; stor: big

now he þatt spedez vche spech þis disport ʒelde you disport: entertainment
bot þatt ʒe be Gawan hit gotz in mynd
querfore quoþ þe freke ⁊ freschlyb he askez said; freke: knight
c
ferde lest he hade fayled in forme of his castes afraid; castes: speech

bot þe burde hym blessed ⁊ biþis skyl sayde damsel; skyl: reason

So god as gawayn gaynly is halden gaynly: appropriately

⁊ cortaysye is closed so clene in hym seluen

couth not lyʒtly haf lenged so long wyth alady lenged: stayed

bot he had craued acusse bihis cõrtaysye cusse: kiss; bihis:

because of his
bisum towch of summe tryfle at sum talez ende
þen quoþ wowen iwysse worþe as yow lykez wowen: Gawain;
iwysse: indeed
Ischal kysse at your comaundement as a knyʒt
fallez
⁊ fire lest hedisplese yow fo plede hit no more fire: further

ho comes nerre with þat ⁊ cachez hym in armez

loutez luflych adoun ⁊ þe leude kyssez bends; leude: knight

223
5 Middle English (1150–1500)

þay comly bykennen to kryst ayþer oþer bykennen: commend

ho dos hirforth at þe ore with outen dyn more dyn: noise

⁊ he ryches hym to ryse ⁊ rapes hym sone rapes: hastens

clepes to his chamberlayn choses his wede calls; wede: clothes

boʒez forth quen he watz boun blyþelyto masse turns; boun: ready

⁊ þenne he meued to his mete þat menskly hym

keped mete: food; menskly:
generously
⁊ made myry al day til þe mone rysed
with gamed
watz neuere freke fayrerfonge fonge: received

bitwene two so dyngne dame dyngne: worthy

þe alder ⁊þe ʒonge

much solace setþay same solace: joy

a
Transcribed from the Cotton Manuscript Nero A X/2 from http://www.bl.uk/
manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Cotton_MS_Nero_A_X/2&index=4, ff. 112r-112v;
accessed May 2020; original punctuation is kept.
b
This word is very difficult to read in the manuscript.
c
Modern editors often interpret this as <fourme>, e.g. Tolkien & Gordon (1967).
d
Although this line is usually presented as such in modern editions, it is written as an
addition to the previous line in the manuscript itself.
e
These two words are difficult to make out from the manuscript, and we adapt the
transcription of Tolkien & Gordon (1967) here.

T.4 The Reeve’s Tale

Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale is one of the tales in his Canterbury Tales. Below is
an extract containing speech between the main protagonists as well as the
narrator. They come from different parts of England, which we indicate
below.a
Aleyn/John (Northern)
Aleyn spak first, “al hayl, Symond, y-fayth;
How fares thy faire doghter and thy wyf?”

224
 Texts

Miller (Southern)
“Aleyn! welcome,” quod Simkin, “by my lyf, quod: said

And Iohn also, how now, what do ye heer?” What are you doing
here?
Aleyn/John (Northern)
“Symond,” quod Iohn, “by god, nede has na peer; Need has no peer.

Him boës serve him-selve that has na swayn, to him has to serve
himself that has no
Or elles he is a fool, as clerkes sayn. servant
Oure manciple, I hope he wil be deed,
Swa werkes ay the wanges in his heed. aches; always; teeth

And forthy is I come, and eek Alayn, forthy: that’s why; eek:
also
To grinde our corn and carie it ham agayn;
I pray yow spede us hethen that ye may.” hethen: hence

Miller (Southern)
“It shal be doon,” quod Simkin, “by my fay; fay: faith

What wol ye doon whyl that it is in hande?”

Aleyn/John (Northern)
“By god, right by the hoper wil I stande,” hoper: hopper

Quod Iohn, “and se how that the corn gas in;

Yet saugh I never, by my fader kin,
How that the hoper wagges til and fra.”
Aleyn answerde, “Iohn, and wiltow swa?
Than wil I be bynethe, by my croun,
And se how that the mele falles doun
In-to the trough; that sal be my disport.” disport: amusement

...
Narrator (Southern)
Whan that he saugh his tyme, softely;
He loketh up and doun til he hath founde
The clerkes hors, ther as it stood y-bounde y-bounde: tied

Bihinde the mille, under a levesel; levesel: arbour

And to the hors he gooth him faire and wel;

He strepeth of the brydel right anon.
And whan the hors was loos, he ginneth gon ginneth: begins

Toward the fen, ther wilde mares renne, fen: marsh

225
5 Middle English (1150–1500)

And forth with wehee, thurgh thikke and thurgh

thenne.
This miller gooth agayn, no word he seyde,
But dooth his note, and with the clerkes pleyde,
Til that hir corn was faire and well y-grounde. And
whan the mele is sakked and y-bounde,
This Iohn goth out and fynt his hors away,
And gan to crye “harrow” and “weylaway”! exclamations of grief

Aleyn/John (Northern)
“Oure hors is lorn! Alayn, for goddes banes, lorn: lost, e.g. forlorn

Step on thy feet, com out, man, al at anes!

Allas, our wardeyn has his palfrey lorn.” palfrey: saddle horse

Narrator (Southern)
This Aleyn al forgat, bothe mele and corn,
Al was out of his mynde his housbondrye.
Aleyn/John (Northern)
“What, whilk way is he geen?” he gan to crye.
...
Aleyn/John (Northern)
By goddes herte he sal nat scape us bathe.
...
Narrator (Southern)
And whan the miller saugh that they were gon,
He half a busshel of hir flour hath take,
And bad his wyf go knede it in a cake.
Miller (Southern)
He seyde, “I trowe the clerkes were aferd; trowe: believe

Yet can a miller make a clerkes berd berd: beard

For al his art; now lat hem goon hir weye.

Lo where they goon, ye, lat the children pleye;
They gete him nat so lightly, by my croun!” gete: win

a
Taken from https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Canterbury_Tales_(ed._Skeat)/Reeve, ac-
cessed May 2020; modern punctuation added. For the full version of the Middle En-
glish text accompanied with Present Day English interlinear translation, see https:
//sites.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/teachslf/rvt-par.htm.

226
 Texts

T.5 The Land of Cockaygne

The Land of Cockaygne is a poem written in Irish English of the 14th cen-
tury. It is one of the so-called Kildare Poems (there are sixteen in total).
These poems represent our earliest examples of Irish English!a As the fol-
lowing extract illustrates, The Land of Cockaygne is a piece criticizing the
morals of the clergy of the period.b
Fur in see bi west spayngne . Fur: far; Spain

is a lond ihote cokaygne · ihote: called

þer nís lond under heuen riche

of wel of godnís hit iliche. iliche: alike

þoȝ paradis be míri a’bríȝt.

cokaygn isof fairír siȝt .
what is þ̇ er in paradis.
bot grasse a’flure a’grene ris· ris: branches

þ̇ oȝ þ̇ er be ioi a’gret dute. ioi: joy; dute: delight

þ̇ er nís met bote frute· met: food

þ̇ er nís halle bure no benche· bure: bower

bot watír man is þursto qenche·

beþ̇ þ̇ er no men but two.
hely a’enok al so· Elijah and Enoch

clínglich maihi go· dry; may they

whar þ̇ er woníþ̇ men nomo· woníþ̇ lives; men:

indef. “one”
In cokaigne is met A’drínk.
wiþ̇ vte care·how a’swínk. swínk: toil

þ̇ emet is tie·þ̇ edrínk isclere. tie: excellent

to nóne· russín a’ sopper · russín: snack

i sigge for soþ̇ boute were·

þ̇ er nís lond on erthe is pere. pere: peer

under heuen nís lond iwisse .

of so mochil ioi a’blisse·
þ̇ er is maní swete síȝte·
Al is daí nís þ̇ er no níȝte·
þ̇ er nís baret noþ̇ er strif · baret: conflict

227
5 Middle English (1150–1500)

nís þer no deþ ac euer lif · ac: always

þ̇ er nís lac of met no cloþ̇ .

þ̇ er nís man no wōman wroþ̇ · wroþ̇ : angry, wroth

þ̇ er nís serpent wolf no fox .

Hors | no capil | kowe· no ox. capil: horse, possibly
hen
þ̇ er nís schepe· no swíne no gote.
no non horwȝ la godit wote· horwȝ̇ : dirt; oh god
knows it
noþ̇ er harate nother stode.
þ̇ e lond is ful of oþ̇ er gode·
nís þ̇ er fleí· fle | no lowse· fly; flee; louse

in cloþ̇ | in toune· bed no house ·

þ̇ er nís dunnír sléte no hawle· thunder; sleet; hail

no non vile worme no snawile ·

no non storme| reín, no wínde·
Þernís man no wōman blínde .
ok al is game Ioií a’gle. ok: and

wel is him þ̇ at þer mai be ·

Þer beþ̇ ríuers gret a’ fíne ·
of oile| melk | honí a’ wíne ·
watir seruíþ̇ þ̇ er to no þ̇ íng .
bot to siȝt a’to wa’ussíng washing

þ̇ er is maner frute ·
Al is solas a’ dedute· pleasure; delight

a
Not to be confused with Irish, i.e. Irish Gaelic, one of the Celtic languages.
b
Transcribed from the Harley 913 Manuscript http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.
aspx?ref=harley_ms_913_fs001r, ff. 3r-3v; accessed May 2020; punctuation kept as in
the original. For the full Middle English version, go here: https://celt.ucc.ie//published/
E300000-001/. For a translation into Present Day English, see e.g. http://wpwt.soton.
ac.uk/trans/cockaygn/coctrans.htm.

228
 Texts

T.6 The Parliament of Fowls

Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls (or Parlement of Foules) is one of the nu-

merous Middle English works based on ornithology of the times. As the
box “Birds, birds everywhere” in this chapter (§5.5.3) suggested, there are
birds in this piece... and they are all over the place!a
The were huntere slepynge in his bed, were: weary

To wode a gayne his mynde goþ̇ a none

The juge dremith · how his plees ben spedd,
The cartere dremith how his cartis gone
The riche of gold · þ̇ e knyʒt fyʒt with his fone fone: foe

The seke met, he drynkth of þe tonne seke: sick; met:

dreams
The louere met he hathe his lady wonne,
...
A gardyn saþ̇ I ful of blosmy bowes saþ̇ : saw; boughs

Upon a ryver in a grene mede mede: meadow

Þere as swetnesse ever y nowy is

Withb floures white blewe yalow ⁊ rede
And colde welle stremes ⁊ no thing ded,
Þat swōm̄ yn̄ ful of smale fisshes lyhte
Wt fynnes rede and skales syluer brygte with

On every bowhe þe bryddes harde I synge bough; birds

t
W voyce of aungel in hu· harmonye hu: their

Some be syde hem her byrdes forth to brynge

The litle conyes to hir pley goŋ hye conyes: conies,
rabbits
And ferþ̇ er al aboute I gaŋ aspie
Þe dredeful roo · þ̇ e bukke þe hart ⁊ hynde timid roe; buck; hart;
c
Squerellis · ⁊ bestes smalle of gentil kynde
hind

...
I sawe bewte · with · oute any A tyre beauty; attire

And yought ful of game ⁊ jolyte

ffoule hardines flatery ⁊ desire
Messagery and mede ⁊ othir three message-sending;
mede: bribery
Her names shalle not here, be tolde for me

229
5 Middle English (1150–1500)

Ańd upōn̄ pilers grete of jaspe longe

I Saw A temple of brasse i founded stronge
...
ffor this was on Saint Valantínís daye
When every foule comith to chese his mate, foule: bird; chese:
choose
Of every kynde · that meŋ thynk may
And that so huge · A noyse gaŋ theí make gaŋ̇ : began

Þt Erth ⁊ ere and tree ⁊ every lake ere: air

So full was ·þ̇ t unneth was þ̇ er space unneth: hardly

ffor me to stonde so full was all þ̇ e place,

...
That is to sey the foules of ravine birds of prey

were hiest sett ⁊ þ̇ anne the foules smale

Þat etyn as þ̇ t nature wold enclyne
As wormes or þ̇ ing⁊ of which I tel no tale
But water foule satt lowest in the dale dale: dale, valley

And foule þ̇ t liuyth be seed sat on the grene live by seed

And that so fele · þ̇ at wondir was to sene fele: many

Ther myʒt men þ̇ e royal Egle fynde

That wt his sharpe loke path þ̇ e sūŋ̄ path: pierces

And oþ̇ ere Eglis of a lower kynde

Of whiche þ̇ t clerkes welle devise con̄ ū clerkes: scholars

Þer was the tirant wt his fetheris don̄ ̄ doṅ: dun

⁊ grey I mene þ̇ e goshauke that dothe pyne goshauke: goshawk

To bryddis for his outragious ravine ravine: greed

The gentil faucon̄ that wt his fete distraynith

The kyngs honde the hardr sperhauke eke
The quaylis foo ·þ̇ e Emerlion̄ that paynith foe; merlin

Hym selfe ful ofte the larke for to seke

Ther was the douve wt hir eyne meke eyne: eyes

Þe jelous swān̄ A yens his dethþ̇ at syngith A yens: against

The Oule eke that of dethe the bode bryngth bode: message

The crane the geant with his trompes sonne geant: giant; sound

The thef the chouwhe · and eke the jangelyng pye chough; magpie

The scornyng jay the Eles fo the heroūn̄ Eles fo: eel’s foe

230
 Texts

The fals lapwyng ful of trecherie

The stare that the counsel can be wrye starling; betray

The tame ruddok ⁊ the coward kyte ruddok: robin

The cok that Orlage is of the thropis lyte Orlage: clock;

thropis: village’s
...
The hote cormeraunt of gloteny hote: hot

The ravinwís ⁊ the crowes with hir vois of care

The throstell olde þ̇ e froste feldefare throstell: thrush;
feldefare: fieldfare
What shulde I seyne Of foules every kynde
Þat in this world han fetheris ⁊ stature
Men myʒt in that place assemble fynde
Be fore noble goddes nature
And Iche of hem did his besy cure each of them worked
diligently
Be nyngly to chese or for to take
Be hir acord his formel or his male formel: female

a
Transcribed from the Harley 7333 Manuscript http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.
aspx?ref=harley_ms_7333_fs001r, ff. 130r–131v; accessed May 2020. For a translation
into Present Day English, see e.g. https://medievalit.com/home/echaucer/modern-
translations/the-parliament-of-fowls-translation/.
b
This word was difficult to decipher and we rely on Benson (1991: 386–390) here.
c
The manuscript seems to indicate <findlo · ⁊ bethe>, so here we follow Benson (1991:
388) with <· ⁊ bestes smalle>.

T.7 The Owl and the Nightingale

The Owl and the Nightingale is a rare piece, both from a linguistic and a
literary point of view. Linguistically, this is a rare sample of early Middle
English (13th century). From a literary perspective, the poem presents an
altercation type of poetry: the nightingale starts a debate with the owl,
arguing about which of the two is the better singer. And if you want to
know the answer, you’ll have to find the full work and read it!a
Ich þ̇ as ín one sumere dale· dale: valley

In one suþe diʒele hale· suþe: truly; diʒele:

secret; hale: corner

231
5 Middle English (1150–1500)

Iherde ich holde grete tale·

An hule and one niʒtingale·
Þat plait þ̇ as stif⁊ starc ⁊strong· plait: dispute; strong

Sum þ̇ ile softe ⁊ lud among. þ̇ile: while

An aiþer aʒen oþer sval· sval: swelled

⁊ let þat vole mod ut al· vole mod: foul temper

⁊ eiþer seide of oþeres custe· custe: character

Þat alere þ̇ orste þat hi þ̇ uste· þ̇orste: worst; knew

⁊ hure ⁊hure of oþeresonge hure: especially

Hi holde plaiding suþe stronge· plaiding: pleading

Þe niʒtingale bigon þe speche·

In one hurne of one breche· hurne: corner

⁊ sat upone vaire boʒe· vaire: fair; boʒe:

bough
þar þ̇ ere abute blosme ínoʒe·
In ore þ̇ aste þicke hegge· ore: a; þ̇aste: fast

Imeínd mid spire⁊grene segge· spire: reed

Ho þ̇ as þe gladur uor þe rise· þ̇as: was; rise branch

⁊ song auele cunne þ̇ íse· in various ways

Bet þuʒte þe dreím þat he þ̇ ere· þ̇ere: were

Of harpe ⁊ pipe þan he nere· nere: wasn’t

Bet þuʒte þat he þ̇ ere is hote· is hote: shot

Of harpe ⁊ pipe þan of þrote·

Þo stod on old stoc þarbiside· stoc: stump

Þar þo vle song hire tide· tide: canonical hours

⁊ þ̇ as mid íuí al bigroþ̇ e· bigroþ̇e: grown over

Hit þ̇ as þare hule eardingstoþ̇ e· eardingstoþ̇e: abode

Þe niʒtingale hi iseʒ·
⁊ hi bihold ⁊ ouerseʒ·
⁊ þuʒte þ̇ el wl of þare hule· wl: foul

For me hi halt lodlich ⁊ fule· lodlich: loathsome

Vn þ̇ iʒt ho sede a þ̇ ei þ̇ u flo· Vn þ̇iʒt: monster

Me is þ̇ e wrs þ̇ at ich þe so·

I þ̇ is for þine wle lete· foul demeanour

Þel oftich mine song forlete· forlete: give up

Min horte atfliþ ⁊falt mitonge· atfliþ: flees

Þonne þ̇ u art tome iþ̇ runge· iþ̇runge: thrusted

232
 Texts

Me luste bet speten þ̇ ane singe·

Of þ̇ ine fule ʒeʒlínge· ʒeʒlínge: howling

a
Transcribed from the Cotton Caligula A. ix Manuscript http://www.bl.uk/
manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Cotton_MS_Caligula_A_IX, f. 233r; accessed
May 2020; punctuation kept as in the original. For the full Middle English version,
with a rich commentary, we recommend Cartlidge (2001).

T.8 Ancrene Wisse

The following text is an extract from a guide to so-called anchorites or
anchoresses. Anchoresses are female hermits – women who have decided
to withdraw from secular society and live in solitude. The text dates back
to the 13th century and was written in the West Midlands dialect, possibly
not too far from Wales.a But what does Ancrene Wisse mean, exactly?
Literally, “anchorites’ guide”.b
Lucifer þurh þ he seh þ: that

⁊ biheold on him seolf his ahne feiernesse leop in

to prude
⁊ bicom of angel eatelich deouel. eetelich: hideous

Of eue ure alde moder is iyriten iyriten: written

on alre earst earst: earliest

in hine sunne sin

inȝong of hire ehsihðe. inȝong: went in

...
þis Eue biheold o þe forboden eappel þis: that is

⁊ seh hine feier feier: fair, adj.

⁊ feng feng: took

to delitin iþe bihaldunge bihaldunge: sight

⁊ toc hire lust þer toyard

⁊ nom ⁊ et þrof þrof: thereof

⁊ ȝef hire laud laud: lord

233
5 Middle English (1150–1500)

loy hu hali yrit spekeð loy: lo

⁊ hu ínyardliche hit teleð hu sunne bigon inwardly

þus eode sunnec biuoren

⁊ makede yei to uuel lust way; evil

⁊ com þe dede þrefter

þ al moncun mankind

ifeleð feels

þes eappel leoue suster

bitacneð bitacneð: represents

alle þe yad ya: misery

þ lust falleð to
⁊ delit of sunne delight

Hyen þu bihaldest te mon,

þu art in eue poínt. position

þu lokest oþe eappel. oþe: on the

hya se hefde iseid to eue whosoever

þa ha yeorp yeorp: cast

earst hire ehe þron: þron: thereon

A Eue yent te ayei Ah!; turn

þu yarpest ehe oþi deað. eye; on thy

Hyet hefde ha iondsyeret? answered

Me leoue sire þu hauest yoh. yoh: wrong

hyerof chalengest tu me?

þe eappel þ ich loki on
is forbode me to eotene
⁊ nayt to bihalden nayt: not

þus yaldewould Eue inohreaðe habben iondsyeret. enough-readily

O míne leoue sustren

as eue haueð monie dehtren þe folhið hare moder
þe ondsyerieð o þisse yise: in this way

Me yenest tu yenest: believe

seið sum
þ ich yulle leapen on him will, want to

þah ich loki on him? þah: though

234
 Texts

godd yat leoue suster yat: knows

mare yunder ilomp. wonder; happened

Eue þi moder leop efter hire ehnen. ehnen: eyes

from þe ehe to þe eappel.

from þe eappel iparais. in paradise

dun to þer eorðe down

from þe eorðe to helle

þer ha lei ha: she

i psun foyr þusent ȝer ⁊ mare. psun: prison

heo ⁊ hire yere ba yere: man; both

⁊ demde al hire ofsprung demde: judged

to leapen al efter hire to deað

yið uten ende. yið uten: without

Biginnunge ⁊ rote of al root

þis ilke reoyðe. same sorrow

yes aliht sihðe a light

þus often as me seið. me: one

of lutel. muchel yaxeð. yaxeð: grows

Habbe þenne muche dred euch feble yummon woman

hyene þeo þe yes riht ta she who was right

there; wrought, made;
iyraht yið godes honden. bisyiken: deceived
Yes þurh a sihðe bisyiken
⁊ ibroht in to brad sunne,
þet al þe yorld ouerspreadde.
a
Read more about anchorites and this fascinating Middle English work here: https:
//d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/hasenfratz-ancrene-wisse-introduction.
b
The following extract is based on the Corpus Christi College MS 402: https://
parker.stanford.edu/parker/catalog/zh635rv2202, f. 13v, our selection corresponds to
lines 46–69 in this source https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/hasenfrantz-ancrene-
wisse-part-two, but for practical reasons, we use our own line numbering and breaks.
Accessed December 2021.
c
The well-known edited version by Robert Hasenfratz provides as the interpretation of
this word sihthe instead (https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/hasenfrantz-ancrene-
wisse-part-two).
d
Hasenfratz translates this as all the things.
e
Both hyen and hyil are present in the manuscript as two options.

235
5 Middle English (1150–1500)

T.9 Ormulum
The Ormulum was composed in the East Midlands of England in the
twelfth century by a man named Orm – a Norse word meaning “serpent”,
cognate with English worm, that was a common Scandinavian name. The
text is in verse and uses a unique spelling system: basically, double con-
sonants after a vowel show that the preceding vowel is short. Scholars
have argued that the text shows Norse influence not only in the lexicon
but also in its syntax (Trips 2002). Norse contact influence is discussed in
more detail in §6.1.1, so you may wish to revisit this text once you’ve read
the next chapter. These lines are taken from the edition by White (1878).
Adam wass wurrþenn deofless peoww peoww/þeoww: slave,
servant
Þurrh þatt he dide hiss wille,
⁊ all þatt streonedd wass þurrh himm streonedd: created,
born
Wass streonedd to þatt illke,
To ben unnderr deofless þeowwdom, ben: be

To farenn all till helle. faren: go, travel

⁊ tatt wass rihht tatt mannkinn wass

Unnderr þe deofless walde, walde: power/rule

All swa summ Adam wurrþenn wass, as Adam had become

Þatt haffde hemm alle streonedd,

all se iss her bitwenenn þe
⁊ tin eorþlike laferrd; earthly lord

Forr all swa summ þu þeowwtesst himm,

Swa shall þin sune himm þeowwtenn,
Butt iff he wurrþe lesedd ut lesedd: released

Off hiss þeowwdomess bandess.

Nu mihht tu sen þatt tatt wass rihht sen: see

Þatt mannkinn for till helle, for: went

All affterr þatt tatt Adam for,

Þatt haffde hemm alle streonedd;
alle forenn all forrþi forrþi: therefore
þeossterrnesse:
Till helless þeossterrnesse, darkness
ȝa þa þatt wærenn gode menn, ȝa þa ... ȝa þa: both
those ... and those
ȝa þa þatt waerenn ille.

236
 Texts

Recommended further reading

A short book-length introduction to the Middle English period in general

is Horobin & Smith (2002), and this book also has excellent chapters on
the morphology and the lexicon of Middle English. For more on phonol-
ogy, check out Minkova (2014), §5.1.3, §5.4, and Chapter 7 in particular.
For more on syntax, see Los (2015: Chapter 4) and Fischer et al. (2017).
Excepting Minkova (2014), all these works are written with the student
reader in mind.
There are many more diving-off points for specific topics discussed
in this chapter. If you’re interested in medieval multilingualism, David-
son (2010), Hsy (2013) and the papers in Jefferson & Putter (2013) are
good starting points. For pronouns and politeness you should try Burnley
(2003). Sylvester (2017) is excellent on the lexicon and semantic change.

237
6 Old English (600–1150)
Moððe word fræt. Me þæt þuhte
wrætlicu wyrd, þa ic þæt wundor gefrægn,
þæt se wyrm forswealg wera gied sumes,
þeof in þystro, þrymfæstne cwide
ond þæs strangan staþol. Stælgiest ne wæs
wihte þy gleawra, þe he þam wordum swealg.

A moth ate words. That seemed to me

a curious happening, when I heard about that wonder,
that the worm, a thief in the darkness, swallowed
a certain man’s song, a glory-fast speech
and its strong foundation. The stealing guest was not
at all the wiser for that, for those words which he swallowed.
(Old English Riddle 47; Cavell 2015)

Welcome to the Old English period! Stretching from the earliest texts in the Latin
alphabet in the seventh century to the aftermath of the Norman Conquest in the
early twelfth century, this period probably presents more challenges to present-
day readers than any other. The Old English riddle that opens this chapter is a
good illustration of the alien appearance of the language at first sight.1
The good news, though, is that by working through this book so far you’ve
already learned about most of the grammatical features that you’ll need to know
about in order to understand Old English texts. For the sounds and sound system
of the language, the relevant changes that get us to Old English include:

• /h/-clusters and /h/-dropping (§3.2.1 and §5.2.3)

• The Great Vowel Shift (§4.2.1)

• Vowel length and lengthening phenomena (§5.2.5)

For the morphology and syntax of the language, you’ll need to know about:
1
Can you solve it? See Cavell (2015) online for possible answers.
6 Old English (600–1150)

• Different pronoun forms (§4.3.1 and 5.3.3)

• Paradigms and verbal endings (§5.3.1)

• Strong and weak verbs (§5.3.2)

• Case (§5.3.3)

• Verb-second (§5.4.1)

It’s wise to check that you understand these notions before proceeding with this
chapter. And have no fear! We’ll introduce everything else you need to know as
we go along. First, though, as usual, we’ll talk about some of the historical events
that shaped how the language was used and developed.

6.1 History and context

Old English was never the only language used in Britain during this period. Ev-
eryone who was writing in Old English also knew some Latin, as writing was
largely the domain of the church, and Latin was the primary language of the
church. Alongside documents written in Old English, we have many written in
Latin – and quite a few that are written in a mixture of English and Latin, such
as glosses and glossaries (see Figure 6.1). Outside of religious contexts, however,
it is not clear how widely spoken Latin was in Britain at this time.2
We can be sure that several other languages were spoken in Britain during the
period, though. One of these was Norse – the language of settlers from Scandi-
navia. In addition, Celtic languages were widely spoken throughout the Isles, and
large numbers of people must have been bilingual in Brythonic Celtic and Old
English. These languages have left their mark on English over the centuries, and
as early as Old English we can see their influence in texts. The following two sub-
sections discuss the Norse and Celtic contact situations, and we will be returning
to the theme of language contact and coexistence throughout the chapter.

6.1.1 Scandinavian settlement and rule

According to the Old English Chronicle, three ships of norðmanna ‘men of the
North’ arrived in England in the year 789. They met the reeve, a local official,
2
The consensus view is that it was hardly spoken at all. However, Schrijver (2013) has argued
that British Latin survived as a spoken language at least into the early part of the Old English
period.

240
 6.1 History and context

Figure 6.1: Part of the Lindisfarne Gospels. The larger, blockier

text is in Latin and dates from around the year 700. Above it, in
a smaller hand, a gloss (word-by-word translation) in Northum-
brian Old English has been added. This dates from the tenth
century. Image from http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?
ref=Cotton_MS_nero_d_iv, f. 20v; accessed May 2020.

who tried to make them come quietly to see the king, þy he nyste hwæt hi wæron
‘because he did not know what they were’. This did not end well for the reeve,
who was killed. Shortly afterward, in June of 793, the island monastery of Lind-
isfarne off the north-east coast of England was attacked and looted by “heathen
men” – what we now call Vikings. For all intents and purposes, this was the start
of the brief but dramatic period of the history of English during which it was
shaped by contact with the Norse language.3
In history books, much is made of the early years of Viking raids on the coasts
of Britain. For linguistic purposes, what’s really interesting is what happened
next: the Chronicle for 876 states that the Scandinavians settled in England, and
“proceeded to plough and support themselves”. This migration continued for at
least the next hundred years, and from this point onwards the Scandinavian in-
comers were a central part of the ethnic and linguistic makeup of Britain itself.
Although there is debate about exactly how many settlers from Scandinavia there
were (see Sawyer 1971 for a sceptical view), the consensus today among historians
and archaeologists is that the scale of settlement was large (Hadley 1997, 2009,
Kershaw & Røyrvik 2016), especially in the east and north-east of England. Most
of these settlers came from what is now Denmark, though the tenth century also
saw settlers from Norway in the north-west of the country.4

3
Two recent TV series – Vikings (2013–) and The Last Kingdom (2015–) – cover the events of early
contact between Norse-speakers and English-speakers. Both aim for entertainment rather than
faithfulness, but are a good way to get the gist of the historical events of this period.
4
Sometimes these later settlers are also referred to as “Vikings”, but this is misleading: “viking”,
i.e. raiding, was an activity, and it makes little sense to lump all Scandinavian immigrants to
Britain together.

241
6 Old English (600–1150)

Boundaries between political entities were fluid during the Old English pe-
riod. Pre-Viking England was a patchworth of small, shifting kingdoms, includ-
ing Northumbria in the north-east, Mercia in the centre of England, Kent in the
south-east, and Wessex in the south. Linguistically and politically, Wessex was
the most important of these in the late ninth century, and at this time its ruler
Alfred reached agreements with the leadership of the Scandinavian incomers
through a mixture of military success, diplomacy, and bribes. The Scandinavian
king, Guthrum, converted to Christianity in 878.
The language of the Scandinavian settlers, which we’ve labelled Norse, was a
Germanic language closely related to Old English (see Chapter 7 for more on the
Germanic family). It’s even likely that, with a bit of effort and a sympathetic ear,
Norse and Old English were mutually intelligible (Townend 2002). This would
have come in handy, as the fate of the settlers and their descendants was inex-
tricably intertwined with that of the Old English speakers: they not only fought
but also traded, farmed, ruled, worshipped, and in many cases lived together, de-
pending on the area. The situation was far more nuanced than simply two rival
groups: for instance, Alfred’s court was visited by a friendly Norwegian, Ohthere
of Hålogaland, who gave him an account of his travels in the far north which still
survives in the Old English text Orosius. Politically, the landscape shifted in the
tenth century, and by 1016 the Danish prince Cnut was able to claim rule of all
of England (advised by a writer and speaker of Old English, the powerful Arch-
bishop Wulfstan of York) – though power returned to Alfred’s descendants in
the House of Wessex in 1042 after the death of Cnut’s sons Harold and Hartha-
cnut. After this, and particularly after the Norman Conquest, Norse as a spoken
language died out in England, though we don’t know exactly when.5
Other than a handful of inscriptions, we have virtually no evidence for the
Norse actually spoken in Great Britain during this period, as it never became
a language of writing. However, we can infer a lot about its spoken form from
the Old Norse writings of Scandinavia, and from these it becomes very clear that
Norse had a huge impact on English, from morphology to syntax to lexicon. We’ll
look at some examples as we go through.6

5
In the Orkney and Shetland Isles off the north coast of Scotland, Norse (known as Norn) sur-
vived as late as the eighteenth century (Barnes 1998).
6
For more detail and evaluations of the Norse-English contact situation overall, see Dance (2012),
Lutz (2012), and Warner (2017).

242
 6.1 History and context

King Alfred

Alfred (Ælfrēd), King of Wessex from 871 un-

til his death in 899 and later known as “the
Great”, is an important figure for the history
of English not just because of his dealings
with the Scandinavians. He also played an im-
portant role in the establishment of (Old) En-
glish as a language of writing, where previ-
ously Latin had been dominant. The preface
to the Old English translation of Pope Gre-
gory’s Pastoral Care, traditionally attributed Figure 6.2: Fourteenth-
to Alfred, writes of Alfred’s desire to see more century manuscript
works of learning translated into English, and miniature of King Alfred
claims that the standard of learning in Eng-
land has declined (some things never change). Most of our Old English
texts come from Wessex and date to Alfred’s reign or later. At one point,
Alfred was thought to be personally responsible for writing a wide range
of Old English texts, but some scholars nowadays are sceptical about this,
suggesting instead that he commissioned and circulated some of these
works, and that others had nothing to do with him at all until after his
death (see Godden 2007 vs. Bately 2009). In one recent linguistically-
informed account (Timofeeva 2018: 143),
Alfred’s role is seen primarily as that of the social leader whose pa-
tronage of a network of Winchester-based scholars gave them the
means and stimulus to embark upon a cultural programme that in-
cluded several extended translations (no matter how many and by
whom) and a number of vernacular texts.

A readable account of King Alfred and Britain during his lifetime can be
found in Adams (2017), and for more detail see the chapters in Discenza &
Szarmach (2015), which contains a bibliography on the authorship issue.

243
6 Old English (600–1150)

6.1.2 Old English and Celtic

Long before the Scandinavian settlement, Old English in Great Britain coexisted
with Celtic languages.
Today’s Celtic languages are spoken only on the western side of Great Britain
and in Brittany in France. The more northerly Celtic languages – Irish in Ire-
land, Scottish Gaelic in Scotland, and Manx on the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea –
are known as the Goidelic languages, and the more southerly – Welsh in Wales,
Cornish in Cornwall, and Breton in Brittany – are known as Brythonic (or Brit-
tonic).7 As can be seen in Figure 6.3, these languages are not widespread. Almost
all the speakers of Celtic languages today are fluent in at least one other lan-
guage: normally modern English, or modern French in the case of Breton. For all
six languages, active revitalization efforts are ongoing. Cornish and Manx were
even considered extinct for a time in the twentieth century.
It wasn’t always like this. During the Old
English period, in particular, the Celtic lan-
guages were much more widely spoken than
they are today. Ireland, Scotland and Wales
never came under the rule of Old English na-
tive speakers, and the same can be said for
large parts of what is now England. Devon, in
the south-west, was only conquered by Wes-
sex in the early eighth century, and Cornwall
not until the very end of the period, in 1086
(Wakelin 1975). Cumbria, in the north-west,
was also never firmly under the control of
Old English rulers during this period. People
in all these areas would have been predomi-
Figure 6.3: Areas where Celtic lan-
nantly Celtic-speaking. And the nature of po- guages are spoken today. Dark and
litical control and identity in kingdoms such light green areas indicate major-
as Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex was such (Map ity and minority usage respectively.
by Fobos92, licensed under
that we know there must have been a large CC-BY-SA 3.0)
number of Celtic speakers in these areas too.
Texts and archaeological evidence from the early Old English period are fairly
sparse and difficult to interpret, so we don’t know as much as we’d like about the
relationships between Celtic and Old English speakers, and it must have varied
7
Like Norse and Old English, the Celtic languages are Indo-European languages (see Chapter 7).
However, the Celtic languages are much more distant relatives, and certainly would not have
been mutually intelligible with Old English.

244
 6.1 History and context

from place to place. However, evidence from the Old English lexicon gives us
a hint as to the status of Brythonic Celtic speakers in kingdoms like Wessex.
The word wealh, in particular, could mean ‘foreigner’, ‘person of Celtic-speaking
origin’, or ‘enslaved person’ (Pelteret 1995, Lutz 2009); the last of these senses
seems to have been limited to the south of England. The word wīln, which comes
from wealh-in (with a feminine suffix), only ever means ‘enslaved female’. This
lexical evidence suggests that people of Celtic-speaking origin were very often
enslaved in the Old-English-speaking kingdoms. There’s also legal evidence in
the form of the laws of King Ine of Wessex, drawn up at the end of the seventh
century (Grimmer 2007, Woolf 2007). In these documents, the wergild 8 for a wilisc
mon (presumably a Celtic speaker) is mentioned explicitly, and contrasted with
that of an englisc mon (presumably an Old English speaker): a wilisc mon9 is
worth much less, though there were some wilisc landowners. What we can infer
from all this evidence is that there were Celtic speakers in the kingdom of Wessex,
and probably quite a lot of them, with generally lower social status than speakers
of Old English. Higham (1992) suggests that the Old English speakers were in
fact only a small, aristocratic minority, with speakers of Celtic making up the
majority.
Despite this clear historical evidence for societal multilingualism, the question
of Celtic linguistic influence on English has been much more controversial than
the question of Norse influence. This is partly due to the fact that the historical
picture of Celtic-English contact outlined above has only become clear since the
1990s (see §7.1.2 for more on this), and the details are still a matter of debate. It’s
partly also due to the relative rarity of the most obvious kind of language contact
influence – lexical borrowings (see §6.5.2 later in this chapter). Many instances of
potential Celtic influence on English throughout its history have been contested:
an example is DO-support, as discussed in §4.4.1 (see van der Auwera & Genee
2002). There are some clear cases, however, even in the Old English period. The
best example is probably the uses of the forms of the verb BE in Old English,
which we’ll introduce in §6.3.2. For overviews of Celtic influence on English see
Filppula et al. (2008) and Hickey (2012).

6.1.3 Old English texts

Nearly a millennium has passed since the Old English period, and the ravages of
time have meant that we don’t have as many Old English texts as we’d like. We
can actually be very specific about this: the Dictionary of Old English Corpus,
8
Money to be paid in compensation for a crime – in this case, someone’s killing.
9
Directly cognate with Present Day English Welsh man.

245
6 Old English (600–1150)

which contains at least one copy of every known Old English text, comes to just
over three million words of Old English.10 For comparison, the seven books of
the Harry Potter series are made up of just over one million words.
The corpus of Old English texts isn’t just very limited – it’s also very skewed.
Because literacy was part and parcel of the Church, all the texts we have were
produced in a religious context, and most of them have overtly religious themes.
Outside religious orders, only a few aristocratic Old English speakers would ever
have had access to writing. We don’t know who wrote the vast majority of the
Old English texts that have come down to us; there are only handful of excep-
tions, such as the prolific Abbot Ælfriċ of Eynsham and the influential Arch-
bishop Wulfstan of York, both of whom were active around the year 1000.
It’s certain that, like any living language, Old English as actually spoken ex-
hibited huge amounts of variation geographically, socially and stylistically. But
we simply don’t have access to most of this variation. Starting with dialects, we
can roughly divide Old English texts into four groups: West Saxon, Kentish, Mer-
cian, and Northumbrian (the last two are often grouped together as Anglian).
However, the emergence of Old English as a written language was linked to the
activities of King Alfred of Wessex, and so it’s not a surprise that almost all of
our Old English texts are written in the West Saxon dialect.11 And, when we can
localize the texts at all, we find that they come from a small number of scribal
centres (see Figure 6.4 for some of the most important).
We have enough Old English material to see it changing over time, though.
Texts from the early part of the period – before Alfred’s reign in the late ninth
century – are few and far between, but some have survived, like the seventh-
century Cædmon’s Hymn and the seventh-eighth-century Épinal and Erfurt glos-
saries. Texts from before 900, including those from Alfred’s reign, are known as
Early Old English texts: these include many translations from Latin, including
Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy and Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the En-
glish People. Old English from between 900 and 1150 is labelled Classical and is
dominated by the works of Wulfstan and especially Ælfriċ. From this period we
have many sermons and stories of the lives of saints, but also scientific texts such
as Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion (‘manual’) and medical handbooks like the Herbarium.
And from across the whole Old English period we have legal documents, as well
as the famous Old English Chronicle, a year-by-year retelling of historical events
that survives in several manuscripts.
10
See https://tapor.library.utoronto.ca/doecorpus/.
11
Or at least the versions that have come down to us are in West Saxon. For some texts, like
Beowulf, there is evidence to suggest that they were originally composed in a different dialect
and only translated later into West Saxon.

246
 6.1 History and context

Northumbrian
Lindisfarne Gospels
Mercian
Durham Ritual
Vespasian Psalter
Corpus Glossary
Épinal Glossary

Chester-
le-Street Kentish
Kentish Glosses

West Saxon Lichfield

Old English Chronicle
(Parker MS)
Canterbury
Orosius (Lauderdale MS)
Winchester

Figure 6.4: Some key scribal centres during the Old English period

The nature of the texts that survive is heavily determined by who wielded (po-
litical and religious) power. The majority of our texts are West Saxon and date
from the late ninth century onwards, due to the preeminence of the kingdom of
Wessex during this period. By contrast, the earlier texts have a strong Northum-
brian or Mercian flavour, since the kingdoms of Northumbria and Mercia had
their heydays in the seventh and eighth century respectively.12 We’ll return to
some of the main differences between early and late Old English in §6.3 and §6.4.

12
If you’re interested in the thorny issues of disentangling dialectal and scribal from diachronic
variation in Old English texts, we recommend you take a look at Hogg (1988), “On the impos-
sibility of Old English dialectology”.

247
6 Old English (600–1150)

Women writers in early England

All of the named writers of Old English that

we know of are men. This makes it rather dif-
ficult for us to know how human gender may
or may not have been expressed through lan-
guage at the time. The earliest named women
writers whose work has been passed down
to us are only from the Middle English pe-
riod (see §5.1.3). That doesn’t mean, however,
that women weren’t active as writers and pa-
trons of writing during the Old English pe-
riod. Religious houses in medieval England
could be male-only, female-only and mixed,
and abbesses like Hild of Whitby (614–680; pa-
tron of the poet Cædmon) and Æthelthryth
of Ely (c. 636–679) wielded a great deal of
Figure 6.5: Hild of Whitby
on a church banner. Note spiritual, political and economic power. The
the runic letters! (Photo by texts known to have been written by women
Jonund, licensed under CC- from this period are in Latin rather than Old
BY-SA 2.0)
English, but some Old English texts such as
Wulf & Eadwacer and The Wife’s Lament are
female-voiced. Watt (2019: 58–68) suggests that the Old English fragments
of the Life of St Mildrith were written by a woman, especially given the
text’s focus on female authority, power, and heritage.a
a
For more on women and writing in early medieval England see Lees & Overing (2001),
Watt (2019), and https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2018/12/women-and-books-
in-anglo-saxon-kingdoms.html.

Finally, no section on Old English texts would be complete without mentioning

the period’s poetry, often seen as the best reason to learn to read Old English from
a literary perspective. Most surviving Old English poetry is contained within just
four manuscripts: the Junius manuscript, the Exeter Book, the Vercelli Book, and
the Nowell Codex. In the poetry we can find a mix of Christian and pre-Christian
influences. Old English poetry is alliterative rather than rhyming (see §7.2.4 in the

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 6.2 Sounds

next chapter), and deals with a variety of themes. The most famous is Beowulf, an
epic poem dealing with the eponymous hero’s journey from wandering warrior
to king and the monsters and challenges he faces along the way.

6.2 Sounds
We’ve come a long way from Modern English, so at this point we should stop and
give an overview of the whole sound system of Old English and how it relates to
spelling. Table 6.1 presents the vowels of Old English, and Table 6.2 presents the
consonants.
Table 6.1: Old English vowel phonemes and corresponding graphemes

Front unrounded Front rounded Back

high /i, iː/ ↔ <i> /y, yː/ ↔ <y> /u, uː/ ↔ <u>
mid /e, eː/ ↔ <e> /ø, øː/ ↔ <oe> /o, oː/ ↔ <o>
low /æ, æː/ ↔ <æ> /ɑ, ɑː/ ↔ <a>

So far, so straightforward. Old English, like Middle English (see §5.2.5), had both
long and short vowel phonemes. This distinction wasn’t represented in writing,
though. Sometimes, in modern editions of Old English texts, the editors mark
length using a macron above the vowel, as in Ælfrēd, with <ē>, for the name of
the king. It’s important to note that this macron was never found in manuscripts
– it’s a modern addition intended to make life easier for readers.13
We find one grapheme used to represent a sound in the Old English vowel
system that we don’t see at any other stage of the language: the grapheme <æ>,
called ash. This is known as a ligature /ˈlɪɡətʃə/ or ligated digraph /ˈlaɪɡeɪtɪd
ˈdaɪɡrɑːf/, and, in simpler words, consists of two characters squished together –
in this case <a> and <e>. It has its own phonemic value, though, which is always
/æ/ or /æː/.
Old English also has diphthongs. Originally, there were eight of these, four
long, four short:

• /iu, iːu/ ↔ <io>

• /iy, iːy/ ↔ <ie>

13
We do find the macron in Old English manuscripts, but not to distinguish vowel length.

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6 Old English (600–1150)

• /eo, eːo/ ↔ <eo>

• /æɑ, æːɑ/ ↔ <ea>

As can be expected for any period of the language, there is some variation in the
vowel system over time in Old English as well. The mid front rounded phonemes
/ø/ and /øː/, written as <oe>, are only found in early Old English texts. Later
on, they become unrounded and merge with /e/ and /eː/. Similarly, half of the
diphthongs are lost during the period. By the time of Classical West Saxon, /iu/
and /iːu/ have merged with /eo/ and /eːo/ respectively, and /iy/ and /iːy/ have
merged with /y/ and /yː/. In later Old English texts we also find a very narrow
range of vowels in unstressed syllables. We’ll come back to this in §6.3.4, because
it’s relevant to morphological changes in the language as well.
Table 6.2: Old English consonant phonemes and graphemes

labial coronal palatal velar

voiceless /p, pː/ ↔ /t, tː/ ↔ <t, tt> /k, kː/ ↔
stops <p, pp> <k, kk>
voiced /b, bː/ ↔ /d, dː/ ↔ <d, dd> /g, gː/ ↔
stops <b, bb> <g, gg>
fricatives /f, fː/ ↔ /θ, θː/ ↔ <þ/ð, þþ/ðð> /ʃ, ʃː/ ↔ <sc> /x, xː/ ↔
<f, ff> /s, sː/ ↔ <s, ss> <h, hh>
voiceless /tʃ, tʃː/ ↔
affricates <c, cc>
voiced af- /dʒ, dʒː/ ↔
fricates <cg or gg>
nasals /m, mː/ ↔ /n, nː/ ↔ <n, nn>
<m, mm>
liquids /l, lː/ ↔ <l, ll>
/r, rː/ ↔ <r, rr>
glides /w, wː/ ↔ /j, jː/ ↔<g/i, gi/ii>
<uu or ƿ, ƿƿ>a

a
The grapheme <w> is found in almost all modern editions of Old English texts, but not in the
manuscripts. Old English scribes either used <uu>, i.e. a literal “double u”, or the character <ƿ>
(“wynn”), originally from the runic alphabet (see §7.2.2).

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 6.2 Sounds

Like the vowels, Old English consonants come in both long and short versions,
and the length distinction is phonemic. Long consonants – also known as gemi-
nates – are usually represented in the manuscripts by doubling: /bː/, for example,
is written as <bb>. These length distinctions could be rather important. Compare
for instance cwelan /kwelɑn/ ‘to die’ and cwellan /kwelːɑn/ ‘to kill’ (or to cause
someone to die).
One thing worth noting about Old English, in contrast to Middle English and
all subsequent stages, is that there is no phonemic voicing contrast in fricatives.
Instead, fricatives had both voiced and voiceless allophones. The voiced allo-
phone (e.g. [v] for the phoneme /f/) was found when the fricative is between
two voiced sounds, for instance between vowels.14 Otherwise, the voiceless allo-
phone was found. Thus, Old English wulf would be pronounced as [wulf], but
the plural wulfas as [wulvas]. As we can see, this allophonic difference isn’t repre-
sented in the spelling, though. The development of a phonemic voicing contrast in
Middle English and beyond is probably due to contact influence from languages
which did possess this contrast. Laker (2009) argues that contact with Brythonic
Celtic is responsible, and in response Minkova (2011) defends the more conven-
tional view that the change is due to the large number of lexical borrowings from
French. Once the voiced allophones had become phonemes, however, they were
often represented as such in the spelling as well.15 This gives us the following
Present Day English phonological irregularities, which are also represented as
irregular in the spelling in case of /f/ and /v/: calf ∼ calves, dwarf ∼ dwarves,
hoof ∼ hooves, knife ∼ knives, leaf ∼ leaves, life ∼ lives, wife ∼ wives, house ∼
houses,16 oath ∼ oaths, path ∼ paths; breath ∼ to breathe, grief ∼ to grieve, teeth
∼ to teethe, and wreath ∼ to wreathe.

Thorn and eth

We met the letter thorn <þ> in §5.2.2. In Old English, as in Middle En-
glish, it’s used for both the voiced dental fricative [ð] and the voiceless

14
But also nasals (/m/, /n/) liquids (/r/, /l/), approximants (/w/, /j/), and voiced plosives (e.g. /b/).
15
With the exception of the dental fricatives /θ/ and /ð/, which – as we have seen – were spelt
with either <þ> or <ð> irrespective of the phonetic or phonological status of the phone, and
in Present Day English are both spelt with <th>
16
Though the latter tends to be pronounced with a voiceless fricative in American English.

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6 Old English (600–1150)

dental fricative [θ]. As we’ve noted, these were allophones of a single

fricative phoneme, since fricative voicing was not distinctive in Old En-
glish. Another grapheme used for the same phoneme was <ð>, eth. There
isn’t any consistent difference between <þ> and <ð>: they’re used vari-
ably to represent the same phoneme (remember, Old English wasn’t stan-
dardized like today’s English).a Historically, thorn comes from the runic
alphabet (see §7.2.2), while eth is simply what it looks like: a Latin <d>
with a bar through it. Drout & Chauvet (2015) suggest that subtle quanti-
tative differences in the use of <þ> and <ð> can be used to investigate the
history and authorship of Old English texts.
a
It has been proposed in the literature that West Saxon was standardized to some extent;
for a sceptical evaluation see Hogg (2006).

With this background in mind, we can now turn to two phonological processes
that characterize Old English: palatalization (§6.2.1) and i-umlaut (§6.2.2).

6.2.1 Palatalization
Palatalization is a process which lies behind Present Day English alternations
like these:

• batch ∼ to bake, bench ∼ bank 17 , to beseech ∼ to seek, birch ∼ birk, chary ∼

care, -chester ∼ -caster, to chill ∼ cold, church ∼ kirk, ditch ∼ dyke, drench
∼ to drink, match18 ∼ to make, milch ∼ milk, stench ∼ to stink, stitch ∼
stick, watch ∼ wake, and -wich ∼ -wick (as in the place names Norwich vs.
Warwick)

• yard ∼ garden, yarn19 ∼ garn20 , yellow ∼ golden, and to yearn ∼ to green21 ,

and to yell ∼ nightingale (the gale part)

• dish ∼ disk, fish ∼ piscatorial, mesh ∼ mask, shatter ∼ scatter, shave ∼ scab,
shell ∼ scale, ship ∼ skipper, shrift ∼ script, shirt ∼ skirt, and shuffle ∼ scuffle

17
In the meaning of ‘a long, high mound with steeply sloping sides’ (OED; 2020, s.v. bank, n.1.).
18
As in ‘a couple’ or ‘a pair’, not the short pieces of wood used to light a fire.
19
A spun fibre.
20
A variant of yarn attested in the north of Britain (OED; 2020, s.v. garn, n.).
21
This word has nothing to do with the colour here: it’s a Scottish word meaning ‘to yearn, desire’
(OED; 2020, s.v. green, v.2).

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 6.2 Sounds

It is a process whereby a consonant with a non-palatal place of articulation be-

comes palatal. Thus, what used to be /k/ (a velar consonant) became /tʃ/ (a palatal
one), /g/ became /j/, and /sk/ became /ʃ/, prior to the time from which we have
the earliest written records of Old English. But hmmmm, hang on, if that was
the case, how come we’ve still got the pairs such as those mentioned above in
Present Day English? There are two reasons for this.
First, in case of /k/ > /tʃ/ and /g/ > /j/, palatalization only happened when a cer-
tain group of vowels combined with /k/ and /g/. Thus, Present Day English chill
/tʃɪl/ comes from Old English ċele and Present Day English cold /kəʊɫd/ comes
from Old English cald; the surrounding vowels are different, and only some vow-
els conditioned palatalization. It is not unreasonable to assume that the palataliza-
tion of /sk/ to /ʃ/ was initially also limited to certain vowel contexts.22 However,
by the end of Old English, /sk/ had palatalized to /ʃ/ irrespective of which vowel
preceded or followed. So it is only the /k/ ∼ /tʃ/ alternations that can be explained
by the vocalic environment of the words involved.
The second explanation is related to chronology. At some point, /sk/ started
changing into /ʃ/. This took a while, but, eventually, this process stopped being
active. There were no more /sk/s left to be affected by palatalization. That is,
until speakers of English came into contact with other languages, and languages
which had not undergone the same process of palatalization and therefore had
/sk/ and/or /k/ in various vowel contexts. Contact with languages such as Norse,
Latin, and French can therefore also explain the alternations we see above: words
with /sk/ and /k/ that were borrowed into English after palatalization stopped
being an active process, i.e. during or after the period of attested Old English,
retained their non-palatalized consonants. Is it a coincidence that kirk, related to
church (from Old English ċirice), is typically used in Scotland, considering that
the presence of Scandinavian speakers was skewed towards the north and east
of the island?
The word pairs provided in the bullet points above are therefore due to a com-
bination of these two reasons. For instance, fish and shatter show Old English
palatalization, while the non-palatalized counterparts, piscatorial and scatter, are
loans from Latin and Old Norse, which had not undergone palatalization. On the
other hand, to yell underwent palatalization due to the following non-low front

22
Palatalization is likely to start in the context of front vowels, such as /i/ and /e/, and has oc-
curred in the history of many languages. The reason for this probably lies in coarticulatory
effects and systematic patterns of misperception by listeners (see Ohala 1989). In pre-Old En-
glish specifically, consonants underwent palatalization when immediately followed by a front
unrounded vowel or by a palatal glide, or when word-final after a front unrounded vowel.

253
6 Old English (600–1150)

vowel, while nightingale did not because the following vowel was too low and
back for palatalization to happen.
The lack of seemingly expected palatalization, as in e.g. disk and skirt, may
however not be only due to language contact and within-dialectal vowel envi-
ronment. An outcome of this type may also have to do with regional differences
present in Old English which affected the types of vowels that preceded and/or
followed /g/, /k/, or /sk/. What this means is that where one dialect may have
had a /g/, /k/, and /sk/ followed by an /e/, /ɪ/ or /j/, another dialect may have
had the same consonant followed by an /ɑ/, which means that that the words in
the dialect of the latter group wouldn’t have undergone the process of palataliza-
tion. Because settlement of Old Norse speakers geographically heavily overlaps
with these dialects, it can be quite tricky to be sure whether a non-palatalized
consonant (e.g. dike vs ditch) is due to regional variation, language contact with
Old Norse, or indeed a mixture of the two. Linguists have been arguing about
such matters quite passionately, and gathering and assessing the evidence can
be a fairly tricky business. A case in point is indeed for instance the word dike
(see Ramisch 1997, who argues these variants are more likely due to dialectal
variation rather than language contact with Old Norse).
Palatalization has an awkward effect on how a speaker of Present Day English
should make sense of some of the Old English spellings, as palatal phonemes do
not usually have their own corresponding grapheme in Old English manuscripts.
The letter <c> can thus represent either /tʃ/ or /k/, and similarly the letter <g> can
represent either /j/ or /g/. If you know the conditions under which palatalization
took place in pre-Old English, you can figure out which phoneme to pronounce
when you read <c> or <g>. But this is hard work requiring knowledge reaching
far beyond even that of Old English, and to make it easier for the modern reader,
many editors of Old English texts have adopted the convention of overdotting,
representing the palatal sounds /ʃ/, /tʃ/, /dʒ/, and /j/ as <sċ>, <ċ>, <ċġ>, and <ġ>
respectively. For example, the Old English word for yellow is written with an
overdotted g: ġeolu. This makes life easier for the reader, but it’s important to
remember that overdotting, like the macron that editors use for long vowels,
was not present in Old English manuscripts.23
If palatalization seems a little bit alien to you, know that palatalization is hap-
pening (yes, again!) in Present Day English as well, right under our noses. Think
for instance of pronunciations such as wantcha and gotcha, or even wouldja, for
want you, got you, and would you, whereby the following palatal sound, /j/, af-
fects the preceding consonant, /t/ and /d/ in our cases, making them into /tʃ/ and
23
At least not for this purpose.

254
 6.2 Sounds

/dʒ/, respectively. (So in other words, /t/ and /d/ have palatal versions today in
some contexts as well!)

How were /r/s pronounced in Old English?

You might be wondering, as many people studying Old English do, just
how exactly the <r> was pronounced. Was it a trill ([r]), was it an alveo-
lar approximant ([ɹ]), or even a retroflex approximant ([ɻ]), or, yes, even
a uvular voiced fricative ([ʁ])? Most Present Day English dialects have
an alveolar approximant ([ɹ]) or a retroflex approximant ([ɻ]). So perhaps
one could assume that this must have been the realization in Old English
too? Good thinking, but Present Day English has more to offer than just
these two variants: a stereotypical feature of Scottish English is the trilled
[r] and a now moribund feature of Northumbrian English is the so-called
Northumbrian burr, which refers to a uvular fricative [ʁ] (Wells 1982c:
368–370). We can’t rule out that these lesser-represented Present Day En-
glish variants used to be more widespread in the past stages of the lan-
guage. As the next step, we could also look to other Germanic languages
spoken today, but once we start looking closely enough, we will find a
wonderfully rich well of variation as well. If we take Dutch, for instance,
Sebregts (2014: 29) mentions 16 variants of /r/, and that’s still not quite
the full picture. To cut a long story short, then, it’s very likely that region-
ally conditioned variation existed in Old English /r/, and the take-home
message for you is not to worry too much about how you pronounce /r/s
when reciting Old English poetry (or prose!), as long as you do pronounce
an /r/ consonant of some sort.

6.2.2 i-umlaut
In Present Day English, we find words which look like they must be related in
one way or other, and which show vowel differences, as in

• brother ∼ brethren, foot ∼ feet, goose ∼ geese, tooth ∼ teeth, man ∼ men,
woman ∼ women, louse ∼ lice, and mouse ∼ mice

255
6 Old English (600–1150)

• blood ∼ to bleed, food ∼ to feed, sale ∼ to sell, tale ∼ to tell, and tooth ∼ to
teethe

• broad ∼ breadth, foul ∼ filth, long ∼ length, and strong ∼ strength

• old ∼ elder (and eldest)

• to bring ∼ brought, to buy ∼ bought, to seek ∼ sought, to sell ∼ sold, to teach

∼ taught, to tell ∼ told, to think ∼ thought, and to work ∼ wrought 24

• full ∼ to fill

• fox ∼ vixen, cat and kitten, and theft ∼ thief

In these examples, we see primarily the following spelling alternations:

• <o> ∼ <e>, <oo> ∼ <ee>, <oa> ∼ <ea>

• <a> ∼ <e>

• <u>, <ou> ∼ <i>

As we saw in Chapters 4 and 5, these letters reflect the pre-Great Vowel Shift
pronunciations:

• <goose> /goːs/ ∼ <geese> /geːs/

• <man> /mɑn/ ∼ <men> /men/

• <mouse> /muːs/ ∼ <mice> /miːs/

So this corresponds to the pairing of the following sounds for most of the exam-
ples given above:25

• /o/, /oː/ ∼ /e/, /eː/

• /ɑ/ ∼ /e/

• /uː/ ∼ /iː/

24
The form wrought, rather than worked, is now archaic and/or used in fairly specific contexts.
25
We ignore the effects of umlaut on diphthongs for simplicity’s sake.

256
 6.2 Sounds

These vowel alternations serve the following functions in the Present Day En-
glish pairs mentioned above: plural formation (mouse ∼ mice), deadjectival noun
formation (strong ∼ strength), deadjectival verb formation (full ∼ to fill), the com-
parative (and the superlative; e.g. old ∼ elder ∼ eldest), verb-verb word-formation
processes (to fall ∼ to fell), and ultimately derivational processes related to noun-
noun pairs (fox ∼ vixen). In Old English, these alternations served these functions
too, but we find two important differences. First of all, these vowel patterns were
not limited to just a handful of words, as in Present Day English, where non-
native speakers have to rather painfully memorize these. Secondly, these vari-
ous functions were not the only functions these vowel alternations had. And we
should also add one more difference: this process was not limited to the vowel
pairs provided above.
But what is this vowel alternation process that we’ve been discussing, and
how did it come about? The process involved in this mystery is the so-called
umlaut, also known as i-umlaut, mutation, and i-mutation. It is a type of vowel
assimilation, whereby one vowel becomes more like another.
More specifically, umlaut is a phonological process that happened prior to Old
English (see more in Chapter 7). If a word had, for instance, two syllables, and
the second one contained either /i/ or /j/, the vowel in the first syllable became
more like this /i/ or /j/. In other words, it assimilated. It is useful here to remind
ourselves of the vowel space, as shown in Figure 6.6. When looking at the figure
first, ignore the red parts. Different vowels have different positions in the vowel
space – they differ in terms of height and backness/frontness.
i, iː hilpθ ‘helps’ yː lyːsiz u, uː luːsiz ‘lice’

e, eː helpan ‘to help’, menː ‘people’ øː føːtiz o, oː foːtiz ‘feet’

æ, æː mænː ɑ, ɑː manniz ‘people’

Figure 6.6: Vowel-specific changes under the process of i-umlaut

When umlaut happened, imagine each of these vowels moving closer to an /i/
(or a /j/, which we can think of as a very short, consonantal version of /i/).26
Thus, the following Old English vowels changed as follows under the influence
of umlaut:
• /u/, /uː/ > [y], [yː]; they fronted, remaining round; as in mus ‘mouse’ ∼ mys
‘mice’, ultimately mis
26
Try saying /j/ and holding the consonant for a while. What happens when you do so?

257
6 Old English (600–1150)

• /o/, /oː/ > /ø/, /øː/; they fronted, remaining round; as in dom ‘doom’ ∼ doe-
man, ultimately deman ‘to deem, judge’

• /e/, /eː/ > /i/, /iː/; they were raised and just a little bit fronted; as in helpan
‘to help’ ∼ hilpð ‘he/she/it helps’

• /ɑ/, /ɑː/ > /æ/, /æː/; as in mann ‘man’ ∼ mænn ‘men’, and ultimately menn27

[øː] is a front rounded vowel, which unrounded fairly early on to [eː], so we often
find it spelt in a way suggestive of [eː] (e.g. <e>) rather than [øː] (e.g. <oe>) in Old
English texts. Towards the end of the Old English period, the same started hap-
pening to [yː], which ultimately unrounded to [iː]. These sounds are phonemic in
Old English, but were allophonic prior to Old English. Most of the forms created
by i-umlaut eventually died out – the plural of cow is no longer kine, for exam-
ple, and the plural of book is no longer beech – but some frequent ones, including
those listed above, have survived and any teacher has to deal with them.
As mentioned, umlaut is what’s known as a conditioned sound change: it
only affected vowels when the following syllable contained an /i/ or a /j/. What’s
tricky about umlaut is that this /i/ or /j/ in the subsequent syllable was mostly
lost, like many of the vowels in unstressed syllables – after umlaut had taken
place, but before the Old English texts that have come down to us. Thus there’s
nothing in the word men, for instance, to indicate that there used to be an extra
syllable on the end containing an /i/. In many cases, umlaut itself is the only
evidence that this /i/ was ever there in the first place.
And if you’re wondering about whether these alternations are also due to um-
laut:

• sing ∼ sang ∼ sung

• ride ∼ road

then let’s just say right now that these can be explained through a different pro-
cess, which you can read more about in §7.3.2 in the next chapter.

27
Long /ɑː/ and /eː/ apparently did not always undergo umlaut, and the development of /ɑː/
differed in different dialects (Minkova 2014: 159–160).

258
 6.3 Morphology

The case of bury

As we have just seen, the Old English /y/, spelt as <y>, started unrounding
at the end of the period. In West Saxon Old English, /y/ unrounded to [i]
∼ [ɪ]. Towards the end of Old English and throughout Middle English,
we can see this sound change reflected in the spelling, with new spelling
variants such as <i> and <u>. Today’s bury comes from the Old English
byrgan. As such, the Present Day English spelling shows exactly what we
might expect: a change from the letter <y> to <u>. But what about the
pronunciation? What we find in standard Present Day English varieties
is [bɛɹɪ], not [bɪɹɪ]. What happened there? What happened was that the
Old English /y/ was not unrounded to [i] ∼ [ɪ] in all dialects. In Kentish
dialects, it was unrounded to [e] ∼ [ɛ] instead. Present Day English bury
is fascinating in that the spelling reflects the developments in one dialect,
but the pronunciation reflects those in another!

6.3 Morphology
The inflectional morphology of Old English is probably the biggest difference
vis-à-vis the present-day language. Simply put, Old English has a lot more end-
ings than modern English does. We’ve already seen a fair few of these in Middle
English, but there are more – both in the verbal domain (§6.3.1) and in the nomi-
nal domain (§6.3.3). Getting a grip on what these endings are and how they work
is crucial to reading Old English texts and to getting inside the grammar of the
language.
A useful one-stop shop for Old English morphology is Peter Baker’s “magic
sheet”, which contains all the morphology we discuss in this section, and is
colour-coded to help you spot generalizations.28 On the magic sheet, and in this
chapter, the forms given in the paradigms are taken from the West Saxon dialect
– other varieties show variant forms that are beyond the scope of an introductory
chapter such as this one.

28
Available at http://www.oldenglishaerobics.net/resources/magic_letter.pdf.

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6 Old English (600–1150)

6.3.1 Verbs and verb endings

The good news about Old English verbs is that the features that determine what
they look like are basically the same ones we see throughout the history of the
language – there are just more distinct endings. These crucial features are:
• Whether the verb is weak or strong (see §5.3.2)
• Whether the verb is finite or non-finite. If it’s finite, we also need to con-
sider:
– Person: first, second, or third
– Number: singular or plural
– Tense: past or present
– Mood: indicative, subjunctive or imperative
All these features except mood should be familiar from Present Day English. We
discussed mood in Chapter 3, where it was concluded that Present Day English
doesn’t have morphological marking for mood (§3.3.2). Old English, however,
very much does, and the three relevant categories are the following:
• The indicative is the default, bread-and-butter verb form of Old English.
It’s by far the most common verb form, and Old English speakers used it
everywhere they didn’t use a subjunctive or an imperative.
• The subjunctive is usually used to express irrealis meaning: the speaker
is not committing themselves to the truth of the statement. If the statement
describes something hypothetical, or a wish or desire, for instance, rather
than the actual world, the verb will usually be in the subjunctive.29
• The imperative is used for giving orders or instructions. As such, it only
has forms in the second person, and in Old English it only has a distinct
form in the singular.30
Let’s start with the weak verbs, which, in Old English as in Present Day English,
are the most common type of verb. The possible endings are given in Table 6.3.
Here, “Pres” = present, “ind” = indicative, “sbjv” = subjunctive, “Imp” = impera-
tive.
29
There are also a few fixed syntactic contexts where the subjunctive is used. The complemen-
tizer þēah ‘though’, for instance, always co-occurs with a verb in the subjunctive, even when
the statement is clearly true and the writer knows it. In Ælfriċ’s Life of St Eugenia, the protag-
onist gets her hands on a copy of St Paul’s teachings and becomes very excited, þēah ðe hēo þā
ġyt hǣðen wǣre ‘though she was still a heathen’ (with the verb wǣre in the subjunctive).
30
The verb BE is an exception to this rule, as to so many others; see §6.3.2.

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 6.3 Morphology

Table 6.3: Finite verb endings in Old English: lufian ‘to love’ (weak)

Person and number Pres ind Pres sbjv Past ind Past sbjv Imp
First singular lufie lufie lufode lufode
Second singular lufast lufie lufodest lufode lufa
Third singular lufaþ lufie lufode lufode
Plural (all persons) lufiað lufien lufoden lufoden lufiað

The corresponding table for the strong verbs is Table 6.4.

Table 6.4: Finite verb endings in Old English: singan ‘to sing’ (strong)

Person and number Pres ind Pres sbjv Past ind Past sbjv Imp
First singular singe singe sang sunge
Second singular singst singe sunge sunge sing
Third singular singþ singe sang sunge
Plural (all persons) singað singen sungon sungen singað

If you compare the endings for the weak verbs (in boldface) in Table 6.3 with
those for the strong verbs in Table 6.4, you’ll see that in the present tense they’re
exactly the same. The only differences are in the past tense, where the weak verbs
have a /d/ and different person forms in the ending, and the strong verbs change
the vowel.31 As for the non-finite forms in Table 6.5, only the past participle is
formed differently in weak and in strong verbs.
Table 6.5: Non-finite verb endings in Old English: lufian (weak) and
singan (strong)

Form Weak Strong

Infinitive lufian singan
Present participle lufiende singende
Past participle (ġe)lufod (ġe)sungen

31
If you’re interested in where this /d/ comes from, see §7.3.1 in the next chapter!

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6 Old English (600–1150)

If you pause at this point to compare the verbal endings in Old English with
the ones presented for Middle English in the last chapter (§5.3.2), you’ll see that
on the whole there’s not a huge amount of difference: the big changes in verbal
morphology in English take place between the Middle and Modern periods. This
is different for nominal morphology, which (as you’ll soon see) is considerably
more complex in Old English than in Middle English. This kind of fluctuation
in rates of change is not unusual! It’s not the case that all aspects of a language
have to change at the same speed or at the same time, and on the whole historical
linguists are a lot better at describing exactly how change happens than they are
at predicting exactly why and when.
There’s one major thing missing from Tables 6.4 and 6.5, though: how do we
know which vowel you get in the past tense? For singan ‘to sing’, the vowel in
the second person singular indicative in the past tense is an /u/: sunge. But for
drīfan ‘to drive’, the corresponding vowel is a short /i/: drife. And for beran ‘to
bear’ it’s a long /ǣ/: bǣre. What’s up with that?
It turns out that the vowels we find in strong verbs in Old English are actually
predictable to a great extent. More specifically, all strong verbs belong to a class,
traditionally labelled classes I to VII. We won’t go into the full range here, but
Table 6.6 illustrates the vowel choices for classes I to V. ‘1st past’ is the vowel
used in the first and third person singular indicative of the past tense; ‘2nd past’
is the vowel used in all other finite past tense forms.
Table 6.6: Some strong verb classes in Old English

Class Sample verb Present 1st past 2nd past Past participle
I drīfan ‘to drive’ /ī/ /ā/ /i/ /i/
II crēopan ‘to creep’ /ēo/ /ēa/ /u/ /o/
III helpan ‘to help’ /e/ /ēa/ /u/ /o/
IV beran ‘to bear’ /e/ /æ/ /ǣ/ /o/
V spreċan ‘to speak’ /e/ /æ/ /ǣ/ /e/

This system of vowels has an interesting history, which you can read about in
§7.3.2. For the purposes of reading Old English, though, you can use the vowels in
Table 6.6 to figure out the infinitive of a verb form you’re not sure about, which
you can then look up in a dictionary if need be.32
Finally, there’s one class of verbs we haven’t discussed yet, which strictly
speaking are neither weak nor strong. These are the preterite-presents, verbs
32
For instance, the online Bosworth-Toller Dictionary: https://bosworthtoller.com/.

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 6.3 Morphology

which have a strong past form as their present tense and a weak past form (often
slightly irregular) as their past tense. There aren’t many of these verbs, but some
of them are extremely frequent: these include cunnan ‘to know/to be able to’, ma-
gan ‘to be able to’, mōtan ‘to be allowed to/to have to’, and sċulan ‘to owe/to have
to’ – the ancestors of the modern modals can, may, must, and shall (see §5.4.2).
They’re quite a disparate group, but Table 6.7 gives an idea of what their forms
look like.
Table 6.7: Finite verb endings in Old English: mōtan and sċulan
(preterite-presents)

Person/number Pres ind Pres sbjv Past ind Past sbjv

First singular mōt, sċeal mōte,sċyle mōste, sċolde mōste,sċolde
Second singular mōst, sċealt mōte,sċyle mōstest, sċoldest mōste,sċolde
Third singular mōt, sċeal mōte,sċyle mōste, sċolde mōste,sċolde
Plural mōton, mōten, mōston, mōsten,
(all persons) sċulon sċylen sċoldon sċolden

Note that preterite-present verbs don’t often occur in the imperative or in non-
finite forms – a foreshadowing of their later fate as modals occupying the I posi-
tion.33

6.3.2 Futurity and the dual paradigm of BE

The most common verb of all is the verb BE, which is completely irregular. Table
6.8 gives its forms. The present participle forms are bēonde and wesende, and the
past participle form is (ġe)bēon.
What’s really special about the forms of the verb BE in Old English is that in the
present tense there are two different sets of forms: one starting in /b/, one with-
out. Furthermore, these two sets are semantically distinct. The forms starting in
/b/ very often have an implication of futurity (Kilpiö 1993, Wischer 2010, Bolze
2013). Among Old English verbs this is highly unusual, as futurity is not nor-
mally morphologically or syntactically marked in Old English – instead, futurity
is left for the reader to infer, sometimes using adverbials of time (e.g. tomorrow).
33
Past and present tense seem to shift around in the history of the preterite-present verbs. Present
Day English should and could are historically the past tense forms of shall and can, but they
don’t have this function any more: You should go to the shops is definitely not a suggestion
relating to the past, for instance.

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6 Old English (600–1150)

Table 6.8: Finite verb endings in Old English: bēon/wesan ‘to be’

Person and number Pres ind Pres sbjv Past ind Past sbjv Imp
1st singular eom, bēo sīe, bēo wæs wǣre
2nd singular eart, bist sīe, bēo wǣre wǣre wes, bēo
3rd singular is, biþ sīe, bēo wæs wǣre
Plural (all persons) sind(on), sīen, wǣron wǣren wesaþ,
bēoþ bēon bēoþ

This twofold paradigm for the verb BE, with two different sets of morphological
forms with different meanings, is also not found in any other Germanic language.
Where could it have come from?
Lutz (2009) argues, following Keller (1925), that this twofold paradigm reflects
Celtic influence on Old English. Brythonic Celtic also had a twofold paradigm
for its verb ‘to be’ in the present tense. One of the sets of forms began with /b/
– and this was precisely the form that could be used for marking the future!34
Given what we said in §6.1.2 about the contact situation between Celtic-speaking
and Old-English-speaking people, this kind of grammatical transfer makes total
sense. And the parallels between the two languages are so precise that it’s hard
to imagine them being due to chance. Here, then, we see an extremely likely case
of Celtic influence on Old English morphology and syntax.

6.3.3 Nouns and the case system

The differences between Old English and Chaucerian Middle English in verbal
morphology may be slight, but in nominal morphology they’re dramatic. In Old
English, it wasn’t just pronouns that had different morphological forms: nouns,
adjectives, and determiners could also vary in form depending on context.
The contextual features that determine what form you find are number and
case. Number works the same way as it does in Present Day English: a noun can
be singular or plural, and all other words in the nominal phrase will agree with
it. (Think of Present Day English this house vs. these houses: the demonstrative
determiner appears in the plural when the noun is plural.) As for case, we’ve
34
We have no records of the Brythonic Celtic ancestor language itself. However, we do have
records of its daughter languages, such as Old Welsh, and these display the same twofold
paradigm. So we can reliably reconstruct the ancestor language as having this same distinction.
On reconstruction, see §7.1.1.

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 6.3 Morphology

already met it in §5.3.3. In Old English we see a new case that we haven’t met
before, though: the dative. Whereas in Middle English the accusative is used for
all objects, in Old English it’s only used for direct objects, with the dative used
for indirect objects instead. Here’s an overview:

• nominative case: used for subjects and subject complements

• accusative case: used for direct objects

• dative case: used for indirect objects

• genitive case: used for possessors

You can see the full system in action in the system of pronouns in Table 6.9.35
The Old English pronoun system is in a state of flux, like it is at every other time
in the language’s history: the accusative forms meċ, þeċ and ūsiċ, for instance,
are lost very early on, before the time of King Alfred, and their role is taken over
by the originally dative pronouns.
Table 6.9: Personal pronouns in Old English

Person and number Nominative Accusative Dative Genitive

First singular iċ (meċ) me mīn
First plural wē (ūsiċ) ūser ūre
Second singular þū (þeċ) þē þīn
Second plural ġe ēow ēow ēower
Third masculine singular hē hine him his
Third feminine singular hēo hīe hire hire
Third neuter singular hit hit him his
Third plural hīe hīe him hira

Nouns, however, have two important additional features: grammatical gender

and noun class. Unlike case and number, these features don’t come from the
context, but rather are inherent properties of the noun itself.

35
Compare this to the Middle English pronouns in 5.3 and 5.4. What differences can you spot?
Other than minor spelling differences, there aren’t many...

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6 Old English (600–1150)

When there’s two of us – not more, not less

Old English, unlike Present Day English, didn’t have only the singular
and the plural – it also had the so-called dual. This is a special type of
number category which is used for two referents – not less and not more.
Old English only has a dual in the pronouns. If we referred to you as, say,
ten readers, we would use the nominative form ġe ‘you 3+’, but if only
two people were reading this book, then we’d address these two people
with ġit ‘you 2’. We also find the dual in Old English with the first person:
iċ refers to ‘one of me’, wē refers to ‘several of us, but more than two’, and
wit refers to ‘two and only two of us’ in the nominative form. The dual is
not found in the third person at all, and it is gradually lost during the Old
English period.

Grammatical gender is a property of many languages of Europe and beyond. In

Old English the gender of a noun can be masculine, feminine or neuter, and this
has no relation to human gender (a sociocultural phenomenon) or to sex.36 For
instance, the Old English noun stān ‘stone’ is masculine, talu ‘tale, story’ is fem-
inine, and sċip ‘ship’ is neuter. The same holds for words for humans: two Old
English words for ‘woman’ are wīf (neuter) and wīfman (masculine).

Wīfman into woman

How did Old English wīfman /wiːfman/ become Present Day English
woman /wʊmən/? Several sound changes took place. The /f/ assimilated
to the consonant that immediately followed it: /wiːfman/ ↔/wiːmman/.
At some point, the vowel shortened too: /wimman/ ∼ /wɪmman/. By now
you also know that gemination was eventually lost as well – hence /wɪ-

36
Many languages, like Chinese and Present Day English, have no grammatical gender distinc-
tions at all. Others, like some of the Bantu languages of Africa, have more than twenty –
though some linguists are reluctant to use the word “gender” for these. For cross-linguistic
perspectives on gender see Corbett (1991) and Aikhenvald (2016).

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 6.3 Morphology

man/; and you also know that vowels in unstressed positions turned into
a schwa or got deleted: /wɪmən/. Regarding the stressed vowel, sometimes
/w/ has interesting assimilatory effects on the sounds around it, and so the
/ɪ/ got assimilated to an /ʊ/, giving us today’s singular /wʊmən/! Check
the OED for more details.

Like verbs, nouns in Old English can belong to one of two classes: strong or weak.
In this context ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ don’t actually mean anything – they’re just
two different types of nouns. We could equally well call them green nouns and
purple nouns, or happy nouns and sad nouns. But ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ are the
traditional terms, so we’ll stick with those in this book.
The inflection of a noun and of the other words in a nominal phrase (such as
determiner and adjectives) depends on the gender and class of the noun. For the
noun itself, Table 6.10 gives the forms for strong masculine nouns, Table 6.11 for
strong feminine nouns, and Table 6.12 for strong neuter nouns. Table 6.13 gives
the forms for weak nouns, which don’t differ much by gender.37
Table 6.10: Strong masculine nouns in Old English: stān ‘stone’

Nominative Accusative Dative Genitive

Singular stān stāne stānes
Plural stānas stānum stāna

Table 6.11: Strong feminine nouns in Old English: talu ‘story, tale’

Nominative Accusative Dative Genitive

Singular talu tale
Plural tala talum tala

There’s a lot of similarity between Tables 6.10–6.13. For example, the dative plu-
ral always ends in -um, and the genitive plural always ends in -a. Within the
paradigms, too, there’s a lot of syncretism: the ending in strong feminine sin-
gular nouns is always -e except in the nominative, for instance. And among the
37
It’s actually more complicated than this, unfortunately. The paradigms in Tables 6.10–6.13 are
for some of the most common noun classes, but there are several more classes. Even worse,
sound changes like i-umlaut often mess with the morphology, so that the forms we see are not
the ones we expect from the paradigms. You can find the nitty-gritty details in books dedicated
to learning Old English, such as Hogg & Alcorn (2012), or a reference grammar like Hogg &
Fulk (2011) or Wright & Wright (1908).

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6 Old English (600–1150)

Table 6.12: Strong neuter nouns in Old English: sċip ‘ship’

Nominative Accusative Dative Genitive

Singular sċip sċipe sċipes
Plural sċipua sċipum sċipa
a
For nouns in this paradigm with a long stem, e.g. word ‘word’, the -u is lost and the plural form
is the same as the singular form.

Table 6.13: Weak nouns in Old English: masculine nama ‘name’, femi-
nine tunge ‘tongue’, neuter ēare ‘ear’

Nominative Accusative Dative Genitive

Masculine singular nama naman
Feminine singular tunge tungan
Neuter singular ēare ēaran
Plural naman namum namena

weak nouns the ending is very often -an. (This is where the other term for this
class of weak nouns comes from: n-stem nouns.) So if you’re trying to figure out
what the case and gender of an Old English noun are, the form of the noun itself
often isn’t much help.
Enter the definite article. This has a lot of distinct forms, which you can admire
in all their glory in Table 6.14.
Table 6.14: The definite article in Old English

Nominative Accusative DativeGenitive

Masculine singular se þone þǣm þæs
Feminine singular sēo þā þǣre
Neuter singular þæt þǣm þæs
Plural (all genders) þā þǣm þāra

The trick is this: whenever a noun co-occurs with an article, the article agrees
with it in gender. So ‘the ship’ is þæt sċip, ‘the tale’ is sēo talu, and ‘the stone’ is
se stān. Even when the noun doesn’t give away many clues as to its gender, the
definite article often does!
The Old English morphological system for nominal phrases is a lot more com-
plex than the one found in Middle English, so we’d advise that you now try Ex-
ercises 4 and 5, in order to familiarize yourself with how it works.

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 6.3 Morphology

Was there a definite article in Old English?

Cross-linguistically, it’s common for demonstratives to grammaticalize

into definite articles. There is debate among scholars of Old English gram-
mar around whether it really had a definite article, or whether what we’ve
called the definite article is better called a demonstrative at this stage.
We’ve chosen to follow Wood (2007), Sommerer (2018) and Allen (2019),
who argue that Old English has a definite article, at least in later texts
and in prose, and therefore the nominal phrases in our trees are labelled
DP (for “determiner phrase”) and not NP. Others maintain that we can’t
speak of a definite article until Middle English, though. If you’re inter-
ested in finding out more about this debate, see Sommerer (2018) and the
references cited there.

6.3.4 What happened to all the nominal morphology?

Between early Old English and late Middle English, most of this complex nomi-
nal morphology simply disappeared. Case and grammatical gender, in particular,
vanish almost without a trace outside the personal pronouns. And the number
of distinct forms shrinks dramatically. Table 6.14 contains nine distinct forms
for the definite article in Old English. By the end of the Middle English period,
there’s just one: the.
The change is not a sudden one: texts like the tenth-century Lindisfarne Gos-
pels and the early twelfth-century Peterborough Chronicle give us snapshots of
change in progress. Millar (2000), for example, shows how the Lindisfarne Gos-
pels contain innovative forms of the definite article. And there are other changes
during the early part of the Old English period, for instance within the pronoun
system, as we’ve seen. Still, overall these shifts make English quite unlike most of
the other Germanic languages, and it’s fair to ask why and how they happened.
Sound change can have a knock-on effect on morphology. In particular, vowels
in unstressed syllables – which were quite varied in early Old English – were
reduced to schwa (/ə/) during the course of the period. Also, /n/ was lost word-
finally in inflectional endings. These changes affected the number of contrasts
in inflectional endings, and so could have contributed to the loss of the case
system (Blake 2001: 176–180). For instance, the loss of /n/ word-finally caused

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6 Old English (600–1150)

all the singular forms of weak masculine nouns like nama to merge (naman >
nama in all cases). However, similar sound changes occurred in other Germanic
languages without such drastic consequences (Barðdal 2009), so this can only be
part of the story.
According to Milroy (1992: 203), “it seems clear that such a sweeping change
is at least to some extent associated with language contact”. If so, contact with
whom, and when? On the face of it, both contact with Brythonic Celtic (§6.1.2)
and contact with Norse (§6.1.1) are plausible candidates. From a sociolinguistic
perspective, Trudgill (2011) argues that the loss of inflectional morphology is a
normal outcome of historical situations in which adult language learners are
present in large numbers among the speakers of a language, and that this is sim-
ply because adult learners (unlike young children) find inflectional morphology
especially difficult to learn.38
Trudgill (2011: Chapter 2) makes the case that it was Celtic-speaking adult
learners of Old English who were responsible for the morphological simplifica-
tion that we see. In this he follows Tristram (2004), who argues that written Old
English was generally conservative and preserved richer inflectional morphol-
ogy than the spoken language of the time. So, for instance, a non-native learner
of Old English may have said stānas as the dative or genitive plural of ‘stone’
if they didn’t know or couldn’t remember the rarer forms stanum or stana, but
classically educated scribes would still have known and used these forms.39 The
fact that the morphological loss only really becomes apparent during the Middle
English period is, according to Tristram (2004) and Trudgill (2011), because this
was when the Old English scribal tradition broke down, not because the change
was happening at this time.
An alternative theory holds that it was speakers of Norse, not Celtic, who were
largely responsible for morphological simplification in English. In support of this
idea is the fact that the chronology is a better fit for Norse contact rather than
Celtic, and the fact that Middle English texts from the north and east (the areas
of Scandinavian settlement) tend to show a simpler case system than those from
the south and west (Allen 1995: 212, Allen 1997; Warner 2017).40 Trudgill (2011),
38
In this section we’ll focus mostly on the case system. See McWhorter (2002: 228–231) for the
argument that the loss of grammatical gender was due to contact with Norse, and Curzan
(2003) for a comprehensive discussion of grammatical gender and its loss in English.
39
Of course, it’s impossible to know what spoken Old English was actually like, pending the
invention of a time machine. The fact that we see quite a lot of variation within written Old
English itself might speak against Tristram’s thesis that this written language was artificially
homogeneous, though; see Warner (2017: 352–361).
40
More specifically, Allen (1997) argues that contact with Norse only sped up the changes that
were already occurring, and did not initiate them.

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 6.4 Syntax

however, takes the view that the contact between Old English and Norse was of
the wrong type: there weren’t enough adult language learners involved. It could
be that both theories are right to some extent – it’s rare that a single factor can
be pinpointed as the sole cause of the spread of a linguistic change through a
population. Or maybe neither is right. In any event, the debate is ongoing – the
story of morphological simplification in the history of English is definitely not a
closed book.

6.4 Syntax
You’ve already encountered some syntactic topics, such as the functions of the
case system and agreement within nominal phrases, in the morphology sec-
tion of this chapter. This section introduces four more important features of Old
English syntax and how they change: clause structure (§6.4.1), the structure of
the verb phrase (§6.4.2), negation (§6.4.3), and relative and correlative clauses
(§6.4.4).
Sometimes you’ll see it written that Old English had free word order. This
is nonsense. There were more word order possibilities in Old English than in
Modern English, but there are also important constraints. One of these is that
word order in nominal phrases is almost exactly the same as it is in Present Day
English, as illustrated in (1), with very little variation.

(1) Demonstrative/article > numeral > adjective > noun

(e.g. se āna ælmihtiga God ‘the one almighty God’)

Clausal word order too was constrained, as we’ll see in the next subsections.

6.4.1 Old English clause structure

The most important feature of Old English clause structure has already been in-
troduced in connection with Middle English: the verb-second (V2) rule, which
applies to main (non-embedded) clauses. West Saxon Old English was charac-
terized not by strict verb-second, but by what we called “information-structure
V2” (IS-V2) in section 5.4.1. To recap: in varieties governed by IS-V2, whether we
find the verb in second position or not (in clauses with an initial constituent that
isn’t the subject) depends on the discourse status of the subject. If the subject is
given information, i.e. refers to something that was mentioned in the previous
discourse, it may precede the finite verb, giving rise to a V3 word order. On the
other hand, if the subject is new information, i.e. it refers to something newly

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introduced into the discourse, it must follow the finite verb. Example (2) shows
a given subject with V3, and (3) shows a new subject with V2.41
(2) Nū se rīċa mann ne mæġ hēr habban
now the rich man neg can here have
‘Now the rich man cannot here have ...’ (Ælfriċ, Ash Wednesday)
(3) On þes ilca Offa dæi wæs ān ealdorman
on art.gen same Offa.gen day was an alderman
‘In the same Offa’s day (there) was an alderman ...’
(Old English Chronicle, E manuscript)
There’s a complication regarding the position of the finite verb, though. In
Present Day English, as we saw all the way back in §1.2.3, the specifier always
comes before the head, and the head always comes before the complement. Ex-
ample (4), repeated from Chapter 1, is an illustration.
(4) IP

We I′

I VP

can V you

meet
In Example (4), the specifier of IP is the subject, and comes before the head of IP,
which is the modal can. This in turn comes before the complement of IP, which
is the VP (the phrase meet you). So we have specifier-head-complement order.
In Old English this wasn’t the case. The head of IP can come either before or
after its complement. Example (5), like all the examples we’ve seen so far, is an
example of a “head-initial” IP, where the head I (the finite verb – here ahæfde
“raised”) precedes its complement VP.
(5) and Aaron ahæfde his hand upp on ġebēdum
and Aaron raised his hand up in prayer
‘and Aaron raised his hand up in prayer’ (Ælfriċ, Prayer of Moses)
41
The negative particle ne in example (2) isn’t a constituent. Editors usually write it as a separate
word, but that doesn’t reflect what we see in the actual manuscripts, and it’s better to think of
ne as a prefix, i.e. as part of the verb.

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 6.4 Syntax

In most Old English subordinate clauses, though, it’s the other way round: the
complement VP comes first and the head I follows it, as in example (6), given as
a tree in (7).

(6) ðā āscade iċ hine hwȳ hē swā dyde

then asked I him why he so did
‘Then I asked him why he did so’ (Letter to King Edward)

(7) CP

hwȳ C′

C IP

hē I′

VP I

swā dyde

There is variation between head-final and head-initial IPs in Old English: in ear-
lier texts and poetic texts we seem to find more head-final IPs. See Ringe & Taylor
(2014: §8.2.3) for the detail. Since the finite verb is the head of IP, the crucial di-
agnostic for head-final vs. head-initial IPs is the position of the finite verb.

6.4.2 Old English verb phrase structure

What about the verb phrase? So far we’ve been assuming that the verb phrase
is head-initial throughout the history of English, too – i.e. that the head of the
verb phrase comes before its complement. But is it true? How can we investigate
this?
Finite verbs don’t tell us anything, since these occupy the I position in Old
English, as we’ve seen. But to figure out whether the VP is head-final or head-
initial, we can use non-finite forms (infinitives and participles) of transitive verbs
(verbs which need an object, such as to eat, eaten, and eating). These non-finite
forms remain in the V position, and don’t move to I. If the object comes directly
before the verb (“OV”), as in We have honey eaten, the VP looks head-final; if the
verb comes before the object (“VO”), as in We have eaten honey, the VP looks
head-initial.

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What we find is that there seems to be evidence for both head-final and head-
initial VPs in Old English, just as there is for IPs. Example (8) is OV with a head-
final VP, as shown in (10), and example (9) is VO with a head-initial VP, as shown
in (11).
(8) on twām þingum hæfde god þæs mannes sāule ġegōdod
in two things had God art.gen man.gen soul endowed
‘God had endowed man’s soul with two things’ (Ælfriċ, Catholic Homilies)
(9) Þū hafast ġecoren þone wēr
you have chosen art.acc man
‘You have chosen the man’ (Apollonius of Tyre)

(10) V′ (11) V′

DP V V DP

þæs mannes sāule ġegōdod ġecoren þone wēr

Whether the VP is head-initial or head-final – that is, whether it is VO or OV –

doesn’t depend on the clause type, but it does vary and change over time. Pintzuk
& Taylor (2006) give the figures in Table 6.15 for the Old and Middle English
periods.
Table 6.15: OV and VO in Old and Middle English

Period Percentage of VPs that are OV

pre-950 (early Old English) 56.7%
950–1150 (late Old English) 50.4%
1150–1250 (early Middle English) 28.4%
1250–1350 3.1%
1350–1420 1.3%
1420–1500 (late Middle English) 0.7%

Language contact may have played a role here too: Trips (2002) argues that
Norse-speaking second-language learners of English were central in the OV–
VO transition, imposing the VO word order of their native language onto the
English that they learned. Since 50–60% of Old English VPs were already head-
final (OV), it’s very unlikely that Norse speakers were the first to introduce VO

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 6.4 Syntax

into English.42 However, they may still have played a role in pushing the change
towards completion in the late Old English and early Middle English period. You
can find detailed discussion of the change from OV to VO in early English, includ-
ing different theoretical perspectives, in Fischer et al. (2000: Chapter 5), Roberts
(2007: 175–198 and 391–399), Los (2015: §6.5), and Fischer et al. (2017: 194–197).

Head-initial and head-final: not anything goes!

The possibility for both IP and VP to be either head-initial or head-final

means that, as mentioned, Old English word order is more flexible than
that of Present Day English. However, it’s not the case that anything goes.
In particular, there’s a strong constraint that requires the VP also to be
head-final when the IP is head-final: so Old English sentences along the
lines of If he can see bumblebees (head-initial IP and VP), If he can bumble-
bees see (head-initial IP, head-final VP), or If he bumblebees see can (head-
final IP and VP) are all fine, but If he see bumblebees can (head-final IP,
head-initial VP) is impossible. The word order that would result from a
head-initial VP dominated by a head-final IP – a non-finite verb (head
of VP), followed by an object, followed by a finite verb (head of IP) – is
simply not found in Old or Middle English texts. What’s more, this spe-
cific constraint, sometimes called the Final-over-Final Condition, may in
fact hold universally for all languages, not just for Old English! Detailed
discussion can be found in Sheehan et al. (2017).

6.4.3 Negation
All languages have a way of negating a statement. The Old English strategy was
dead simple: insert the prefix or clitic ne directly before the finite verb. An
example is (2), repeated here as (12). We’ll call this Stage 1.

(12) Nū se rīċa mann ne mæġ hēr habban

now the rich man neg can here have
‘Now the rich man cannot here have ...’ (Ælfriċ, Ash Wednesday)
42
A further complication is that we don’t know whether Norse as spoken in Great Britain at the
time of the Scandinavian settlement was in fact a VO language. See Bech & Walkden (2016:
71–73) for discussion.

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6 Old English (600–1150)

Present Day English uses the word not, which behaves like an adverb: it comes
after elements in I, but before the lexical verb in V, e.g. He does not know.43 How
did we get from ne to not?
In late Old English, we occasionally see ne joined by another element, the word
nāwiht/noht/naht, which originally meant ‘nothing’ or ‘not a thing’. An example
is given in (13).

(13) þæt ðū þās dyntas naht ne ġefretst

that you those blows nothing neg feel
‘that you do not feel those blows at all’
(Ælfriċ, Julian and Basilissa, from Willis 2016: 486)

Here the use of naht seems to be emphatic, giving a meaning of ‘not at all’ (com-
pare this e.g. to Present Day English The bumblebee didn’t give a hoot about all
the blossoms.). In late Old English and early Middle English, however, naht gets
more and more common alongside ne – so much so that in texts from between
1250 and 1350 this is the most common way of negating a statement, and doesn’t
seem to be emphatic at all. We’ll call this ne ... naht pattern Stage 2.44 Finally,
towards the end of the Middle English period, the original negator ne is lost, and
only noht (or not) remains (Stage 3).
Like the other syntactic changes discussed in this book, this one didn’t happen
overnight. Table 6.16 gives figures for the different stages in different periods of
Middle English, from Wallage (2008).
Table 6.16: Changes in negation in Middle English (Wallage 2008: 645)

Period % ne (Stage 1) % ne ... not (Stage 2) % not (Stage 3)

1150–1250 60.5% 38.5% 1.0%
1250–1350 22.9% 67.7% 9.4%
1350–1420 1.9% 10.5% 87.5%
1420–1500 0.8% 1.0% 98.2%

Walkden & Morrison (2017) look at the regional distribution of the variants
using the Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (Laing 2013). They argue that
the disappearance of ne may be in part due to Norse influence, since Stage 3
43
The word not can be contracted, as discussed in §3.3.1 – but that’s not important here.
44
Readers who’ve studied some formal French might find this reminiscent of the French ne ... pas
negation.

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 6.4 Syntax

Figure 6.7: Negation in Middle English 1150–1350 (Walkden & Morrison

2017: 182). Darker green points indicate more use of Stage 3.

seems to emerge first in the north and east (Figure 6.7) – or at least that contact
with Norse may have accelerated the change.45
What’s really interesting about this change, though, is that it is something that
has happened independently in dozens of languages, including Berber, Breton,
Burmese, Dutch, English, Estonian, Fɔn, German, Moroccan Arabic, Palestinian
Arabic, Norse, and Welsh.46 The full pathway of change from Stage 1 to Stage
3 is known as Jespersen’s Cycle, after the Danish linguist Otto Jespersen, who
described the change as follows (Jespersen 1917: 4):

The history of negative expressions in various languages makes us witness

the following curious fluctuation: the original negative adverb is first weak-
ened, then found insufficient and therefore strengthened, generally through
some additional word, and this in its turn may be felt as the negative proper
and may then in course of time be subject to the same development as the
original word.

Jespersen’s Cycle is one of the strongest indicators we have that language change
in general is not completely random but rather follows pathways that are in prin-
ciple predictable. Obviously, predicting change is still very difficult in practice!
But we have no reason to think that it should be impossible, in the long run.
45
Following ideas first proposed in Iyeiri (1992, 2001) and Ingham (2008).
46
See Willis et al. (2013) for general discussion.

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6 Old English (600–1150)

For a full overview of the history of negation in English, see Ingham (2013).
There is also discussion in Fischer et al. (2000: 305–318), including how negation
should be captured in a syntactic tree.

Negative concord in Old English

Negative concord, the use of multiple negative-marked words in a sin-

gle clause to express only one semantic negation – e.g. I didn’t do nothing
to no one rather than standard I didn’t do anything to anyone – is frowned
upon by prescriptivists in Present Day English. It’s associated with vari-
eties that have historically had low overt prestige and been discriminated
against, such as African American English and Alabama English.a Those
pedants who think that this is an uncouth, illogical innovation may be
interested to learn that Old English was a negative concord language, as
examples like (14) show.
(14) Ne mæg nān man twām hlāfordum þēowian
neg may no man two masters serve
‘No man may serve two masters.’
(West Saxon Gospels, Matthew 6:24; Ingham 2013: 141)

In fact, the vast majority of the world’s languages exhibit negative con-
cord (Haspelmath 2013).
a
See Matyiku (2011) at https://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/negative-concord for more
on negative concord in present-day varieties of English.

6.4.4 Relative and correlative clauses

In Present Day English, relative clauses can be introduced in a variety of ways:
(15) The book that I read (that)
(16) The book which I read (which)
(17) The book Ø I read (zero marking)
Similarly, in Old English, relative clauses can be introduced in several different
ways. First, they can be introduced by a definite article/demonstrative, which

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 6.4 Syntax

then takes the case that the gap in the relative clause would take. If it’s a direct
object, it appears in the accusative, if it’s a subject, it appears in the nominative,
and so on.

(18) þā twēġen fēt þā þēo sāwul habban sċeal

the two feet dem.acc.pl the soul have shall
‘the two feet that the soul shall have’ (Adrian and Ritheus)

Secondly, they can be introduced by the particle þe. This is like modern English
that: it’s completely morphologically invariant.

(19) tō his āgenum ǣþele þe he on ġeboren wæs

to his own country particle he in born was
‘to his own country which he was born in’ (Ælfriċ, Life of St. Basil)

Thirdly, they can be introduced by both an inflected definite article and the par-
ticle þe together.

(20) Se weig se þe lǣt tō hēofonrīċe

the way dem.nom.sg particle leads to heaven
‘the way which leads to heaven’ (Ælfriċ, Catholic Homilies)

Relative clauses crop up quite a lot in Old English texts, so it’s useful to see what
they look like and how they work. As for their history, the use of the inflected
demonstrative died out during the early Middle English period at the same time
as the inflected demonstrative itself. The modern type of relative clause intro-
duced by which, who(m) and whose was introduced later in the Middle English
period.
Another related construction is the correlative construction, which you can
see in example (21).

(21) Ðā iċ ðā ðis eall ġemunde, ðā wundrade iċ swīðe ðāra

when I then this all remembered then marvelled I much the.gen.pl
gōdena wiotena
good.gen.pl wise-men.gen.pl
‘When I remembered all of this, then I marvelled at the good wise men
exceedingly’
(Preface to the translation of Pope Gregory’s Pastoral Care)

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6 Old English (600–1150)

Correlative constructions start with a subordinate clause, followed by a full main

clause introduced by a resumptive pronoun or adverb. Typically, the resumptive
is the same as the element that introduces the subordinate clause. In example
(21), the subordinate clause is introduced by þā ‘when’, and the main clause is
also introduced by þā, in this case meaning ‘then’.
Correlative constructions are not really found in Present Day English, but they
are very common in other Indo-European languages such as Hindi and Urdu to
this day. A similar construction is found with a very heavy nominal phrase at the
start, followed by a full main clause introduced by a resumptive pronoun, as in
example (22). Here, se (the nominative form of the definite article/demonstrative)
introduces the heavy nominal phrase, and also introduces the main clause (in the
meaning ‘he’ or ‘that one’).

(22) Se God þe mē forġēaf þis gōde ġeþanc, se wyle þē ġehȳran

the God who me gave this good thought he will you hear
‘The God who gave me this good thought, he is willing to hear you’
(Ælfriċ, Life of St. Basil)

See if you can spot correlative constructions in Old English texts. Again, there
are quite a lot of them!

6.5 Lexicon
6.5.1 Word formation: derivation and compounding
Old English made productive use of a variety of word-formation strategies in
order to form new lexical items. Both derivation (the addition of an affix to a
free form) and compounding (putting two free forms together) were widely used
during this period.
In the verbal domain, prefixes were common. Thus, verbs like onsacan ‘to re-
fute, to deny’ were derived from simple verbs like sacan ‘to attack’. The prefix
be- made intransitive verbs transitive: so murnan ‘to mourn’, as in ‘they were
mourning’, gave rise to bemurnan, as in ‘they mourned his death’. However, the
function of individual prefixes is often difficult to discern, and sometimes they
are used interchangeably in different versions of the same text (Ogura 1995). Ver-
bal prefixes were also an exception to the general rule that all Old English words
were stressed on the lexical morpheme, which was often the first syllable (see
§7.2.4) – this probably reflects the fact that these prefixes are grammaticalized
versions of what once were independent words. The system of verbal prefixes

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 6.5 Lexicon

was already becoming less productive in late Old English, and disappeared al-
most entirely in Middle English (Hiltunen 1983, Lutz 1997, Elenbaas 2007, Thim
2012).

The prefix ġe-

The prefix ġe- is found on both nouns and verbs, though has a different
meaning with each. On nouns, ġe- often adds a notion of collectivity or
grouping, e.g. ġefēra ‘comrade’. This nominal ġe- is stressed. On verbs,
the function of ġe- is hard to pin down, but it seems to be associated with
perfectivity or resultativity (McFadden 2015). This verbal ġe- is unstressed.
It’s often found with past participles, but not only with past participles,
and can occur with all kinds of verb forms.

The borderline between derivation and compounding is blurred with Old English
nominal word-formations, since it’s often difficult to tell whether a given ele-
ment is a suffix or a free form. Cross-linguistically, it’s very common for suffixes
to originate as grammaticalized free forms, but it’s hard to know where to draw
the line. -liċ, for instance, is cognate with the noun līċ ‘body’, and is used to form
adjectives from nouns, e.g. heofonliċ ‘heavenly’ from heofon ‘heaven’, and dēofol-
liċ ‘devilish’ from dēofol ‘devil’.47 -dom is cognate with the noun dōm ‘judgement’,
and creates abstract nouns, e.g. þēowdom ‘slavery’ from þēow ‘slave’. These
endings, and others such as -ful, -lēas and -sċip (the ancestors of modern -ful,
-less and -ship) are sometimes referred to by Old English scholars as “suffixoids”
to indicate that we can’t be sure whether they are suffixes or free forms. There
are, however, also some unambiguous derivational suffixes in Old English, like
-iġ, which creates adjectives (giving us the Present Day English -y suffix, as in
fishy, stormy, and windy), and -ung and -nes(s), which create abstract feminine
nouns.
Old English is particularly fond of compounding, and this is nowhere more
true than in the poetic texts (see Godden 1992). Some compound elements, such
as heaþo-, beadu- and hilde- (all relating to ‘war’), are only found in the poetry,
e.g. heaþohelm ‘war-helm’ and hildebil ‘battle-blade, sword’. Davis-Secord (2016)
is a recent and in-depth study of compounding in Old English literature.
47
This is where the adjectival use of -ly comes from in Present Day English friendly and manly.

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Kennings

Kennings are a special type of compound or set phrase, used figuratively,

and made up of of two parts: a base word and a determinant. The deter-
minant shares its semantic area with the thing that the kenning refers
to overall. Kennings include such compound words as hronrād ‘sea’ (lit-
erally ‘whale-road’) and merehengest ‘ship’ (literally ‘sea-stallion’). Both
Old English and Old Norse poetry make liberal use of kennings.

6.5.2 Lexical borrowing

The majority of the Old English vocabulary was either inherited from Proto-
Germanic or built up using the sort of word-formation strategies discussed in
the previous section. That doesn’t mean that Old English was free of borrow-
ings, however – far from it! Brythonic Celtic, Latin, and Norse all contributed to
the lexicon of Old English to varying degrees.
The number of accepted lexical borrowings from Brythonic Celtic into Old
English is small. Old English brocc ‘badger’ is one clear case, and there are sev-
eral elements that are often found in place-names, such as cumb ‘valley’, luh
‘lake’, torr ‘rock, hill’. We can also identify a few words from Old Irish: drȳ ‘ma-
gician’, also found in the derived form drȳcræft ‘sorcery, witchcraft’. Some schol-
ars (e.g. Coates 2017) have taken the relative paucity of accepted borrowings
as an indication that the contact situation was not nearly as intense as we sug-
gested in §6.1.2. This isn’t a necessary conclusion, though. Given the low status
of Brythonic Celtic and Celtic-speakers, it makes sense to imagine that words of
Celtic origin would have been consciously suppressed by speakers of Old English:
they just weren’t prestigious enough. The real impact of Celtic on Old English
would then have been on areas of the language that are less subject to conscious
scrutiny, such as morphosyntax and perhaps phonology – which fits well with
the evidence (recall §6.3.2 on the twofold paradigm of BE). We shouldn’t expect
all language contact situations to have the same outcome.48 Also, recently it has

48
For more detail on different outcomes of language contact, see Winford (2005) on ‘borrowing’
vs. ‘imposition’, and Trudgill (2011) on short-term vs. long-term contact situations.

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 6.5 Lexicon

been suggested that more words were borrowed into Old English from Celtic
than previously thought (Breeze 2002), though time will tell whether these ety-
mologies become accepted by the scholarly community.
Direct Latin borrowings in Old English are numerous: probably around 600
in total (Durkin 2014: 100). We can often use linguistic evidence, such as the
presence or absence of certain sound changes, to determine when exactly a word
was borrowed: see §7.5.3 in the next chapter for discussion of this and of very
early borrowings. Borrowings into Old English itself, after the year 600, mostly
had to do with religion and learning, for instance dēmōn ‘demon’, pāpa ‘pope’,
circul ‘circle’, and þēater ‘theatre’.
There are also very many words which are not direct borrowings but either
contain Latin elements or are modelled directly on Latin morphological struc-
tures. In grammatic-cræft ‘grammar’, the first element is from Latin, but the
second element -cræft is inherited, and is a productive way of forming abstract
nouns in Old English. The word ælmihtiġ ‘almighty’ is almost certainly a loan
translation from Latin omnipotens: in both words the first part (æl-, omni-) means
‘all’, and the second part (-mihtiġ, -potens) means ‘powerful’ (Durkin 2014: 164).
It’s hard to know how many of these borrowings which we find in texts were
‘real’ in the sense of being widely used in speech, rather than opportunistic
coinages of the moment. Remember that the texts are heavily biased towards
the domains of religion and learning anyway (§6.1.3). But it isn’t doubted that
Latin had a major lexical impact on Old English. See Durkin (2014: part III) for
extensive discussion.
Norse borrowings into English are also very numerous. They start to appear
only in late Old English (see §6.1.1), and at this point are mostly restricted to spe-
cific domains: seafaring (e.g. barþ and cnear, types of ship), law (e.g. lagu ‘law’
itself!), warfare (e.g. grið ‘peace’). Pons-Sanz (2013) lists 185 accepted Norse bor-
rowings in Old English, and many more that are disputed. During the Middle
English period, more Norse borrowings flow into the language, including many
that are still used today: die, egg, meek, though. Townend (2002) points out that
the borrowings from Norse into Old English tend to show signs of adaptation
to Old English phonology, whereas the later borrowings first attested in Middle
English do not. This could indicate a general change in the nature of the contact
situation, away from prestige-driven borrowing and towards substitution of ev-
eryday words – perhaps by native speakers of Norse, as the language slowly died
out in England during the Middle English period.

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6 Old English (600–1150)

At present, Pons-Sanz (2013) is the definitive overview of Norse borrowings

into Old English. Durkin (2014: part IV) discusses Scandinavian lexical influence
in general, and the Gersum Project website allows you to look up potential bor-
rowings and how likely it is that they truly have Norse origins.49

6.6 Final note

Old English is a challenge for the reader, especially if – as will be the case for
most students using this book – this is the first time you’re encountering it. But
don’t worry: no one is expecting you to become fluent! Instead, just give your
curiosity free rein and explore this weird and wonderful period of the English
language with an open mind.
We’ve focused in this chapter on the multilingual nature of early Britain.
English was just one language among many during this period, and it would
have been impossible to predict with any confidence in 600, 1000 or 1150 that it
would eventually become the most widely spoken language in Britain (still less
the world). Old English coexisted with Brythonic Celtic, Norse, Latin, and later
French. It wasn’t just Britain as a whole that was multilingual; individuals of all
social classes very often spoke more than one language, and the development of
English from 600 onwards reflects this coexistence of languages.

Suggested exercises

E.1 Letters vs. sounds

What are the Present Day English equivalents of the following Old English
words? Don’t use a dictionary – simply guess. The Old English words be-
low all happen to be very similar to their Present Day English equivalents,
so don’t expect any treacheries here: if ofer looks like the Present Day En-
glish over to you, assume that this is indeed what it is.
Comment on the spelling and the pronunciation differences.

49
Available at https://www.gersum.org.

284
 Suggested exercises

1. æsc 8. miht
2. bedd 9. ofer
3. cynn
10. scip
4. dæg
11. ðorn
5. fisc
6. hyll 12. þorn

7. mann 13. þynn

This exercise is adopted and adapted from Hogg & Alcorn (2012).

E.2 Pronouncing Old English

How about trying to transcribe the first line of Beowulf in the Interna-
tional Phonetic Alphabet?

Hwæt wē gārdena in ġēardagum

6.6.1 Using the Bosworth-Toller Dictionary

The Bosworth-Toller Dictionary by Joseph Bosworth and T. Northcote
Toller is available online for you to use.a It’s a fantastic source to use
when you need to look up an Old English word. However, it may take a
while to orientate oneself when first using it. This should become a bit
easier by following these tasks:
1. Look these words up: cearu, lic (the very first entry), loða, scitan
(the second entry), werewulf, and wifmann.

2. What information does the dictionary provide you with when it

comes to these words? Is it useful?

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6 Old English (600–1150)

3. Now try something like durste. The search will give you useful in-
formation, but you’ll have to do a bit more hunting in this case to
get to know what durste means exactly. Can you figure out how?

Hint: the rather mysterious abbreviations such as an and es provide you

with the ending representing the genitive singular. The f., m., and n.
abbreviations give you information on the morphological gender of the
noun in question.

Tip for teachers: Go through the less obvious parts of the dictionary with
the students, such as the links to the paragraphs of the Wrights’ Old En-
glish Grammar with the lic entry.
a
Available at https://bosworthtoller.com/. Digitalized by Sean Crist and Ondřej Tichý,
maintained by Ondřej Tichý.

E.3 Fricative allophony

Old English did not have voiced and voiceless fricatives as contrasting
phonemes. [f] and [v], [s] and [z], and [θ] and [ð] did exist, but as condi-
tioned allophones. Sort the following words into two categories, decid-
ing whether the letter in bold represents a voiceless or a voiced fricative
in the pronunciation.
sæ ‘sea’ broðor ‘brother’
wif ‘wife, woman’ hræfn ‘raven’
flota ‘ship’ ceaster ‘city’
weorþe ‘worthy’ ofer ‘over’
risan ‘to rise’ æþele ‘noble’
lyft ‘air’ yrhðo ‘slackness’
offrian ‘to offer’ bosom ‘bosom’
oððe ‘or’ wæs ‘was’
þegn ‘thane’ efne ‘even’

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 Suggested exercises

nosu ‘nose’ bliþe ‘joyous, blithe’

heofon ‘heaven’ hæslen ‘of hazel’ (adj)
be-secgan ‘to announce’
Note: voiced sounds include vowels, liquids, nasals, and all voiced stops.

Note: all the spellings with two graphemes e.g. <ff> count as two separate
“sounds”/sound events/segments.

Note: the allophonic voicing rule didn’t operate across morphemes, i.e.
it was blind to the vowels and consonants that were not part of the
morpheme in which we find the relevant fricative.

Acknowledgement: this exercise is adapted from Johanna Wood’s 2016

teaching materials.

E.4 Identifying nominal features

For each of the following phrases, identify the case, number, gender, and
class of the noun. If there is more than one possibility for case or gender,
list all the possibilities. Try not to use a dictionary.
1. þone bāt (noun: ‘boat’)

2. þā dōru (noun: ‘door’)

3. sēo faru (noun: ‘journey’)

4. þæs flēogan (noun: ‘fly’)

5. þāra ēagena (noun: ‘eye’)

6. þone docgan (noun: ‘dog’)

7. þā huniġcambe (noun: ‘honeycomb’)

8. þǣm dorum (noun: ‘bee’)

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E.5 Murder mystery

In this exercise, you’ll be learning about Old English morphology using

the following nouns as our practice material:
PDE OE nominative OE genitive OE accusative
‘chief’ fruma fruman fruman
‘friend’ freond freondes freond
‘lady (of the house)’ hlæfdige hlæfdigan hlæfdigan

Now here’s the murder mystery (more or less in Present Day English).
The main protagonists are presented to you in Old English and you can’t
rely on the word order to know who did what to whom. You have to rely
on the morphology. Below are three questions you need to answer.

Once a fruma was a guest in a freondes hall. His freond went out to
hunt. The fruma the hlæfdigan regarded (looked at). The fruman the
hlæfdige regarded. Followed the hlæfdigan the fruma. The hlæfdige
the fruman feared. Desired the hlæfdigan the fruma. The fruman fled
the hlæfdige. Embraced the hlæfdigan the fruma. The fruman the
hlæfdige insulted. Twisted the hlæfdigan arm the fruma. Kicked the
fruman the hlæfdige where it hurts real bad. Hit the fruma the hlæfdi-
gan. The fruman the hlæfdige slew.

Answer these questions:

1. Who is lying dead on the floor?

2. Who did it?

3. Why?

Acknowledgement: we inherited this exercise from Johanna Wood and

Ocke-Schwen Bohn; however, we have not been able to trace the author
of this wonderful activity.

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 Suggested exercises

E.6 Irregular plurals

A.
There are various strategies to form the plural in Present Day English.
The regular strategy is to add the -(e)s morpheme to the singular form,
as in bumblebee > bumblebees. Was this the case in Old English?

B.
The singular/plural pairs below use a different strategy and have to be
learnt as exceptions to the regular plural rule in Present Day English. Us-
ing the Magic Sheet, say which Old English morphological classes the
following Present Day English irregular plurals derive from:
1. sheep ∼ sheep
2. man ∼ men
3. deer ∼ deer
4. fish ∼ fish
5. knife ∼ knives
6. ox ∼ oxen
7. wolf ∼ wolves
C.
Identify the origin of the irregularity for each of the following pairs.
1. tooth ∼ teeth
2. louse ∼ lice
3. child ∼ childrena
Note: the whole point is for you to be able to identify the historical source
of these Present Day English irregularities. We don’t expect you to re-
member what the different classes should/can be labelled exactly, but we
do expect you to know where to look in the Magic Sheet.

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6 Old English (600–1150)

Acknowledgement: This exercise was partly inspired by Johanna Wood’s

2016 teaching materials.
a
Children are difficult. You probably won’t be able to explain the entire plural form, but
give it a go.

E.7 Contrasting Present Day English with Old English

Below are extracts from The Wanderer. You are provided with the corre-
sponding Present Day English translations. Your task is to explain how
the expressions in bold differ from their Present Day English equivalents
in terms of their syntax and verbal morphology.
Using the digital version of the Bosworth-Toller Dictionary will be
helpful if you work with Old English.a

The Wanderer:b
Old English Present Day English
Oft him (1) anhaga (2) Often the solitary one (2)
are gebideð (3), finds grace (3) for himself (1),
metudes miltse (4), the mercy of the Lord (4),
þeah þe he modcearig Although he, sorry-hearted,
geond lagulade through sea ways
longe sceolde hreran (5) long should row (5)
mid hondum (6) with hands (6)
hrimcealde sæ (7), the ice-cold sea (7),
wadan wræclastas. tread the paths of exile.
Wyrd bið ful aræd! Fate is fully determined!
Swa cwæð eardstapa (8), The wanderer spoke so (8),
Earfeþa gemyndig (9), mindful of hardships (9),
wraþra wælsleahta, of fierce slaughters,
winemæga hryre and the downfall of kinsmen.

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 Suggested exercises

a
https://bosworthtoller.com/.
b
Adapted from Miller (http://www.anglo-saxons.net/hwaet/?do=get&type=text&id=
Wdr).

E.8 Verb phrases

Translate the following clauses into Present Day English. Use a dictionary
where you need to. For each of them, say whether the verb phrase in
Old English is head-initial or head-final. Remember: the non-finite verb
is crucial!
1. Ac hē sċeal þā sacfullan ġesibbian

2. þæt hē ne mæġe nān gōd dōn

3. se wolde ofslēan þone cyning Dauid

4. ġif hēo þæt bysmor forbēran wolde

5. ðæt hē wolde ġenealæcan his hulce

E.9 Emphasizing negation

When you read about Jespersen’s Cycle in this chapter, you learnt about
not having evolved out of what used to be added on top of the negative ne
for emphatic reasons, as in the Present Day English The bumblebee didn’t
give a hoot about all the blossoms. There are plenty of words of the hoot
type that we use today to emphasize negation. One more example would
be The bumblebee didn’t give a fig about all the blossoms.

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6 Old English (600–1150)

Using your own knowledge of English, asking other speakers, and/or

searching online, how many other such hoot type words can you come
up with? Aim for as many as possible. Do these have the same meaning,
would you say?

E.10 Change across Old English

Look at the two excerpts from the Peterborough Chronicle in §6 below.

The first presents an older stage of Old English, the latter presents a newer
stage of Old English (in fact, very early Middle English according to where
we’ve drawn the line). Which linguistic differences suggest that the for-
mer is older and the latter is younger?

E.11 Translating Beowulf

A. Comment on the following remark Heaney has made on his

translation of Beowulf regarding his use of Irishisms (Heaney 2000:
xxxiv):
[...] I have in several instances used the word ‘bawn’ to refer to Hroth-
gar’s hall. In Elizabethan English, bawn (from the bó-dhún, a fort for
cattle) referred specifically to the fortified dwellings which the En-
glish planters built in Ireland to keep the dispossessed natives at bay
[...]. Putting a bawn into Beowulf seems one way for an Irish poet to
come to terms with that complex history of conquest and colony, ab-
sorption and resistance, integrity and antagonism, a history which
has to be clearly acknowledged [...].

What are the pros and cons of this approach to translating Beowulf ?

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 Suggested exercises

B. Old English poetry employed certain linguistic structures in ways in

which these are no longer used in present-day English. One of these dif-
ferences is the very frequent use of compounding in Old English poetry.
On this, Heaney (2000: xxxiii) says the following:

Old English abounds in vigorous and evocative and specifically po-

etic words for these things [i.e. a sword or a spear or a battle or any
bloody encounter with foes], but I have tended to follow modern
usage and in the main have called a sword a sword.

Would you support Heaney’s decision to “call a sword a sword”, so to

speak, in a Present Day English rendition of the poem? Why (not)?

C. Here we present you with two passages from the poem: one in Old
English (OE), one being a philological translation serving as a maximally
detailed type of glossary (PT), and the translation by Seamus Heaney (SH).

Encounter with Grendel’s mother:

OE: Ongeat þa se goda grund-wyrgenne
OE: mere-wif mihtig; mægen-ræs forgeaf
OE: hilde-bille, hond sweng ne ofteah,
OE: þæt hire on hafelan hring-mæl agol
OE: grædig guð-leoð.
(Heaney 2000: 104)

PT: Perceived [he] then the good ground-throttler

PT: mare-wife [= woman] mighty; might-rush [he] gave
PT: slope-edged, hand blow not spared [i.e. he didn’t spare],
PT: it [i.e. the sword] her on head ring-ornamented sang
PT: greedy battle-poem/song.

SH: The hero observed that swamp thing from hell,

SH: the tarn-hag in all her terrible strength,
SH: then heaved his war-sword and swung his arm:
SH: the decorated blade came down ringing
SH: and singing on her head.
(Heaney 2000: 105)

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6 Old English (600–1150)

Having killed the dragon:

OE: Nalles æfter lyfte lacende hwearf

OE: middel-nihtum, maðm-æhta wlonc
OE: ansyn ywde; ac he eorðan gefeoll
OE: for ðæs hild-fruman hond-geweorce.
(Heaney 2000: 190)

PT: Not-at-all after in the air playing [he] turned

PT: [at] midnight, of costly-possesions proud
PT: face showed; and he to earth fell
PT: for [= by] that war-ruler hand-work

SH: Never again would he glitter and glide

SH: and show himself off in midnight air,
SH: exulting in his riches: he fell to earth
SH: through the battle-strength in Beowulf’s arm.
(Heaney 2000: 191)

And here are your tasks:

• How much does Seamus Heaney diverge from the original?

• When he diverges, what consequences does this have for the reader
of the literary work?

• Why not try a translation of your own?

D. Look at the two passages above. Compare the Old English version
with the Present Day English version from a purely linguistic point of
view. How has the language changed since the times of Beowulf ? Why
is Old English challenging for a Present Day English speaker?

E. If you have access to the following review of Heaney’s Beowulf,

Čermák, Jan. 2012. Heaney’s Beowulf: gleaning the unsaid off the
palpable. In Jana K. Schulman & Paul E. Szarmach (eds.), Beowulf at
Kalamazoo: essays on translation and performance, 301–304. Michi-
gan: Medieval Institute Publications.

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 Suggested exercises

Focus on the following:

• What differences between the two versions of the poem does Čer-
mák list?

• Are these important differences? Why (not)?

Tips for teachers: give the students a word limit and a deadline to submit
a summary if a written type of exercise is seen as helpful.

E.12 Ezra Pound’s translation of Seafarer

Below are the first seven lines of the Seafarer. We provide you with
the Old English transliteration (“OE”),a a philological translation
serving as a maximally detailed type of glossary (PT), and a translation
by Ezra Pound (EP).b
OE: maeg ic be me sylfum
OE: soðgied wrecan
OE: siþas secgan
OE: hu ic geswincdagum
OE: earfoðhwile
OE: oft þrowade
OE: bitre breostceare
PT: may I by me [= my] self
PT: a true tale work [= make]
PT: travels say
PT: how I at days of labour
PT: a time of hardship
PT: oft suffered
PT: bitter breastcare [= sorrow, anxiety]
EP: May I for my own self
EP: song’s truth reckon

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6 Old English (600–1150)

EP: Journey’s jargon,

EP: how I in harsh days
EP: hardship
EP: endured oft
EP: Bitter breast-cares have I abided

And here are your tasks:

• How much does Ezra Pound diverge from the original?

• When he diverges, what consequences does this have for the reader
of the literary work?

• Why not try a translation of your own?

a
Page 306 here: https://archive.org/details/codexexoniensisc00sociuoft/page/306.
b
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44917/the-seafarer.

E.13 Food for thought

Engage with the following statements. Argue for and/or against:

• Contrasting Old English and Present Day English spelling reveals
some important sound changes that have happened in the history
of English.

• Old English morphology was so different from Present Day English

morphology that one could argue Old English and Present Day En-
glish are two different languages.

• Old English had a free word order.

• We cannot approach Old English from a sociolinguistic point of

view.

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 Text samples

• The Middle English words <veal>, <vertú>, and <Zephirus> are

very likely to be inherited from Old English.

Tip for teachers: Assign one of these questions as a written exercise, giving
the students a word count limit and a deadline.

E.14 Improve these statements

Could you improve the following claims in any way?

• “Nouns in Old English were gendered.”

• “The Present Day English hardly gained the derivational suffix -ly,
which now shows its grammatical case as an adverb.”

• “English was influenced by Germanic.”

• “The tense of cuman is the plural form of cuma.”

• “Throughout its history, English has lost a lot of casing.”

• “The Old English prefix ge- was inherited from earlier forms of Ger-
man and Dutch.”

• “V2 refers to the free word order we find in Old English, where the
verb occurs at the end of a sentence.”

• “The Old English case can also determine the mood of the verb.”

• “The Old English verb biddeþ has the thorn as a suffix.”

Text samples
Below we have prepared a choice selection of Old English texts for you. Wulf-
stan’s Sermo Lupi ad Anglos presents a late Old English text, as does the poem

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6 Old English (600–1150)

Judith. Wulf and Eadwacer is a female-voiced poem, and the Voyage of Ohthere
sheds light on relations between Scandinavians and Old English speakers. The
two excerpts from the Chronicle provide a window onto narrative history-telling
of the period, centuries apart. As usual, the texts are in reverse chronological
order, but you might like to start with the excerpt of the Life of St Basil in §3, for
which we’ve provided full glossing and translation.
In the next chapter you’ll find a couple more early Old English texts, including
The Law of Æþelberht.

T.1 Wulfstan’s Sermo Lupi ad Anglos

Wulfstan was an important ecclesiastical figure of the British world of the

end of the 10th and the beginning of the 11th centuries. His Sermo Lupi ad
Anglos translates into ‘Wolf’s Sermon to the English’ and is an early 11th-
century homily, in which Wulfstan blames the Scandinavian incursions
on the moral decline of the English. Below we give you an excerpt of this
best-known of Wulfstan’s works.a
Ne ǣniġ ƿið ōþerne ʒ̇etrȳƿlīċe · sƿā rihte sƿā hē scolde · ac mǣst
ǣlċ swicode · ⁊ōþrum derede · ƿordes ⁊dǣde· ⁊hūru unrihtlīċe mǣst
ǣlċ ōþerne æftan hēaƿeþ. mid sceandlican onscytan · dōmāre ʒ̇if
hē mæʒ̇e · forþām hēr syn onlande unʒ̇etrȳƿþa miċle · forʒode ⁊for
ƿorolde·⁊ eac hērsyn on earde on mistliċe ƿīsan · hlāford sƿican
maneʒ̇e; ⁊ealra mǣst hlāfordsƿice sebið onƿorolde· þæt man his hlā-
fordes sāule besƿīce; ⁊ful miċel hlāford sƿice ēac bið onƿorolde ·
þæt man his hlāford· of līfe for rǣde; Oððonoflande lifiendne drīfe;
⁊ǣʒ̇þer is ʒ̇eƿorden · on þysan earde;Ēad ƿeard man for rǣdde ·
⁊syððan ācƿealde· ⁊æfter þām forbærnde;
a
From the manuscript at http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=cotton_ms_
nero_a_i_f070r, MS Cotton, Nero, A 1, ff. 111v–112r; accessed May 2020; original punc-
tuation preserved; overdotting and length marking added; abbreviations silently ex-
panded.

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 Text samples

T.2 Judith
Judith is a late 10th – early 11th-century Old English poem, which depicts
a female character as one of the main protagonists and certainly as a hero-
ine figure. Below we provide you with the excerpt describing how Judith
beheaded the Assyrian general Holofernes in his drunken sleep.a
hī ðā se hēhsta dēma
ǣdre mid elne onbryrde sƿā hē dēð ānra ʒ̇ehƿylċne
hērbūendra þe hyne him tō helpe sēċeð
mid rǣde ond mid rihte ʒ̇elēafan Þā ƿearð hyre rūme on mōde
hāliʒ̇re hyht ʒ̇enīƿod ʒ̇enam ðā þone hǣðenan mannan
fæste be feaxe sīnum tēah hyne folmum ƿið hyre ƿeard
bysmerlīċe ⁊ þone bealofullan
listum ālēde lāðne mannan
sƿā hēo ðæs unlǣdan ēaðost mihte
ƿel ʒewealdan slōh ðā ƿundenlocc
þone fēondsceaðan fāʒum mēċe
heteþoncolne þæt hēo healfne forċearf
þone sƿēoran him þæt hē on sƿīman læʒ̇
druncen · ⁊ dolhƿund næs ðā dēad þā ʒ̇ȳt
ealles orsāƿle slōh ðā eornoste
ides ellenrōf ōðre sīðe
þone hǣðenan hund þæt him þæt hēafod ƿand
forð on ðā flōre læʒ̇ se fūla lēap
ʒēsne beæftan ʒǣst ellor hƿearf
under neoƿelne næs ⁊ ðǣr ʒ̇enyðerad ƿæs
sūsle ʒ̇esǣled syððan ǣfre
ƿyrmum beƿunden ƿītum ʒ̇ebunden
hearde ʒ̇ehæfted in helle bryne
æfter hinsīðe ne ðearf hē hopian nō
þȳstrum forðylmed þæt hē ðonan mōte
of ðām ƿyrmsele ac ðǣr ƿunian sceal
āƿa tō aldre būtan ende forð
in ðāmb heolstran hām hyhtƿynna lēas·

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6 Old English (600–1150)

a
From the Cotton MS Vitellius A XV manuscript at http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/
Viewer.aspx?ref=cotton_ms_vitellius_a_xv_f094r, ff. 204v–205r; accessed May 2020;
original punctuation preserved; overdotting and length marking added; silent ab-
breviations expanded. We follow the line numbering found here (and elsewhere):
http://www.oldenglishaerobics.net/judith.php for ease of comparison.
b
Expanded here from the original <ðū>.

T.3 Lives of Saints

Ælfriċ’s Lives of Saints were written in the 990s. They’re usually classed
as prose texts, but are regularly rhythmical and alliterative, showing that
the boundary between poetry and prose is not a hard-and-fast one. For
texts at the height of piety, some scurrilous and shocking activities are
described! We’ve added glossing and translation to this extract from the
Life of St Basil to make your entry into Old English text-reading a bit
easier at least here.a
Sum ārƿurþe þeġn hæfde āne dohter · þā hē ƿolde
an honourable thane had a-acc daughter when he wanted
ġebringan · binnan sumum mynstre · ⁊ criste be-tæcan ·
bring-inf within a monastery and Christ-dat show-inf
to his clænan þēoƿdome · þā ƿearð an his cnapena · to
to his pure servitude then became one his boy-gen.pl tō
cūð þām mǣdene · ⁊ þurh dēofles tihtinge ·
known the.dat maiden-dat and through devil-gen persuasion
hī dīgolliċe lufode · ac hē ne dorste āmeldian his
her.acc secretly loved but he neg dared make.known-inf his
unġemetegodan lufe · Ēode þā to anum drymen
unmoderated love went then to a-dat sorcerer-man.dat
þe deofles cræft cūðe · ⁊ behēt him sceattes ·
particle dēvil-gen power knew and promised him treasure-gen
ġif hē mid his scȳn-cræfte him þæt mǣden mihte
if he with his illusion-power-dat him the maiden might

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 Text samples

ġe-macian to ƿīfe · Þa ge-brohte se dry-man ·

make-inf to wife Then brought the.nom sorcerer-man.nom
þone cnapan · tō his dēofle · ⁊ se dēofol befrān ·
the.acc boy-acc to his devil-dat and the.nom devil.nom asked
þone dƿeligendan cnapan · ġif hē ƿolde on hine gelȳfan ·
the.acc straying boy-acc if he wanted in him believe-inf
⁊ his hælende ƿiðsacen · ƿið þā þe hē
and his saviour deny-inf against dem.acc particle he
ġefremode his fūlan gālnysse ·
achieved his foul lustiness
‘An honourable man had a daughter. When he wanted to bring her
to a monastery and commit her to the pure service of Christ, one of
his boys became too close to the girl, and through the devil’s
persuasion he secretly loved her, but he did not dare to make
known his excessive love. He then went to a sorcerer who knew
the power of the devil, and promised him treasures if he could use
his magic to make the girl his wife. Then the sorcerer brought the
boy to his devil, and the devil asked the erring boy if he would
believe in him and deny his Saviour [i.e. Christ] in exchange for
satisfying his foul lust.’
a
From Skeat’s edition at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ælfric%27s_Lives_of_Saints;
accessed May 2020; glossing, overdotting and length marking added.

T.4 Wulf and Eadwacer

Below is one of the famous Old English elegies, Wulf and Eadwacer, in its
entirety. This is a very interesting piece for a range of reasons, one being
that the narrator is a woman.a
leodum is minum sƿylce him mon lac ʒife
ƿillað hy hine aþecʒan ʒif he on þreat cymeð
unʒelic is us ·

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6 Old English (600–1150)

ƿulf is on ieʒe ic on oþerre

fæst is þæt eʒlond fenne biƿorpen
sindon ƿæl reoƿe ƿeras þær on iʒe
ƿillað hy hine aþecʒan ʒif he on þreat cymeð
unʒelice is us
ƿulfes ic mines ƿid lastum ƿenum doʒode
þonne hit ƿæs renig ƿeder ⁊ ic reo tuʒu sæt ·
þonne mec se beadu cafa boʒum bileʒde
ƿæs me ƿyn to þon ƿæs me hƿæþre eac lað .
ƿulf min ƿulf ƿena me þine
seoce ʒedydon þine seld cymas
murnende mod nales mete liste
ʒehyrest þu ead ƿacer uncerne earne hƿelp
bireð ƿulf to ƿuda
þæt mon eaþe tosliteð þætte næfre ʒesomnad ƿæs
uncer ʒiedd ʒeador. :⁊
a
From the Exeter Book, Exeter Dean and Chapter 3501 manuscript at https://notendur.
hi.is/peturk/KENNSLA/OE/TEXTS/wulf.htm; ff. 100v–101r; accessed May 2020; origi-
nal punctuation preserved, abbreviations silently expanded. We follow the line num-
bering typically encountered in modern editions of the work.

T.5 The Voyage of Ohthere

Ohthere’s story is preserved in a text usually called the Old English Oro-
sius, but which Godden (2016) refers to as the Old English History of the
World. The majority of this text is a translation from Latin of Orosius’s His-
toriae adversus paganos (‘history against the pagans’, written circa 400),
but Ohthere’s story itself is not found in this Latin original: instead it’s
set nearly 500 years later, in King Alfred’s court. It’s a good illustration
of how relations between speakers of Norse and English weren’t always
hostile.a

302
 Text samples

Ōhthere sǣde his hlāforde Ælfrēde cyninge þæt hē ealra norð monna
norþ mēst būde · Hē cƿæð þæt hē būde on þǣm lande norþƿeardum
ƿiþ þā Ƿestsǣ · Hē sǣde þēah þæt land sīe sƿīþe lang norþ þonan · ac
hit is eal ƿēste buton on fēaƿum stōƿum styċċe mǣlum ƿīciað Finnas
on huntoðe on ƿintra and on sumera on fiscaþe be þǣre sǣ He sǣde
þæt hē æt sumum ċirre ƿolde fandian hū longe þæt land norþryhte
læġe oþþe hƿæðer æniġ mon be norðan þǣm ƿēstenne būde Þā fōr
hē norþ ryhte be þǣm lande Lēt him ealne ƿeġ þæt ƿēste land on
ðæt stēorbord ⁊ þā ƿīd sǣ on ðæt bæcbord þrīe dagas Þā wæs hē
sƿā feor norþ sƿā þā hƿælhuntan firrest faraþ · Þā fōr hē þāġiet norþ
ryhte sƿā feor sƿā hē meahte on þǣm oþrum þrīm dagum ġesiġlan
“Ohthere said to his lord, King Alfred, that he lived the furthest north
of all northmen. He said that he lived in the land north of the West
Sea [=North Sea]. He said that although the land extended far to the
north from there, it was all wasteland apart from a few places here
and there where Finns camp, hunting in the winter and fishing in the
sea in the summer. He said that at one point he wanted to find out
how long the land extended to the north, or if anyone lived north
of the wastes. Then he went northwards by the land. He kept the
wasteland on his right and the wide sea on his left for three days.
Then he was as far north as the furthest the whale-hunters go. Then
he travelled even further northwards, as far as he could within three
days’ sailing.”
a
From the manuscript at http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Add_
MS_47967, ff. 8r–8v; accessed May 2020; capitalization, overdotting and length mark-
ing added, abbreviations silently expanded.

T.6 The Chronicle

The Old English Chronicle is probably the most famous non-fiction text of
the Old English period. Supposedly a historical record, it is very selective
in the events it chooses to include and leave out: for long periods it is

303
6 Old English (600–1150)

obsessed with the movements of the Scandinavian raiders and settlers.

Here are two records of two different years, from the Laud manuscript or
Peterborough Chronicle.a
865: Hēr sæt se hǣðene here on Tenet ⁊ ġenam frið ƿið Cantƿarum ·
⁊ Cantware heom feoh behēton ƿið ðām friðe · ⁊ on þām feoh behāte
se here hine on niht up bestæl ⁊ oferherġode ealle Cent ēastewarde ·
“This year the heathen [=Scandinavian] army remained in Thanet
and made peace with the Kentish people. And the Kentish people
promised them a fee for the peace. And under cover of this promise
the army sneaked up at night and overran all of Kent to the east.”

1132: Ðis ġear com Henri king to þis land · þā com Henri abbot ⁊
uureide þe muneces of Burch tō þe king forþī ðæt hē uuolde ðæt
mynster to Clunie · sua ðæt te king ƿas ƿel neh bepaht · ⁊ sende eft
þe muneces ·
“This year King Henryb came to this land. Then Abbot Henry came
and betrayed the monks of Peterborough to the king because he
wanted that cathedral to belong to Clunyc , so that the king was well
nigh [=almost] tricked, and sent after the monks.”
a
From the manuscript at https://medieval.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/catalog/manuscript_7423,
f. 30r and f. 88v; accessed May 2020; capitalization, overdotting and length marking
added, abbreviations silently expanded.
b
Henry I of England, fourth son of William the Conqueror.
c
An important abbey in what is now central France.

Recommended further reading

There are many good textbooks on Old English that go into more depth
on most of the aspects we’ve covered: our favourites are Hogg & Alcorn
(2012), Smith (2009a), and Baker (2012).
Contact between Old English and other languages is not something
that is in general well covered in textbooks, so other sources are needed.

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 Text samples

For contact with Celtic, Tristram (2004), Woolf (2007), Lutz (2009), and
Hickey (2012) present different perspectives. For Norse, Townend (2002)
is a book-length study, and briefer overviews can be found in Townend
(2006) (which also covers Latin and French), Lutz (2012), and Dance (2012).
For Old English phonology, we can recommend Old English Phonology
by Lass & Anderson (1975) to start with. Wright & Wright (1908) contains
a lot of useful information, especially from a more general perspective of
historical phonology of Germanic languages, and other languages spoken
in Europe; however, be prepared for a tougher read in most places. Finally,
for a more advanced but fairly accessible read on specific Old English
phonological phenomena, we recommend Minkova (2014: Chapters 4 and
6). Old English morphology is dealt with in detail in any textbook, but if
that doesn’t satisfy you, Hogg & Fulk (2011) is the place to go.
There is a good overview treatment of Old English syntax in Fischer
et al. (2000: Chapter 2), and that book also goes into detail on issues of
clause structure and how they change. Los (2015) and Fischer et al. (2017)
also contain student-friendly discussion of syntactic change in early En-
glish. The Old English lexicon is discussed in Smith (2009a: 59–73), and in
more detail in Kastovsky (1992). Kastovsky (2006) provides an overview
of word-formation patterns from Old English through to the present day.
If interested in Old English dialectology, we recommend Hogg & Alcorn
(2012: Chapter 9) for a basic introduction and Hogg (1988) for something
a little bit more advanced.
Finally, we also recommend the Old English Aerobics webpage, with
all sorts of Old English goodies, created by Peter S. Baker.a
a
Available here: http://www.oldenglishaerobics.net/.

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7 The prehistory of English
7.1 History and context
7.1.1 Linguistic detective work
As we near the end of our journey through the history of English, we start to
face some unique challenges. The most important challenge facing us when we
study English pre-600 is that we have almost no written texts from this period.
This is not an accident: as we’ve seen, the real explosion of texts written in Old
English dates from the reign of King Alfred. Even more significantly, literacy in
the Old English period was always strongly associated with the Christian church.
The speakers of Old English weren’t always Christians, however: their wholesale
conversion to Christianity mostly happened during the 7th century, thanks to a
group of missionaries sent from Rome by Pope Gregory the Great in 596–597
CE. Before the Christianization of what is now England, there was no tradition
of writing in English beyond a limited number of inscriptions. This is why we
term this period “the prehistory of English”.

Christianity in Britain

Christianity in Britain is much older

than Pope Gregory’s mission. It was
brought there in the context of the Ro-
man Empire in the 1st and 2nd cen-
turies, and took root among the Celtic-
speaking locals especially during the 4th
and 5th. Later, there was some tension
between the local Christian traditions Figure 7.1: St Colm Cille
and the new ones brought in by Gre- (Columba), 6th-century Irish
gory’s missionaries: for instance, the dif- missionary in Britain, on a
stained-glass window at Iona
ferent traditions didn’t agree on the cor- Abbey (Photo by Brian Gratwicke,
rect date for the festival of Easter. licensed under CC-BY 2.0)
7 The prehistory of English

The problems of studying the prehistory of English go beyond this, however. It’s
a commonplace to all historical disciplines that the further you go back in time,
the harder it gets (all else being equal). It’s not just the language we’re a little
hazy on: the history of Britain and Europe during this period is also less well
understood, and the written sources are highly unreliable. That’s why we’ll find
ourselves relying more on different types of evidence in this chapter. On the
historical side, we’ll give less weight to people’s written accounts of the period,
and more weight to the evidence unearthed by archaeologists, which over the
last thirty years has revolutionized our understanding of the period (see Flem-
ing 2010, Gerrard 2013, Higham 2013, and Oosthuizen 2019). On the linguistic
side, our main methodology is linguistic reconstruction: working backwards
from our attested records to infer the most likely properties of unattested linguis-
tic stages and varieties.
Linguistic reconstruction has been described as “basically the darkest of the
dark arts, the only means to conjure up the ghosts of vanished centuries” (Cola
Minis 1952, cited in Campbell 2013: 107). The main technique we use for linguis-
tic reconstruction is the Comparative Method, which involves comparing at-
tested languages thought to be related in order to extrapolate back to their com-
mon ancestor. This is also the technique we use to establish which languages are
related to each other, and how closely: see Campbell (2013) for a clear introduc-
tion. Regular sound change, as introduced in §2.2, plays a crucial role here, and
the hypothetical ancestor language reconstructed by means of the Comparative
Method is called a protolanguage. The consensus is that English is a member of
the Germanic family, whose common ancestor is called Proto-Germanic. These
languages in turn are part of a larger family, Indo-European, whose ancestor is
Proto-Indo-European. The convention is to mark reconstructed forms with an
asterisk: so, *dōn- is the stem of a Proto-Germanic verb meaning ‘to do’, for ex-
ample.
We’ll look only at a tiny selection of Proto-Germanic and Proto-Indo-European
features in the following sections. If you’re hungry for more, Ringe (2017) should
be able to satisfy you.

7.1.2 The aduentus Saxonum

Pretty much everyone knows that English as spoken in the United States was
(and is) a language of immigrants – though they’re usually termed “settlers” or
“colonists” (see Chapters 3 and 4). It’s less well known that English wasn’t always
spoken in England either. The first speakers of Old English arrived in Britain

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during the 5th and 6th centuries.1 Before that time, the inhabitants of Britain
and Ireland would almost all have been speakers of Celtic varieties (potentially
with some British Latin thrown in as well; see Schrijver 2013 and Halsall 2013),
as mentioned in Chapter 2. Between the first and the fifth centuries CE, most of
Britain was part of the Roman Empire.
The arrival of speakers of Germanic languages in Britain is often referred to
as the aduentus Saxonum. Sometimes this process is described as an “invasion”,
but the term isn’t a very apt one. It implies a large, unified invading army, and
a large amount of military conflict. The archaeological evidence shows that this
wasn’t what happened, however. Battles leave material traces – mass graves, for
instance – and there is very little such evidence. More importantly, the consensus
at present is that the arrival of Germanic speakers did not involve the death
or displacement of the majority of the indigenous population. Instead, though
the scale of migration of Germanic-speaking peoples was relatively small, they
were probably able to assume a position of power both politically and culturally
(Higham 2013: 103–105). This elite dominance view of the aduentus Saxonum is
the most widely accepted narrative, but by no means the only one (see Fleming
2010 and Oosthuizen 2019). The relationship between the newcomers and the
indigenous speakers of Brythonic Celtic has been described in terms of slavery
(Pelteret 1995), but also apartheid (Woolf 2007), and its linguistic implications
have been discussed briefly in §6.1.2 above. Emerging approaches to the past,
such as palaeobotany, population genetics, and studies of ancient DNA, have the
potential to shed light on this picture. Like other historical witnesses, though,
this evidence yields results that can be interpreted in more than one way, and
each approach has its own strengths and weaknesses.

1
The term “Anglo-Saxon” is often used to describe these speakers, but in this book we’ll avoid it,
except when referring to other sources. In the modern era it is a term that is more often associ-
ated with white supremacists, and has recently been problematized for that reason (Rambaran-
Olm 2018, Wilton 2020). It’s not a term that writers of Old English used to describe themselves:
for this they preferred englisc, when they used a term at all. Grouping the Germanic speakers
in Britain together as “Anglo-Saxons” also implies a static, overarching ethnopolitical unity for
which there is no evidence in the historical record (Reynolds 1985), as we’ll see in this section.

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Evidence from written sources

There are few written sources describing the aduentus Saxonum, and none
of the British sources are contemporary. The most famous sources are the
writings of Bede and the Old English Chronicle, but as Christian monks
associated with centres of political power the writers of these texts have
a clear motive to exaggerate the prowess of the Germanic-speaking mil-
itary leaders and to play up the dramatic discontinuity of the aduentus.
Even more problematically, these texts are not really contemporary: they
were written hundreds of years after the events that they describe, and are
based on sources that are themselves problematic, such as Gildas’s Ruin
and Conquest of Britain, from the sixth century. Gildas, who wrote in Latin,
regarded the incomers as a curse sent by God to punish the indigenous
peoples for their deviant ways. Gildas’s text is an extended argument (re-
ally more of a rant), judging the behaviour of all of Britain’s inhabitants ac-
cording to Roman social norms and trenchantly criticizing them for their
– in his view illegitimate – military activities (Harland 2017). It is not a
narrative history, and neither Gildas nor Bede can be taken at face value.
As a thought experiment, you might like to imagine a future historian’s
view of the early 21st century if they had to rely solely on Donald Trump’s
Twitter feed, or on the manifesto of your least favourite political party.

The extent to which the aduentus Saxonum involved military engagement is still
disputed. The standard story, dating back to Victorian historians and through
them to written sources such as Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, is that the first Ger-
manic speakers in Britain were mercenaries, invited over from the Continent to
help out in turf wars between Celtic-speaking peoples and against raiders from
the north and west of the Isles. According to Gildas, the thin end of the wedge
involved three ships which arrived in Kent in 449 CE. These events were made
possible by the weakening of Roman imperial power and the withdrawal of the
legions, as well as the subsequent loss of trade connections with continental Eu-
rope, in the second half of the fourth century. In an archaeologically-informed
revisiting of this narrative, Higham (2013: 104) comes to the conclusion that it
is broadly plausible, but that there was no mass migration involved. Fleming
(2010) takes a different view, arguing that the early Germanic-speaking settlers
“seemed uninterested in and incapable of conquering anybody or anything. They

310
 7.1 History and context

wanted land to farm, and they must have hoped for woods where their swine
could forage” (2010: 40). According to Fleming, migration from Europe was more
of a fluctuating stream over centuries than a targeted military strike in a single
year, and involved women and children as well as (military and non-military)
men. The overall story was one of settlement, acculturation and accommodation.
Oosthuizen (2019) suggests that the end of Roman rule in the fifth century in-
volved more continuity than change, with Romano-British administrative struc-
tures and rights of property remaining intact. Exactly how much continuity and
how much change there was in the period leading up to 600 CE is likely to remain
a topic of much debate over the coming years.
What evidence about the aduentus can we glean from the archaeological
record? Here it is important to bear in mind that correlations between languages,
material culture and genetic evidence are always fuzzy and full of exceptions: ob-
jects, languages, and genes may – and often do – diffuse independently of one an-
other. Burial practices are one potential source of evidence. The fourth-century
inhabitants of Britain buried their dead intact, but in the fifth century we start to
see the rise of cremation, with the ashes of the deceased placed in a pottery urn.
This rise has been linked with the arrival of Germanic-speaking newcomers (see
Gerrard 2013: 195–207). We can also look at what people buried alongside their
dead. Different styles of brooches are found in different areas, for instance. Cru-
ciform (cross-shaped) brooches, square-headed brooches, and saucer brooches
are found in the south and east of England in the fifth and sixth centuries (Flem-
ing 2010: 45–54; Higham 2013: 78–87; Martin 2015). This archaeological evidence
maps fairly well onto evidence from place names of Germanic rather than Bry-
thonic Celtic or Latin origin. Broadly speaking, this evidence also lines up with
findings from recent genetic studies of the present-day British population (e.g.
Leslie et al. 2015). All these types of evidence show signatures of fifth- and sixth-
century influence from the Continent in the south and particularly the east of
England.2
Still, it’s important to remember that these practices and features were stun-
ningly diverse. Bede famously divided the immigrants into three tribes: Angles,
Saxons, and Jutes. Research has provided no support for any such clear division.
Cemeteries differed substantially from place to place. The expression of gen-
der identity and gendered norms could differ, for instance. Conventionally, men
were associated with weaponry and women with jewelry during this period, but
2
We see the reverse influence too: coins and other items that were undoubtedly produced
in Britain are found at sites in northern Germany dating from the fourth to sixth centuries
(Grünewald 2019, Rau 2019), showing that the North Sea was by no means a one-way street at
this time.

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7 The prehistory of English

Figure 7.2: The Kingston Brooch, a 7th-century composite brooch

found at Kingston Down in Kent (Photo by Rept0n1x, licensed under
CC-BY 3.0)

in some cemeteries (e.g. West Heslerton in North Yorkshire), men are buried with
jewelry, while in others (e.g. Buckland, Dover) women are buried with weapons.
Some cemeteries included graves where the deceased was accompanied by tiny
pots containing the ashes of pets such as dogs and horses. In others, tree branches
were placed in the grave. Saucer-shaped brooches are found more in the south
and west of what is now England, while cruciform brooches are more common
in the north, but these areas overlapped substantially. There must have been an
equal level of linguistic diversity, too, with individuals exploring new ways of
constructing their identities in this new and promising environment, just as we
see in the present day when different varieties of English and other languages
come into contact (as we saw in Chapters 2 and 3 in particular). Unfortunately,
the lack of texts means that we’ll never know for sure.
All in all, the evidence does not point to any clear “tribal” or ethnic group-
ings for the period before 600: “distinctive ethnic identities had probably not
yet coalesced” (Fleming 2010: 49). Modern archaeological and historical research
recognizes that ethnicity is a situational construct: it’s not objective or genetic,
but rather is constructed by groups according to their needs in any given sit-
uation. These constructed identities, insofar as they existed during this period,
must have been complex and multifaceted (Hills 2015, Martin 2015). One strand
of recent research has made the case that the explanatory value of ethnicity for
this period is limited to nonexistent (Harland 2017, 2019, Oosthuizen 2019).

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 7.1 History and context

7.1.3 The Germanic family

The peoples who were to become the speakers of Old English migrated from
continental Europe. Both the texts and the archaeological evidence point us at
what is now northern Germany and southern Denmark as their point of origin.
As such it’s probably not surprising that Beowulf, the most famous Old English
literary text, is explicitly about the Danes.
We know a few things about the Germanic-speaking peoples of this area and
others, but much is lost to the mists of time. Like the pre-Christianization Old
English speakers, and like many societies of the world until very recently, the
Continental Germanic-speaking peoples of Europe pre-600 didn’t do much writ-
ing. The main contemporary text dealing with these peoples is by Tacitus, a Ro-
man administrator and politician, and was written around 98 CE. It describes a
range of “tribes”, the Germani, who lived in a large area of central and northern
Europe, between the northern borders of the Roman Empire and the North Sea
and Baltic coasts. We must treat Tacitus’s text with caution, as we know that he
himself had never travelled to this area, and all of his information is second- or
third-hand. When Tacitus praises the monogamy of the Germani, for instance,
he’s as likely to be making a political point (by contrasting them with what he
saw as the immoral practices of his Roman compatriots) as he is to be faithfully
reporting the real situation. It’s also debatable whether all the groups Tacitus
described as Germani were really speakers of Germanic languages.
As usual, the archaeological evidence is more tangible, even if it remains silent
on many of the most intriguing social details. The peoples living in these ar-
eas were skilled wood- and metalworkers, and the organization of their settle-
ments was more complex and sophisticated than the written records imply (Todd
2005), including fortified settlements. Excavations of the settlement at Feddersen
Wierde, on the coast of north-western Germany, for instance, show that at its
peak as many as fifty families – each with a separate longhouse – may have called
it their home. Animal husbandry, especially of cattle, played a central economic
role. When they fought, these peoples mostly fought on foot, as infantry. Taci-
tus and other sources mention a wide range of tribal names – Alamanni, Franks,
Goths, Vandals, and more – but recent research has shown that it is a mistake to
view them as fixed political, geographic or ethnic groupings with firm pedigrees.
Rather, as far as we can tell, these groupings emerged opportunistically and or-
ganically, under individual leaders and in response to the circumstances of the
times (see e.g. Drinkwater 2007 on the Alamanni). Some of the names mentioned
by Tacitus, like Germani itself, were never used by the peoples themselves as far
as we know, but rather were imposed on them by the Roman world.

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7 The prehistory of English

Figure 7.3: Germanic peoples around 1 CE, following Tacitus. The black
line is the contemporary Roman border. Different colours represent
approximate locations of different groups of Germanic speakers. (Map
by AKAKIOS, licensed under CC-BY-SA 2.5)

We can divide the Germanic languages – both present and past – into three
groups: East Germanic, North Germanic, and West Germanic. The East Germanic
languages are now extinct, and the only language of this group that we know
much about is Gothic, which is preserved mainly in a 4th-century translation of
parts of the Bible. This translation consists mostly of books of the New Testa-
ment, and was supervised by a Gothic bishop with the adorable name of Wulfila
(‘little wolf’): see the text samples at the end of this chapter. The Goths were
major players in the politics of Europe in the first millennium, especially during
the twilight of the Roman Empire (see Heather 1996). Because of the age of its
attestation, Gothic is the closest of the well-attested early Germanic languages to

314
 7.1 History and context

Proto-Germanic. Still, Gothic displays several linguistic features that set it apart
from all other Germanic languages, and the other two branches – North and West
Germanic – are probably more closely related (Kuhn 1955).

Proto-Germanic

Northwest Germanic East Germanic

West Germanic North Germanic Gothic

Anglo-Frisian Old Saxon … Danish …

Old English Old Frisian Low German

English Frisian

Figure 7.4: Partial Germanic family tree

The North Germanic languages survive robustly to this day, mostly in Scan-
dinavia: varieties of Danish, Faroese, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish all be-
long to this group, as did the Norse spoken by the Scandinavians who settled in
Britain during the 9th to 11th centuries (see §6.1.1). The West Germanic branch
includes Afrikaans, Dutch, Frisian, German, Yiddish, and English. The internal
structure of the West Germanic branch is still debated (see Stiles 2013 for a recent
overview), though is not too important for our purposes. Within West Germanic,
English’s closest relative is Frisian, a collection of related varieties currently spo-
ken along the North Sea coast of the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark, and
endangered to some extent.

English as a cuckoo in the nest

The majority view is that English is a West Germanic language, but not
everyone shares this view. Recently it has been proposed that modern
English is a North Germanic language: see Bech & Walkden (2016) for a
sceptical evaluation. Another view is that, due to its extensive history of

315
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language contact, English is now a language without any relatives whatso-

ever, a creole – which arose through contact with either Norman French
(Bailey & Maroldt 1977) or Norse (Poussa 1982). Görlach (1986) presents
arguments against both claims. No one disputes that Old English was a
West Germanic language, however.

There are no texts longer than a few sentences from either North or West Ger-
manic from pre-600: all we have are brief inscriptions (see §7.2). The closest lan-
guage to Old English that is attested in the first millennium CE is Old Saxon, a
West Germanic language probably spoken between the rivers Elbe and Weser.
We have Old Saxon texts from the 9th century onwards, and there’s a text sam-
ple at the end of this chapter. Modern-day dialects of northern Germany are the
living descendants of Old Saxon. Robinson (1992) provides more information on
the other early Germanic languages, Old English’s closest relatives.

7.1.4 Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans

The Germanic languages descend from Proto-Germanic, which in turn is part of
a larger family, Indo-European. The establishment of this family was one of the
major achievements of nineteenth-century comparative linguistics (see Clackson
2007 for an accessible overview), and a family tree can be found in Figure 7.5.
Proto-Indo-European

Anatolian

… Tocharian

Balto-Slavic Germanic Indo-Iranian Italo-Celtic

Baltic Slavic … Armenian Hellenic … Celtic Italic

… … Greek … …

Figure 7.5: Partial Indo-European family tree (loosely based on Ringe

et al. 2002: 90, their Figure 8)

Almost all the languages of Europe are demonstrably part of this family. (Basque,
Estonian, Finnish, and Hungarian are notable exceptions.) This includes all the

316
 7.1 History and context

languages that had a major influence on English before the colonial period: Latin
(part of the Italic branch), French (ultimately descended from Latin), the Celtic
languages (which form their own branch), Greek, and of course Norse, as we
saw in Chapters 4–6. The family also has several members which are further
afield, and perhaps more surprising: Armenian, for instance, and the Indo-Iranian
languages spoken in central and southern Asia, including the ancient language
Sanskrit.
All Indo-European languages ultimately descend from a single ancestor, Proto-
Indo-European. The speakers of Proto-Indo-European are even more of a mys-
tery than the speakers of Proto-Germanic. No texts go back that far, so we are
entirely dependent on reconstruction and on the archaeological record to tell us
about the people who spoke the language (though evidence from ancient genetic
material is starting to play a role as well – see Haak et al. 2015). The usual story
(starting with Gimbutas 1970) is that Proto-Indo-European was spoken between
4,000 and roughly 2,000 BCE, and originated in the Pontic-Caspian steppes, in
present-day Ukraine and southern Russia: this is labelled the “Kurgan hypoth-
esis” or “steppe hypothesis”. Synthesizing the linguistic and archaeological evi-
dence, Anthony (2007) makes the case that the domestication of the horse and
the invention of the wheel, along with new modes of social and political organiza-
tion, contributed to the spread of the Indo-Europeans and their language across
Europe and beyond.3 As these newcomers and their culture fanned out across
Europe, the language diversified into varieties that were mutually unintelligible,
through exactly the processes of linguistic change that we’ve been exploring
throughout this book (see e.g. Chapter 2 on homogeneity and heterogeneity).

Before Proto-Indo-European?

Proto-Indo-European cannot have been spoken before the 7th millennium

BCE at the very earliest. However, research on the evolution of the human
capacity for language (see Fitch 2010) has demonstrated that this capacity
has been around in its modern form since the 50th millennium BCE at the
very latest. This book therefore only covers at most 10% of the history of
English and its predecessors, and if we disregard the present chapter it’s

3
For a recent overview that also takes ancient DNA evidence into account, see Anthony (2019).

317
7 The prehistory of English

more like 1–2%. Can we go any further back? The short answer is “not
really”. Some linguists have proposed more distant relationships between
Indo-European and other language families such as Afro-Asiatic (includ-
ing Arabic and Hebrew), Uralic (including Finnish and Hungarian), and
Kartvelian (including languages of the Caucasus such as Georgian). How-
ever, the consensus in linguistics is that the time depth is too great, and
the evidence too weak, to be anything other than suggestive: the usual
tools such as the Comparative Method yield inconclusive results (Camp-
bell & Poser 2008). Thus, with Proto-Indo-European we reach the earliest
portion of the history of English that is accessible by normal means, and
the clouded realm of linguistic prehistory looms before us.

7.2 Sounds
7.2.1 Old English and Frisian vowels
One major feature setting Old English (and also Old Frisian) apart from the other
Germanic languages was a series of changes to their vowels, which have the pic-
turesque name of “Anglo-Frisian Brightening”. West Germanic long [ɑː] became
[æː], and a little later short [a] became [æ] as well. This gives us words like Old
English dæġ ‘day’, mæġ ‘may’ and strǣt ‘street’, compared to (for instance) Old
Saxon dag ‘day’, mag ‘may’ and strāt- ‘street’, which did not undergo the change.
Nasalized [ɑ̃], and [ɑ] followed by /n/ or /m/, were unaffected by Anglo-Frisian
Brightening, however. These sounds later raised to [õ] and [o] in both Old En-
glish and Old Frisian, giving us words like Old English and Old Frisian mon ‘man’
whereas the Old Saxon cognate man remained unchanged. The same happened
to the long vowels [ɑ̃ː] and [ɑː], yielding for instance Old English mōn- ‘moon’
rather than Old Saxon mān- ‘moon’. It is actually not uncommon for nasal conso-
nants, such as /n/ and /m/, to raise the preceding vowel at various points in time
in the history of the English language. Thus, we can observe e.g. the so-called
pin-pen merger in some dialects of American English, but there are more raising
processes taking place before nasals in Present Day English.
Old Frisian later raised [æ] to [ɛ] and [æː] to [ɛː], giving us (for instance) dei
‘day’ and strēt- ‘street’. Thus, the presence of the letter <æ> is a sure-fire way
to tell that you’re dealing with an Old English text! However, there is variation
between and within dialects with regard to the sound changes discussed in this

318
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section (Ringe & Taylor 2014: 167–170). This variation probably reflects the fact
that these sound changes were still in progress at the time of the arrival of Ger-
manic speakers in Britain (Toon 1992), as this sort of variability is exactly what
we see in present-day changes in progress (see Chapter 2).

7.2.2 Runes and runic inscriptions

Before 600 CE, we don’t find Germanic languages written in the Latin alphabet.
Rather, the few surviving Germanic writings from this period (with the exception
of some texts in Gothic) use a different writing system: the runic alphabet.
We have runic inscriptions from all across the Germanic world, from the 2nd
century CE onwards. You’ll notice that, unlike the Latin alphabet, the runic char-
acters consist entirely of straight lines. This is because they were designed to be
carved into hard surfaces, not scribed with ink: in fact, the English verb to write
is descended directly from a Proto-Germanic verb meaning ‘to carve’.

Futhark or Futhorc?
The original twenty-four-character runic alphabet is known as the
futhark, after its first six characters – much like the QWERTY key-
board, the usual layout for keyboards in the Latin alphabet. It is some-
times known as the Older Futhark to distinguish it from its descendant
the Younger Futhark, which developed in Scandinavia from the 7th cen-
tury onwards. In Britain, at around the same time, the futhorc, a slightly
expanded set of runes, came into use. The futhorc better reflected the new
vowel system of Old English (see §7.2.1 above): the rune <æ> came to rep-
resent [æ], and the new runes <a> for [ɑ], <o> for [ɑ̃] (later [õ]), and <œ>
for [œ] are found for the first time.

The runic alphabet in fact tells us a few interesting things about the phonolog-
ical system of the early Germanic languages. For instance, the rune <þ>, called
thorn, represents the phoneme /θ/. The Latin alphabet had no convenient way
to represent this sound – unsurprisingly, as the Latin language itself didn’t have
the sound. The thorn rune was so useful that scribes of Old English kept us-
ing it even when they were otherwise writing in the Latin alphabet, and that’s
where the Old English letter <þ> comes from. Thorn was lost in Middle English,

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Table 7.1: The runic alphabet (Older Futhark), from Findell (2014: 18)

Rune Transliteration Sound value

f f [f]
u u [u]
þ þ [θ]
a a [a]
r r [r]
k k [k]
g g [ɡ]
w w [w]
h h [h]
n n [n]
i i [i]
j j [j]
p p [p]
I ï [i] (?)
R z [z]
s s [s]
t t [t]
b b [b]
e e [e]
m m [m]
l l [l]
ŋ ŋ [ŋ], [ŋɡ], [iŋɡ]
d d [d]
o o [o]

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 7.2 Sounds

and nowadays we write this sound as <th>, but that’s a poor substitute (try pro-
nouncing [t] and [h] together and you’ll see that it’s nothing like [θ]).

Figure 7.6: The anklebone of a roe deer, found in Caistor-by-Norwich

and dated to the 5th century. This is the earliest runic inscription yet
found in England. The word written here means ‘roe’. Try transliterat-
ing it yourself!

Bluetooth
The logo of the wireless technology standard Bluetooth
(Figure 7.7) is a rune! In fact, it’s two runes used together:
<h> and <b>, which in the Younger Futhark stand for
/h/ and /b/ respectively. These are the initials of Harald
Bluetooth, the tenth-century Danish king who the tech-
nology is named after. When two runes are written to- Figure 7.7: The
gether like this, the result is called a bind rune. Bluetooth logo

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7 The prehistory of English

7.2.3 The First Sound Shift

We’ve just seen that the early Germanic languages had the phoneme /θ/, but
that Latin – another Indo-European language – didn’t. What happened here?
Does Latin better reflect the inherited Proto-Indo-European situation, or does
Germanic?
Using the Comparative Method it’s possible to establish that it’s Germanic
that’s the innovator. In fact, the change that Proto-Germanic underwent, some
time after 500 BCE, is probably the single most important feature setting the Ger-
manic languages apart from all the other Indo-European languages. This makes
it important evidence that the Germanic languages belong together as a group.
The change is known as the First Sound Shift, or as Grimm’s Law, because it is
associated with the 19th-century linguist and mythologist Jacob Grimm (part of
the famous German “Brothers Grimm” duo, along with his brother Wilhelm). In
fact, the much less famous Danish linguist Rasmus Rask had got there first, in
the year 1818. In any case, the First Sound Shift is the second of the two famous
sound changes mentioned in Chapter 2 (the other being the Great Vowel Shift
discussed in §4.2.1).
What Rask and Grimm noticed was that there were systematic correspon-
dences between certain consonants in the Germanic languages and their coun-
terparts in the other Indo-European languages. For example, where we find a /p/
in other Indo-European languages, we often find a /f/ in Germanic languages, as
shown in Table 7.2.
Table 7.2: Indo-European /p/ & Germanic /f/ (based on Ringe 2017: 114)

Meaning Latin Greek Sanskrit Gothic Old English Old Saxon

‘foot’ ped- pod- pā́ d- fōt- fōt fōt
‘fish’ pisc- fisk- fisċ fisk
‘five’ pénte páñca fimf fīf fīf

The full set of changes that make up the First Sound Shift is given in Table 7.3.
Similar corresponding sets of examples can be found for each of these changes.
For instance, Sanskrit bhrā́tṛ ‘brother’, which starts with a voiced aspirated /bʰ/
and contains a voiceless /t/, corresponds to Gothic brōþar and Old English brōþor,
which start with a voiced unaspirated /b/ and contain a voiceless fricative /θ/.
The First Sound Shift is a regular sound change with far-reaching consequences,
and is one of the most striking and characteristic features of the Germanic lan-

322
 7.2 Sounds

Table 7.3: The First Sound Shift (after Campbell 2013: 42)

Labial Coronal Velar

voiceless stops > fricatives p>f t>θ k>x
voiced stops > voiceless stops b>p d>t ɡ>k
voiced aspirated stops > plain voiced stops bʰ > b dʰ > d ɡʰ > ɡ

guages.4 You may like to think about whether the First Sound Shift is also a chain
shift, in the sense that was discussed in §2.2.2 for the Northern Cities Shift and
in §4.2.1 for the Great Vowel Shift.

Making linguistic history: Rask, Grimm, and Verner

The version of the First Sound Shift given in Table 7.3 is almost excep-
tionless, but not quite: for instance, Sanskrit pitṛ́ ‘father’ contains a /t/
that seems to correspond to a /d/ in Gothic fadar and Old English fæder,
rather than the expected /θ/. Rask and Grimm were working in an era
before the regularity of sound change was postulated, and were aware
of some exceptions to their generalization. It wasn’t until 1875 that an-
other Danish linguist, Karl Verner, was able to show that these exceptions
were themselves governed by a robust rule. In fact, Verner’s discovery
played an important role in the establishment of the regularity of sound
change as a guiding principle in historical linguistics during the 19th cen-
tury. See Campbell (2013: 140–142) for the details of “Verner’s Law”, and
Lass (1997: 132–135) for a critical assessment of Verner and regular sound
change. (Search for Verner’s Law and the Studies in Germanic Philology
on YouTube if you’d like to watch a highly amusing film on these linguis-
tic discoveries.)

4
For more detail on the First Sound Shift, see Ringe (2017: §3.2.4) and Fulk (2018: §6.4–§6.7).

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7 The prehistory of English

7.2.4 The Germanic stress shift

Another change that divides the Germanic languages from many of their more
distant Indo-European family members has to do with the positioning of lexi-
cal stress within a word. We can reconstruct earlier Indo-European, before Ger-
manic branched off, as having a stress system that was lexically variable (simi-
larly to Present Day English: compare photo, photography, and photographic, with
the stress on the first, second, and third syllables respectively). This system was
present in Vedic Sanskrit, for instance. Different words have their primary stress
on different syllables: for example, bhrā́tṛ ‘brother’ is stressed on the first sylla-
ble, while pitṛ́ ‘father’ is stressed on the second (a syllabic /r/). In Proto-Germanic,
by contrast, the stress became fixed on the first lexical morpheme of the word,
which usually corresponded to the first syllable of the word. Thus, in the early
Germanic languages, all words have initial stress, with the exception of some
unstressed verbal prefixes such as Old English ġe-.5
Fixing the stress on the first syllable of the word had various consequences.
For one thing, a tradition of alliterative poetry developed in Germanic, and
some of these poems are preserved in many of the early Germanic languages –
including Old English, Old Saxon, Old High German and Old Norse. The most
famous example of Old English alliterative verse is Beowulf, but there is much
more.
Alliterative verse differs from rhyming verse in that what’s important is not
the end of the syllable (as in rhyming verse, e.g. pill vs. fill) but rather the first
consonant of the first syllable of the word. This sort of verse survives into Middle
English, and the first line of William Langland’s poem Piers Plowman is an acces-
sible example: In a somer seson, whan soft was the sonne ‘In summer, when the
sun was soft’. Here the alliteration is on the phoneme /s/. Clearly, word-initial
stress and alliterative verse are a match made in heaven, and linguistically it’s no
surprise that in Present Day English, with its more complex stress system, allit-
erative verse is not the dominant tradition any more. If you want to learn more
about Old English alliterative poetry, McCully & Hilles (2005: unit 5) is a great
introduction.
The fixation of stress on the initial syllable also may have had consequences
for the morphology of the Germanic languages. Proto-Germanic had a variety
of vowels in unstressed syllables, similar to (early) Old English (Chapter 6), and
these can still be seen in the Gothic Bible and the earliest runic inscriptions,

5
Similar stress-fixation changes affected other branches of the Indo-European language families
at different stages of their historical paths.

324
 7.3 Morphology

as well as to some extent in Old English and Old Saxon texts. A common ten-
dency across all the Germanic languages was to lose these vowels entirely, or
for them to lose their distinctiveness and merge together as schwa /ə/. These un-
stressed syllables, however, often carried important morphological distinctions,
especially when word-final: different cases, for instance, or different person and
number forms of the verb. The only difference between the Old English past tense
plural forms of the verb ‘to help’, hulpon (indicative mood) and hulpen (subjunc-
tive mood), for example, is the vowel in the unstressed syllable: /o/ in the indica-
tive and /e/ in the subjunctive. When the distinctive vowel quality was lost, the
morphological distinction it conveyed was often also lost. Thus, a change that
dates back to the birth of the Germanic family was still making itself felt many
centuries later. Note, though, that the fixation of stress can’t by itself explain why
some Germanic languages (like English and Afrikaans) ended up losing almost
all their morphological endings while others (like Icelandic and German) were
much more conservative.6 For that, a different story is needed: see §6.3.4.
Yet another consequence of fixing the stress was related to the fate of ablaut.
More on this in §7.3.2.

7.3 Morphology
7.3.1 The Germanic weak past tense
Alongside the First Sound Shift and Germanic stress shift, a third major change
characterizing the Germanic languages but not other Indo-European relatives
was the development of a new type of past tense for weak verbs.
In all of these present-day Germanic languages, and in all the early Germanic
languages as well, the regular past tense is formed using a suffix containing some
sort of coronal consonant – usually /d/.7 But this type of past tense formation is
not found elsewhere in the Indo-European family.8 How did it arise?
As usual with changes that predate the textual record, there are different the-
ories, and we have to decide which is the most plausible. Here we’ll briefly illus-
trate the dominant contender (as summarized in Ringe 2017: 191–192), which is

6
There are also other languages where the stress is fixed on the first syllable, such as Finnish,
which show no signs of vowel reductions in unstressed syllables, again suggesting that the
fixation of stress isn’t the whole story.
7
See §5.3.2 if you need a reminder of what weak, strong, regular, and irregular mean.
8
This is a bit of a simplification. Some Iranian languages – also belonging to Indo-European –
have undergone a very similar development independently. See Kümmel (2020).

325
7 The prehistory of English

Table 7.4: Forms of the past tense of ‘play’ in present-day Germanic

languages

Language Infinitive Past (3rd Singular)

English play played
Danish lege legede
Dutch spelen speelde
Faroese spæla spældi
German spielen spielte
Norwegian leke lekte

that the Germanic weak past in /d/ arose when a sequence consisting of a non-
finite verb form and a past tense form of the verb *dōną ‘to do’ was reinterpreted
as a single word. Basically, two originally independent words got stuck together.
Thus, in essence, a form like played originated as something like play did. This
sort of happening is well known in the literature on grammaticalization (Hop-
per & Traugott 2003), where it’s usually known as univerbation. See also the
discussion of the Modern English semi-modals in §3.4.2.
This theory receives direct support from a set of plural forms in Gothic. In
this language, the past tense of weak verbs in the plural ends in -dēdun, e.g.
nasidēdun ‘they saved/healed’, sōkidēdun ‘they sought, looked for’. This reflects
exactly the reconstructed Proto-Germanic past tense of the verb *dōną, which is
*dēdun in the third person plural.9 These forms are the only place in Germanic
where the assumed historical development is reflected so precisely, and indicate
that the verb *dōną has to be at least part of the story.
We can’t be sure that this is what happened in the prehistory of Germanic. But
it does fit with what we know about common pathways of grammatical change,
without needing to wave a magic wand and propose a historical development
that has no parallel elsewhere. See Ringe (2017: 191–192) for a much more detailed
version of the story. This sort of evidence might not stand up in a court of law,
but it’s good linguistic detective work nonetheless.

9
Note that the /d/ at the end of the form *dēdun is part of the stem, not part of the ending. If it
were part of the ending, the theory would be circular, as it would require there to have already
been a weak past in /d/ in Proto-Germanic, and so its origin would remain unexplained.

326
 7.3 Morphology

7.3.2 The Germanic strong verbs

Alongside the weak verbs, the strong verbs constituted the other big group of
verbs in early Germanic. As we’ve seen in §6.3,10 the endings on strong verbs in
Old English were very similar to those of weak verbs, but they differed in how
they formed their past tense: where the weak verbs added an ending containing
a /d/, the strong verbs changed the vowel in the stem.
For Present Day English, and to a certain extent for Middle and Old English,
the dominant approach to the vowel alternations in the strong verbs is simply to
treat them as irregular and lexically listed. In other words, for each strong verb,
the language user simply has to memorize the relevant past tense forms in their
entirety (Pinker 1999). However, things weren’t always like this. The further we
go back in time, the more we find that the strong verbs follow a neat, orderly
system that actually makes sense.
Table 7.5 gives some illustrative forms for the first three classes of strong verbs
in Old English (there are seven in total; we’ll leave aside classes IV–VII). The
column “1st past” gives the vowel used in the first and third persons singular of
the past tense; “2nd past” gives the vowel used elsewhere in the past tense.
Table 7.5: Strong verb classes in Old English

Class Sample verb 1st past 2nd past

I drīfan ‘to drive’ drāf drifon
II crēopan ‘to creep’ crēap crupon
III helpan ‘to help’ healp hulpon

Reducing this to its essentials gives us the vowel system in Table 7.6.
Table 7.6: Vowels in strong verbs in Old English

Class Present 1st past 2nd past

I ī ā i
II ēo ēa u
III e ea u

Things are even more transparent if we consider the Proto-Germanic ancestors

of these vowels: see Table 7.7.
10
And also in Chapter 5 for Middle English: §5.3.2.

327
7 The prehistory of English

Table 7.7: Stems in strong verbs in Proto-Germanic

Class Present 1st past 2nd past

I ei > ī ai i
II eu au u
III e a u

And we can go back even further in time and reconstruct how the precursors
of this system must have worked in Proto-Indo-European: see Table 7.8. In this
table, Ø stands for no vowel at all, S stands for a sonorant consonant (/r/, /l/, or
a nasal), and C stands for any consonant.
Table 7.8: Stems of Germanic strong verbs in Proto-Indo-European

Class Present 1st perfect 2nd perfect

I ei oi Øi
II eu ou Øu
III eSC oSC ØSC

Here we see that the vowels used in the different tense forms (these are tradi-
tionally termed ablaut grades) are exactly the same across classes: the “e-grade”
in the present, the “o-grade” in the 1st past, and the “zero grade” in the 2nd past.
What differs is the structure of the verb stem only. What then happened in the
transition from Proto-Indo-European to Old English via Proto-Germanic is that
a series of regular sound changes destroyed the neatness of this morphological
system by creating more differences between classes. The diphthong /ei/, for ex-
ample, becomes long /iː/, as reflected in the present tense form of Class I.
It is likely that sound changes like these made the new forms extremely in-
transparent to learners, and hence over time caused the strong verbs to stop
being productive and instead become completely irregular. Certainly almost all
verbs introduced from Old English onwards (for instance, via borrowing) are in-
flected as weak rather than strong.

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 7.4 Syntax

Sturtevant’s paradox

Regular sound change operates “with blind necessity” – meaning with-

out regard for semantics, morphological structure, etc. As a consequence,
just as in the case of the Germanic strong verbs, regular sound changes
can wreak havoc on an otherwise well-behaved morphological system –
paradoxically, disrupting their “regularity”. This is known as Sturtevant’s
paradox: sound change is regular, but creates irregularity. Morphological
analogy, on the other hand, is irregular (in the sense that it affects only
specific words, usually not whole classes of words), but creates regularity.

7.4 Syntax
7.4.1 Expressing the subject
A lot of the phonology, morphology and lexicon of Proto-Germanic and Proto-
Indo-European can be confidently reconstructed using the Comparative Method.
Things haven’t gone as smoothly with reconstructing the syntax of these lan-
guages. Still, progress has been made in syntactic reconstruction, especially in
recent years. This section will present just one tiny case study: the expression of
subjects.
Present Day English is a language that loves to express its subjects. So much
so, in fact, that a sentence without a subject is simply not possible or grammat-
ical in most normal contexts: *speaks English, or *is here.11 This even extends to
sentences like It is raining or It seems that ..., in which the It doesn’t refer to
anything at all. We can thus say that both non-referential and referential sub-
jects must be overtly expressed in English. One way to analyse this is to say that
Present Day English has a requirement that the specifier of IP in the tree (recall
our tree structure introduced in §1.2.3) must be present and filled by some overt
element.
Not all languages are like this, though. In Italian and Chinese, for example,
there’s no such requirement to express the subject. An Italian sentence like Parlo
11
Leaving out subjects in Present Day English is only possible in very restricted contexts, as
mentioned briefly in §1.2.3, and more in writing than in speech.

329
7 The prehistory of English

italiano ‘Speak.1sg Italian’, meaning ‘I speak Italian’, with no subject pronoun,

is perfectly grammatical, as long as the context allows us to infer who or what
the subject is. In earlier stages of English, too, the expression of the subject was
optional: Rusten (2019) has carried out a detailed investigation. Middle English,
on the whole, was a language in which referential subjects (like I, he, she ...) had
to be expressed, but non-referential subjects (like the It of It seems that ...) could
be left out. For the most part, Old English is like this too, but in the very earliest
Old English texts, and especially the poetry, we also find that referential subjects
could be left out, particularly in the third person. Here’s an example from Beowulf,
in which the understood subject is a wealthy man:

(1) þonne bið on hreþre under helm drepen biteran strǣle

then is in heart.dat under helm.acc hit bitter.dat dart.dat
‘Then he is hit in the heart, under his helmet, by the bitter dart’ (Beowulf
lines 1745–1746)

This kind of subject omission is found in all the other early Germanic languages
too, especially Gothic. Walkden (2014: Chapter 5) argues that on this basis we
can reconstruct subject omission as a property of Proto-Germanic, affecting
both referential and non-referential subjects. Looking across at other early Indo-
European languages such as Sanskrit, Latin and Greek, all of which can omit
subjects very freely, it seems likely that subject omission was also a property of
Proto-Indo-European.

7.4.2 Analytic and synthetic languages

You’ve probably noticed a trend: the further back in time we go, the more mor-
phology we see. While Present Day English varieties are very morphologically
impoverished, Old English has a relatively rich inflectional morphology for
both nouns and verbs, and Proto-Germanic – as far as we can tell – must have
been even richer.
In §6.3, for instance, we discussed the Old English case system for nouns. There
we were able to identify four cases: nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive.
In fact, there are also traces of a fifth case in Old English, the instrumental, which
is used for the instrument or means by which an action is achieved. Here’s an
example:

(2) hē wǣre ġetogen mid þon īsnan hōce on þǣre piċenan

he was.sbjv pulled with the.inst iron hook into the.dat pitchlike

330
 7.4 Syntax

ēa
water
‘He was dragged with the iron hook into the murky water’
(Blickling Homilies, The Third Sunday in Lent)
The instrumental is already dying out gradually during the Old English period,
and we find variation (see Freeman 2018), with the instrumental being replaced
by the dative. In Old English, distinctive instrumental endings are only really
found on pronouns and occasionally adjectives. (In the example above, the adjec-
tive īsnan ‘iron’ and the noun hōce ‘hook’ have ambiguous endings.)

Why?

The word why is the only surviving trace of the instrumental in Present
Day standard Englishes. It originated as the instrumental form of the pro-
noun hwæt, meaning ‘what’.

The instrumental is found in the other early Germanic languages too, and if
we look at Gothic, we find traces of a sixth case, the vocative, used for people
(or things) being directly addressed. This means that Proto-Germanic is usually
reconstructed with all six of these cases. Proto-Indo-European, meanwhile, is
usually reconstructed with two additional cases, the ablative and the locative
(Clackson 2007: 90–100). The further we go back, it seems, the more cases and
the more case morphology we find. The same is true for verbal tenses and moods,
and verbal morphology in general.
Languages that rely heavily on inflections to code grammatical information
are known as synthetic, and languages that use function words and strict word
order to code the same information are known as analytic ([ˌanəˈlɪtɪk]). To take
the case study discussed in the previous subsection, the strict use of subject pro-
nouns (a type of function word) in most Present Day Englishes can be said to be
an analytic feature, as opposed to the possibility of subject omission in earlier
English, more characteristic of synthetic languages. Analytic and synthetic are
not strict classes of language, but rather there’s a continuum between synthetic
and analytic languages: a language can be more or less synthetic.
Sometimes it’s said that the history of English involves a transition from syn-
thetic (Old English) to analytic (Present Day English), but that’s only partially

331
7 The prehistory of English

true: Old English had a relatively rigid word order, only two morphological
tenses, and a lot of syncretism in person and case endings (as we saw in Chap-
ter 6). Also, by some measures, English has actually become more synthetic since
the Early Modern period: see Szmrecsányi (2012). In general it’s a good idea to be
wary of any story that says that the history of English involves a straightforward
progression from one thing to another thing. When it comes to language history,
to quote Algernon in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, “The truth
is rarely pure and never simple.”

7.4.3 Tense, aspect and the verbal system

The Germanic languages inherited a two-way opposition between present (or
nonpast) and past tense from Proto-Germanic, and morphologically this is the
only tense distinction to be found in any Germanic language. However, several
early Germanic languages, including Old English, can be seen to develop new
ways of expressing different nuances of temporal, aspectual and modal meaning.
Usually these are analytic in the sense of the previous subsection: they are con-
structed by means of a non-finite form and an auxiliary verb. One of these is a
new perfect construction, which involves a past participle and a form of have
or be. Here’s an example from Old English:

(3) Þā hīe ... þǣr tō ġewīcod hæfdon . þā onġēt se here ...

when they there to encamped had then realized the host
‘When they had made camp for this, then the army realized ...’
(Old English Chronicle, year 896)

Because all the early Germanic languages develop a new perfect construction in
the same way, it has been argued that this should be reconstructed for Proto-
Germanic too (Brinton 1988). However, Drinka (2017: Chapter 9) argues that it is
a later development, and is introduced into the Northwest Germanic languages
through contact with Latin, after Proto-Germanic had already diverged into dis-
tinct languages.

7.5 Lexicon
7.5.1 Sources of the lexicon
Just as a large proportion of the vocabulary of Old English was inherited from
Proto-Germanic, so a large proportion of the vocabulary of Proto-Germanic was

332
 7.5 Lexicon

inherited straight from Proto-Indo-European. At one point, it was thought that

around a third of Proto-Germanic lexical items had a non-Indo-European origin
(Feist 1924: 88), and that massive contact influence was needed to explain the
Proto-Germanic lexicon. However, more recent research has cast doubt on this
(see Roberge 2010: 407–409). There must certainly have been a population speak-
ing non-Indo-European languages in contact with Germanic during its early de-
velopment, and we’ve seen throughout this book that language contact is almost
ubiquitous in language history. However, on the whole the Germanic lexicon is
not more innovative than that of other branches of Indo-European, and so there’s
no need for special pleading.

7.5.2 Word formation

Like Old English, Proto-Germanic was fond of compounding as a source of new
words. This is the origin of the Present Day English days of the week, for instance:
see Table 7.9. Tiw, Odin, Thor and Frigg are part of the pre-Christian pantheon
of gods attested in Germanic sources (best known from Norse mythology; see
Gaiman 2017), and Monday and Sunday are named for the moon and the sun
respectively. Saturn is a Roman god, and in fact betrays the origin of the whole
system: Tiw, Odin, Thor and Frigg correspond to Mars, Mercury, Jupiter and
Venus from the Roman pantheon, and the days of the week in many Germanic
languages are simply translations of these.
Table 7.9: The days of the week in Present Day English and in Proto-
Germanic

English Proto-Germanic Meaning

Monday *mēniniz dagaz ‘Moon’s day’
Tuesday *tīwasa dagaz ‘Tiw (god of war)’s day’
Wednesday *wōdanasa dagaz ‘Odin’s day’
Thursday *þunarasa dagaz ‘Thor’s day’
Friday *frijjōz dagaz ‘Frigg’s day’
Saturday *saturnasa dagaz ‘Saturn’s day’
Sunday *sunnōniz dagaz ‘Sun’s day’

Ablaut (discussed in connection with strong verbs in §7.3.2 above) could also
be used for word-formation in Proto-Germanic and early Germanic. This gives
rise to whole families of related words. For instance, the Old English strong verb

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7 The prehistory of English

beran ‘to bear, to carry’ reflects the e-grade in Proto-Indo-European. Some de-
rived nouns, like bearm ‘lap, bosom’ and bearwe ‘barrow, basket’, reflect the
Proto-Indo-European o-grade. Other derived nouns, such as bora ‘bearer, carrier’
and byrele ‘cup-bearer’, reflect the zero-grade (see Lass 1994: 191). These different
ablaut variants are still found in Present Day English, e.g. to ride vs. a road, to
sing vs. a song. So Proto-Germanic had a variety of language-internal ways of
coining new words.

7.5.3 Borrowing
Speakers of Proto-Germanic were also perfectly happy to borrow words from
speakers of other languages, either consciously or subconsciously. At an early
stage these speakers were in contact with speakers of Proto-Finnic, the ancestor
language of modern Finnish and Estonian (Koivulehto 1980). Old English healf
‘half’, for instance, goes back to Proto-Germanic *halbaz, and may originate in
Proto-Finnic halpa meaning ‘reduced’ (Hyllested 2014: 103–105). It’s even more
certain that there were borrowings the other way round, too: Finnish and Esto-
nian kuningas ‘king’ directly reflect the Proto-Finnic form, which must have been
borrowed from Proto-Germanic *kuningaz. What’s neat about this borrowing is
that it reflects the nominative singular -az ending, which is reconstructed for
Proto-Germanic using the Comparative Method but which isn’t directly attested
in any Germanic language. The word must have been borrowed into Proto-Finnic
straight from Proto-Germanic, before it split up into its daughters and the ending
was lost.
In what’s traditionally known as the “migration period” (200–600 CE), the
language that played the most important role for the lexicon of pre-Old English
was Latin. Many Latin words must have been borrowed in continental Europe,
before the speakers of what was to be Old English arrived in Britain. We can
spot these very early borrowings because they have undergone the same sound
changes as Old English words themselves, and because they are found in the
other Northwest Germanic languages. For instance, Old English sæcc ‘sackcloth’,
from Latin saccus, has cognates in Old Frisian, Old Saxon, Old Norse, etc., and
the presence of the /æ/ is an unmistakable sign that it’s undergone Anglo-Frisian
Brightening (§7.2.1) – which means that it must have already been in the language
by the time this sound change happened. By contrast, later Latin loanwords in
Old English, such as those associated with Christianization from the 7th century
onwards, do not show the effects of these early sound changes.

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 7.6 Final note

7.6 Final note

Here you are at the end – or is it the beginning? More than any other period,
this prehistoric era shows us just how difficult the work of the practising his-
torian really is, regardless of whether they are investigating language, society,
biology, material culture, or something else entirely. When it comes to language,
we can reconstruct prehistoric language stages using relatively reliable methods,
but even these shed less and less light on the situation the further we go back
in time. Proto-Germanic and Proto-Indo-European, the ancestors of English, are
within our grasp. Beyond that, we can only speculate.

Suggested exercises

E.1 The dark arts

In this exercise, try to use your knowledge of the sound changes that the
West Germanic languages have undergone in order to reconstruct proto-
forms for Proto-West-Germanic words. You’ll need to take into account
the sound changes that we’ve discussed in this chapter and in §6.2 of
Chapter 6. Here are two additional changes that will help you with your
reconstructions:
• In Old Frisian, word-final nasal consonants were lost in infinitives.

• In Old High German, /p/ became /f/ in some phonetic environments.

Here are the sets of cognates for you to work with:

1. Old English slǣpan, Old Frisian slēpa, Old High German slāfan ‘to
sleep’

2. Old English sċip, Old Frisian skip, Old High German skif ‘ship’

3. Old English mȳs, Old Saxon mūsi, Old High German mūsi ‘mice’

4. Old Frisian skēp, Old Saxon skāp, Old High German skāf ‘sheep’

5. Old English hond, Old Frisian hond, Old Saxon hand ‘hand’

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7 The prehistory of English

6. Old English sċīnan, Old Frisian skīna, Old High German skīnan ‘to
shine’

E.2 Completely futharked

Decode, by transliterating, the messages below written in Present Day

English using the Older Futhark alphabet.
1. old:frisian:is:fun

2. i:see:dead:people

3. þe:truþ:is:out:þere

4. one:small:step:for:man

E.3 Sound change does come to an end...

As we saw in this chapter, Grimm’s Law took centuries to complete. This

is not unusual. Nevertheless, the change did come to an end. Here are
some words that underwent Grimm’s Law: corn, cool, eat, foot, fish, hearty,
horn, kin, knee, teach, tooth, three.
Below is a table with Latin words and existing English words borrowed
from Latin after Grimm’s Law came to an end, sometimes via French or
other Romance languages. This means that the consonantal changes are
nowhere to be seen in these loanwords. Use the third column to match
the words above with those that were borrowed from Latin later.

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 Suggested exercises

Latin word Borrowed from Latin PDE Germanic word

ped- pedal [p]
genu genuflect [ɡ]
dens dental [d]
cor cordial [k]
piscis Pisces [f]
granum granular [ɡ]
glaces glacial [ɡ]
dicere dictate [d]
cornu cornet [k]
tres trio [t]
genus genus [ɡ]
edo edible [d]

Acknowledgement: This exercise is taken from Johanna Wood’s 2016 teach-

ing materials.

E.4 Umlaut
The following Old English words and their reconstructed Germanic
sources illustrate some mutations:

Proto-West-Germanic Old English Present Day English

*gōs-i (plural noun) > gēs ‘geese’
*fōd-jan (verb from noun) > fēdan ‘to feed’
*stel-idi (3sg verb form) > stilþ ‘steals’

1. Describe how the vowels changed between Proto-West-Germanic

and Old English in each of these three words.

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7 The prehistory of English

2. What were the conditions that caused the mutations?

3. Why is the cause of mutation not clear in written Old English?

Acknowledgement: This exercise is based on Johanna Wood’s 2016 teach-

ing materials.

E.5 How do we decide what’s regular and what’s irregular?

Recall that regular is not the same as weak, and irregular is not the same
as strong. In this chapter we’ve talked about the origins of weak verbs
and their distinctive feature (§7.3.1). Your task in this exercise is to look at
the sets of Old English verb forms given and decide whether each verb is
a) weak or strong and b) regular or irregular.
1. dropian ‘to drop’: dropast (2sg.pres), dropode (3sg.past)

2. metan ‘to measure’: mitst (2sg.pres), mæt (3sg.past)

3. stincan ‘to smell bad’: stincst (2sg.pres), stanc (3sg.past)

4. bringan ‘to bring’: bringest (2sg.pres), brōhte (3sg.past)

E.6 Essay topics

Write a short essay in which you critically discuss one of the following
claims.
• “Bede’s story of the aduentus Saxonum is oversimplified, but basi-
cally correct.”

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 Texts

• “Old English is a typical Germanic language.”

• “Whereas Present Day English is a typical analytic language, Old

English is a prime example of a synthetic language.”

• “The Germanic weak past tense arose through univerbation.”

• “Sound changes obscure the underlying systematicity of ablaut.”

• “Old English poetry is subject to both literary and linguistic con-

straints.”

Texts
The text samples for this chapter are a mixed bag, due to the fact that there
simply aren’t any substantial English texts from the period up to 600 CE. The
first two texts are actually from later than 600, the third is from circa 600, and
only the first and third can reasonably be said to be in English! Still, all of them
should help to shed some light on the development of English from Proto-Indo-
European via Proto-Germanic. Glosses and translations are provided for all texts
in this chapter.

T.1 Franks Casket

This text is in Old English of the early 8th century. It’s featured in this
chapter rather than the previous chapter because it’s written in the runic
(futhorc) alphabet. Note that the material aspect of this object is important:
Figure 7.8 shows just one side of a small whalebone casket, probably of
Northumbrian origin, that can now be seen in the British Museum. Start-
ing at the top left and working its way round clockwise, the text on this
panel is a riddle, relating to the material the casket is made of. Can you
see how the transcription (below) relates to the runes in the image?

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7 The prehistory of English

Figure 7.8: The Franks casket

fisc . flodu . ahof on ferg | enberig | warþ ga:sric grorn

fish flood.nom lifted on mountain became rage-beast sad
þær he on greut giswom | hronæs ban
where he on grit swam whale.gen bone
‘The flood lifted a fish onto the cliffs. The angry beast became sad
where he swam in the sand. Whalebone.’

T.2 Old Saxon worm charm: Contra vermes ‘Against

worms’
This text is also later, written in the 10th century. It’s in Old Saxon, the
closest first-millennium relative of Old English. See if you can spot allit-
eration! You may also notice the absence of Anglo-Frisian Brightening.

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 Texts

Gang út nesso. mid nigun. nessiklinon.

go out worm with nine worm-small-dat.pl
út fana themo. margę. | an that. ben.
out from the.dat marrow.dat to the.acc bone.acc
fan themo. bene. an that. flesg
from the.dat bone.dat to the.acc flesh.acc
ut fan themo. | flesgke. an thia hud.
out from the.dat flesh to the.acc skin.acc
ut fan thera. hud. an thesa strala.
out from the.dat skin.dat to this.acc arrow.acc
drohtin uuerthe so.
lord become.sbjv so
‘Get out, worm, with nine little worms! Out from the marrow to the
bone, from the bone to the flesh, out from the flesh to the skin, out
from the skin to this arrow. Lord, may it be so!’

T.3 The Law of Æþelberht

King Æþelberht of Kent (/ˈæðelberxt/) lived between 550–616. One of the

things he is known for is being one of the very first Old English kings who
converted to Christianity. Another thing he’s known for, more relevant
here, is his famous law code, which provides a lot of detail on what sort of
fines applied under what circumstances at the time. This code is actually
the earliest such work attested in any Germanic language. We give you
a few lines below. If you’d like to know what the punishment was for
making someone lose their tooth or the ability to speak, read on!a
31 Gif fri man ƿið fries mannes ƿif ʒeliʒeþ · his ƿerʒelde
if free man with free.gen man.gen wife lies his wergild
abicʒe. ⁊ oðer ƿif his aʒenum scætte beʒete · ⁊
pay-off.sbjv and other wife his own.dat money.dat get.sbjv and

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7 The prehistory of English

ðæm oðrum æt þam ʒebrenʒe·

the.dat other.dat at that.dat bring.sbjv
‘If a free man sleeps with another free man’s wife, he should pay
his wergild and pay for another wife with his own money and
bring her to the other man at home.’
32 Gif man rihthamscyld þurh stinð. mid ƿeorðe forʒelde·
if man rihthamscyld through pierces with worth.dat pay.sbjv
‘If someone pierces the rihthamscyld,b let him pay with its worth.’
33 Gif feaxfanʒ ʒeweorð. l. sceatta to bote·
if hair-grip happens 50 sceattas to restitution
‘If there is seizing of hair, 50 sceattas should be paid as restitution.’
34 Gif banes blice ƿeorðeþ. iii. scillinʒum ʒebete·
if bone.gen exposure happens 3 shillings pay.sbjv
‘If a bone is exposed, 3 shillings should be paid.’
35 Gif banes bite ƿeorð. IIII. scillinʒum ʒebete·
if bone.gen bite happens 4 shillings pay.sbjv
‘If a bone is cut, 4 shillings should be paid.’
36 Gif sio uterre hion ʒebrocen ƿeorðeþ. x. scillinʒum ʒebete·
if the outer hion broken becomes 10 shillings pay.sbjv
‘If the outer bone of the head is broken, 10 shillings should be paid.’
36.1 Gif butu sien. xx. scillinʒum ʒebete·
if both be.sbjv 20 shillings pay.sbjv
‘If both are (broken), 20 shillings should be paid.’
37 Gif eaxle ʒelæmed ƿeorþeð. xxx. scill ʒebete·
if shoulder lamed becomes 30 shillings pay.sbjv
‘If a shoulder is lamed, 30 shillings should be paid.’
38 Gif oþer eare naƿiht ʒehereð. xxv· scill ʒebete·
if either ear nothing hears 25 shillings pay.sbjv
‘If either ear loses hearing, 25 shillings should be paid.’

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 Texts

39 Gif eare of ƿeorð aslaʒen. xii. scill ʒebete·

if ear off becomes cut 12 shillings pay.sbjv
‘If an ear is cut off, 12 shillings should be paid.’
40 Gif eare þirel ƿeorðeþ· iii· scill ʒebete·
if ear pierced becomes 3 shillings pay.sbjv
‘If an ear is pierced, 3 shillings should be paid.’
41 Gif eare sceard ƿeorðeþ· vi· scill ʒebete·
if ear gashed becomes 6 shillings pay.sbjv
‘If an ear is gashed, 6 shillings should be paid.’
42 Gif eaʒe of ƿeorð. l· scillinʒum ʒebete·
if eye off becomes 50 shillings pay.sbjv
‘If an eye is cut out, 50 shillings should be paid.’
43 Gif muð oþþe eaʒe ƿoh ƿeorðeþ· xii· scill ʒebete.
if mouth or eye damaged becomes 12 shillings pay.sbjv
‘If the mouth or eye is damaged, 12 shillings should be paid.’
44 Gif nasu ðyrel ƿeorð· viiii· scillinʒum ʒebete·
if nose pierced becomes 9 shillings pay.sbjv
‘If the nose is pierced, 9 shillings should be paid.’
44.1 Gif hit sio an hleore iii· scill ʒebete.
if it be.sbjv on cheek.dat 3 shillings pay.sbjv
‘If it (the piercing) is on the cheek, 3 shillings should be paid.’
44.2 Gif butu ðyrele sien. vi. scill ʒebete·
if both pierced be.sbjv 6 shillings pay.sbjv
‘If both are pierced, 6 shillings should be paid.’
45 Gif nasu ælcor sceard ƿeorð ʒehwylc· vi· scill
if nose otherwise gashed becomes each 6 shillings
ʒebete·
pay.sbjv

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7 The prehistory of English

‘If the nose otherwise becomes gashed, 6 shillings should be paid

for each.’
46 Gif ðirel ƿeorþ· vi· scill ʒebete·
if pierced becomes 6 shillings pay.sbjv
‘If it becomes pierced, 6 shillings should be paid.’
47 Se þe cinban forslæhð mid· xx· scillinʒum forʒelde.
he who chin-bone breaks with 20 shillings pay.sbjv
‘He who breaks the jawbone should pay 20 shillings.’
48 Æt þam feoƿer toðum fyrestum æt ʒehƿylcum· vi·
at the.dat four teeth.dat first.dat at each 6
scillinʒas.
shillings
‘The four front teeth are worth 6 shillings each.’
48.1 Se toþ se þanne bi standeþ· iiii· sci·
the tooth that then by stands 4 shillings
‘The tooth next to them is worth 4 shillings.’
48.2 Se þe ðonne bi ðam standeþ. iii· scill.
that which then by that.dat stands 3 shillings
‘The one next to that one is worth 3 shillings.’
48.3 And þõn siþþan ʒehƿylc scillinʒ·
and then after each shilling
‘And one shilling for each one (tooth) after.’
49 Gif spræc aƿyrd ƿeorþ. xii· scillinʒas.
if speech damaged becomes 12 shillings
‘If speech becomes damaged, 12 shillings should be paid.’
a
From the manuscript at https://earlyenglishlaws.ac.uk/laws/manuscripts/h/?tp=
s&nb=69, ff. 2r-2v; accessed May 2020; punctuation kept as in the original. A Present
Day English translation as well as a transliteration of the entire work can be found
here: https://earlyenglishlaws.ac.uk/laws/texts/abt/. The line numbering follows this
version for ease of comparison, but in the Old English manuscript the different fines

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 Texts

start and begin at different points of the individual lines, marked by a red capital letter
in the manuscript.
b
The word hamscyld is extremely difficult to translate, and scholars have been specu-
lating as to what this might mean exactly. See e.g. Ammon (2002) for some ideas.

T.4 The Gothic Bible

This text is from the 4th-century Gothic Bible translation. It’s an excerpt
of the parable of the Sower and the Seed (Mark 4, verses 3–4), like the
one we saw in Exercise 1 of Chapter 1. Gothic is an East Germanic lan-
guage, and is often thought to be the closest Germanic language to Proto-
Germanic because of its early attestation and complex morphology.
hauseiþ! Sai, urrann sa saiands du saian fraiwa
hear.2pl.imp see out.ran the sower.nom to sow seed.dat
seinamma.
his.dat
Jah warþ, miþþanei saiso, sum raihtis gadraus faur wig,
and became while sowed some though fell to way
jah qemun fuglos jah fretun þata.
and came.3pl bird.nom.pl and ate that.acc
‘Listen! The sower went out to sow his seed. And it happened that,
while he sowed, some fell onto the road, and birds came and ate it.’

T.5 The Golden Horn of Gallehus

Another runic inscription, this time in something close to Proto-Norse,
the ancestor language of the North Germanic branch. This one was found

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on a drinking horn made of sheet gold, one of a pair, in Gallehus, Denmark.

It dates to the early 5th century CE. Discovered in 1734, the horn was
stolen and melted down in 1802. Fortunately, detailed drawings had been
made, so that a replica could be constructed, and the ancient inscription
itself was not lost.

Figure 7.9: The Golden Horn of Gallehus replica (Photo by Bloodofox,

licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0)

The inscription is in the Older Futhark, and consists of a single clause. The
verb in this clause is a characteristically Germanic weak past tense form!

ekhlewagastiR:holtijaR:horna:tawido:
ek hlewagastiz: holtijaz: horna: tawido:
I Hlewagastiz Holtijaz horn made
‘I, Hlewagastiz Holtijaz, made this horn.’

Recommended further reading

If you’re interested in the history and archaeology of Britain, Fleming

(2010) is a recent and masterful overview, starting before the aduentus
Saxonum and covering the whole period up to 1070 CE. For Indo-European
history and archaeology, Anthony (2007) should be the first place to look.
Robinson (1992) is a great introduction to the early Germanic languages,

346
 Texts

and Clackson (2007) introduces comparative Indo-European linguistics.

On the general methodology of historical linguistics and linguistic re-
construction, there are many good textbooks available: we’d recommend
Campbell (2013).
Findell (2014) is a handy guide to the world of Germanic and Old En-
glish runes. There is a substantial literature on Germanic and Old English
alliterative verse, but from a linguistic perspective the clearest overview
is to be found in McCully & Hilles (2005). Finally, if you’d like to find
out more about the specific phonological, morphological and syntactic
changes that characterized the prehistory of English, the first two vol-
umes of Ringe’s Linguistic History of English (Ringe 2017; Ringe & Taylor
2014) are treasure troves of information, as is Fulk (2018) – though be
warned that they are not exactly light bedtime reading.

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8 Wrapping up
Congratulations! You’ve reached the end of the journey. But as T. S. Eliot reminds
us,

In my beginning is my end.
...
In my end is my beginning.
(Eliot 1977: 177, 183)

Indeed, here we are, at the end of this book, but the journey has only just begun.
Before you go on to your further adventures, though, it’s important to make sure
that you have sufficiently processed your experiences from all the recent travels.
In this final chapter, we first remind you of the reasons why studying the history
of English can be useful and exciting, we then present you with an overview of
the main themes we covered, and finally – as always – exercises await which
should help you to consolidate all that knowledge you picked up along the way.

8.1 Main observations

We hit the road in Chapter 1, where we discussed six main observations that our
voyage was to make us aware of. The remaining chapters then took us to differ-
ent temporal destinations, in which specific examples relevant for the specific
periods were covered.

8.1.1 Variation, variation everywhere

First of all, we saw that variation is indeed omnipresent. All natural languages
vary, and variation is found in all areas of the English language. We saw this
plenty of times, but let’s have a look at some examples. We find examples of
orthographic (or spelling) variation:

• Present Day English <you> vs. <u> for you

• Middle English <whanne> vs. <quanne> for when (§5.2.2 and §5.2.3)
8 Wrapping up

Phonetic and phonological variation:

• Present Day English rising intonation in statements (2.2.3)
• Old English hlaf /hlaːf/ becoming Middle English /laːf/ (§5.2.3)
Morphological variation:
• Present Day English The government want to support bumblebee sprees vs.
The government wants to support bumblebee sprees (§2.3.2)
• Middle English pronouns they, them replacing earlier hie, hem (§5.3.3)
Syntactic variation:
• Present Day English My hedgehog got stolen vs. My hedgehog was stolen
(§2.4.2)
• Early Modern English What do you read? vs. earlier What read you? (§4.4.1)
Lexical variation:
• Present Day English trousers vs. pants (§1.2.4)
• café referring to a place serving different things in different communities
of English (§1.2.4)
• Old and Middle English meat referring to what today’s food refers to
And pragmatic variation:
• Present Day English dialectal terms of address like love and pet (§1.2.5)
• Middle and Early Modern English second person pronoun variation be-
tween thou/thee and ye/you (§4.3.1)
As these examples also demonstrate, we find variation in all linguistic levels in
all stages of the history of English: Old English, Middle English, Early Modern
English, Late Modern English, and Present Day English. And even in the prehis-
tory of the language (Chapter 7), we can be sure that there was variation, even
if not all of it is recoverable by means of linguistic reconstruction.
In addition, we saw that there’s another dimension to variation which seeps
through language – the social aspects of language variation. You will, for in-
stance, remember the example of progressive passives (e.g. The bumblebees are
being watched) being (a) heavily stigmatized in Late Modern English; and (b) as-
sociated with the group of the Lake Poets. As speakers of Present Day English, we
know that progressive passives are (a) no longer stigmatized, and (b) no longer
associated with the Lake Poets. Linguistic variation can serve a wide range of
functions, and the social meaning of variation is also subject to change.

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 8.1 Main observations

8.1.2 The social life of language

In every period of the language, it therefore also became apparent that linguis-
tic variation more often than not comes with a certain social function, or social
meaning. In other words, although many instances of linguistic variation do not
change the lexical content of a sentence, they can reveal various social affiliations
of the speakers. We discussed this most in the chapter on Present Day English,
where it’s easiest to tap into such social meanings of linguistic variation, but
there’s no doubt that cases of variation in the older periods also went hand in
hand with variably complex social implications.
To refresh our memory a little bit here, remember the stigma associated with
/h/-dropping discussed in Chapter 3, related to one’s social class and therefore
status in the power dynamics of the social hierarchy. We also touched upon the
case of AAE (African American English), whose linguistic features typically sig-
nal one’s ethnicity. But even something as innocuous as spelling can signal social
meaning; can you imagine your grandparents writing C u l8er! to you, or some
such? To combine a range of linguistic phenomena clearly imbued with social
meaning, imagine your grandparents writing S’up, bro? when communicating
with you.

8.1.3 Irregularities
Within standard (and most non-standard) varieties of English, in Chapters 4–
7 we read about changes and alternations that have resulted in the following
irregularities:

• irregular plural formation: child ∼ children; man ∼ men; ox ∼ oxen; sheep

∼ sheep; wolf ∼ wolves

• irregular verbal inflection: drink ∼ drank ∼ drunk; keep ∼ kept ∼ kept

• irregular comparatives and superlatives: old ∼ elder ∼ eldest 1

• not numerous but frequent noun-adjective correspondences: length ∼ long;

sanity ∼ sane

• not numerous but frequent noun-verb correspondences: song ∼ sing; tooth

∼ teethe

1
These coexist in most varieties of English with the regular (and more frequently used) forms
older and oldest.

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8 Wrapping up

Many more examples were provided in the relevant chapters, and now you’re
less in the dark as to where they come from. And if you’re still as much in the
dark as before starting reading this book, we recommend revisiting the chapters,
especially if it’s been some time between your last classes and your exam prepa-
ration. And remember there’s always the table of contents to consult in order to
remind yourself where we discuss what.

8.1.4 Interpreting older literary and other texts

In Chapter 4, it started becoming apparent that we need to know at least some-
thing about the language of the period to be able to engage with the literary
(and other) works of Early Modern English. More specifically, we saw that the
2nd person pronoun variation went with a complex web of social meanings (re-
member our you, thou, and thee examples and the Hamlet exercise, 2), which are
likely lost on the reader of the 21st century without sufficient knowledge of the
history of English.
Further down the path, the language started to look somewhat alien as we
approached Middle English and even more so by the time we reached Old English.
Without a dictionary and a basic knowledge of the structural properties of the
language, we would all find it extremely challenging, if not impossible, to even
read texts written in Middle and Old English, let alone engage with them further
beyond basic comprehension.

8.1.5 Different linguistic levels can interact

We also saw that the different linguistic levels or domains (morphology, syntax,
phonology, lexicon, pragmatics) not infrequently interact with each other. To
take a Present Day English example, in Exercise 4 in Chapter 1 we saw a sentence
containing I dunno. As the non-standard spelling implies, this is not pronounced
as [aɪ dəʊnt nəʊ] (which is what the standard spelling, <I don’t know>, would
suggest), but rather something like [ɐdənə]. So here we see something very much
related to sounds and phonology. However, all these reductions also affect the
morphology of the phrase: how many words are there in something like I dunno?
If we decided to treat dunno as a single word, this also means that there is a new
lexical item in one’s vocabulary, and so we would have to also consider this of
relevance for the lexical component of English. This makes this example also rel-
evant for syntax: depending on how many words we say dunno represents, and
the structure that underlies it, we’d have to conceptualize these different possi-
bilities with different syntactic analyses and trees. And finally, pragmatics also

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 8.1 Main observations

gets to share in the interest surrounding I dunno. For instance, Pichler & Levey
(2010) show that the reduced form, dunno, is associated with different pragmatic
functions than the unreduced form, I don’t know: in their data, in doctor-patient
conversations the reduced form was associated with reluctance to talk as op-
posed to genuine lack of knowledge.
In the previous chapters, you were presented with more examples which
would be of interest to a range of linguists interested in various levels, such as
semi-modals discussed in Chapter 3 on Late Modern English (gonna, finna, etc.),
the Great Vowel Shift discussed in Chapter 4 on Early Modern English, and the
reduction of morphological endings discussed in Chapters 5 and 6 on Middle and
Old English. And those are just some of the many examples we could recall here.
If, at this stage, you are worried about not being able to tell whether a certain
phenomenon belongs to the domain of syntax or morphology or phonology, etc.,
we recommend calming down with a cup of good tea (or cake, or both), consulting
the list of contents of this book (which gives you a list of phenomena under
the linguistic domains), and realizing that more often than not a specific case
of language change is of relevance to multiple domains of language structure.
Interaction between various linguistic levels happens all the time, and there is
no hiding from this fact.

8.1.6 Language change is inevitable (and perfectly normal)

And by this point, you might be thinking that we’ve been hammering this mes-
sage home a wee bit too much, but here it comes again, because it is important:
language change is inevitable – and perfectly normal. We saw this in every stage
of the history of the English language. This fact enables us to make interesting
observations.
First, what we learn about the mechanisms of language change in Present Day
English should also hold for how change can operate in earlier stages of the
language. This also works the other way round. In other words, if we think that
a certain change is impossible or unlikely in Present Day English, it should also
be impossible or unlikely in all previous stages, and vice versa. To use T. S. Eliot’s
insights again,

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
(Eliot 1977: 171)

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8 Wrapping up

It is sometimes the case that efforts at standardization and codification, of the

kind discussed in Chapter 4, may explicitly aim to halt – or even reverse – lan-
guage change. However, they are basically never successful in doing so – al-
though deliberate efforts at prescriptivism may have other, unintended effects
(Curzan 2014).
The second observation we can make is that it seems very usual for human
beings to comment on language, and to be anxious and self-conscious about
our own language use. We mainly looked at this in Chapter 3 and to some
extent in Chapter 2. If you’re interested in a critical approach to these topics, we
recommend Cameron (2003), and for a perspective from the history of English
see Machan (2009).

So here we are, having reminded ourselves of the major observations about how
one could benefit from studying the history of a language, and in our case that
of English. And who knows, perhaps you can think of even more reasons!

8.2 Themes
We’ve seen that there are good reasons why one would want to study the his-
tory of English. As we navigated through the different periods (moving from
the comforts of Present Day English to the rougher seas of Germanic), we also
encountered several themes which are important for our understanding of how
the language has developed. §8.1 touched upon some of these, but let’s remind
ourselves of all of the major themes now.
As already mentioned, variation is omnipresent. It appears on all linguistic
levels and in all historical periods of the language (and languages other than En-
glish are no exception, of course barring languages that are dead). This leads us
to the first theme: homogeneity vs. heterogeneity. In Chapter 2, we mentioned
how dialects of English are often seen as dying out due to the effects of me-
dia and technology. We saw plenty of examples of changes which happen in a
(more) global scale in English as well; however, these typically (if not always)
develop local “flavours”. While older varieties of English may be changing, that
does not necessarily mean they are dying out. And even in cases where some tra-
ditional dialects could be considered extinct or significantly changed in terms of
their perceived salience, new dialects do develop. Homogeneity and heterogene-
ity are therefore relative. And if we remember Chapter 3, where the emergence
of American English was introduced, we find a very good example thereof.
In a similar vein, while the technological developments we’ve experienced
across the past decades and centuries have changed how we communicate, the

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 8.2 Themes

research available thus far suggests that exposure to TV and social media do not
lead to language change as much as is frequently assumed by the general public
(see Chapter 2).
Chapters 1 and 2 also introduced the sentiment expressed by a wide range of
speakers: language change is seen as bad. This theme also appeared in Chapter 3.
Indeed, the idea that change is bad is a fairly widespread belief, and one which
is by no means limited to language.2 However, throughout the book we were
again and again exposed to different waves of changes, and one thing that does
remain constant as we travel through the historical stages of English is the fact
that all the linguistic levels will and do undergo changes of some sort. Change is
inevitable, whatever we may think of it as speakers.
This leads us to a very closely related topic, that of prescriptivism. Prescrip-
tivism was the overarching theme of Chapter 3. Although the phenomenon is not
limited to Late Modern English, it is very much felt in this period in particular,
in contrast to the older periods. In Chapter 4, we were predominantly occupied
with the theme of standardization, which turned out to be very important for
the rise of institutionalized prescriptivism in the history of English, and in Late
Modern English in particular.
Chapter 5 was very much about transitions. The Middle English period, before
standardization got into full swing, is hugely diverse in terms of the linguistic
varieties attested, and drastic changes can be observed on all linguistic levels in
the four hundred years of Middle English. /h/s were lost left, right and centre, a
smorgasbord of new pronouns made their way into the language from different
sources, and verb-second word order gave way to the subject-verb-object (SVO)
word order of the present-day language. Some of these transitions are predictable
as part of larger patterns: for instance, the meaning change of indeed, where orig-
inally pragmatic meaning becomes semantically encoded, a common tendency in
language change. Others, like vowel lengthening and shortening processes, can
seem arbitrary and idiosyncratic. The history of any language is filled with both
kinds of transition.
In Chapter 6, we focused on language contact and multilingualism. When ap-
proaching Old English, and the change from Old English to Middle English, it
is important for us to consider the role of contact with Brythonic Celtic, Norse,
and Latin (at least). Although we emphasized language contact in our discus-
sion of Old English, we also saw that language contact played an important role

2
George and Míša, for instance, both refused to buy a smartphone for a long time (although
they would grudgingly admit the advantages of owning one of the machines). George finally
surrendered to the smartphone technology in summer 2021, while Míša is still holding on.

355
8 Wrapping up

in Middle English (Latin and French being the most frequently highlighted lan-
guages of interest). Starting with colonization in Early Modern English, language
contact with a wide range of cultures and speakers of different languages has
introduced a good range of new concepts, words and structures into the lan-
guage. The English language has never stood “alone”, and it has never been the
province of only monolinguals, despite what nationalistic “one nation, one lan-
guage” rhetoric would have us believe.
Finally, Chapter 7 dealt with linguistic prehistory. The issues raised there about
our access to knowledge are crucial for any reflection on history: how do we find
out about the past? And how can we find out whether we’re right? Regardless
of whether we have preserved texts from a particular period or not, do we ever
really have direct access to the truth of what happened? Our stance – the stance
of all serious historians – is that the story we tell is constructed. The title of
the book is “A history of English”, with an indefinite article, not “The history
of English”, with a definite article. Our history, like all other possible histories,
is a narrative, one that we’ve put together in good faith and with the aim of
coming as close to the truth as possible. But, like all other possible histories, our
history is subjective, coloured by who we are as writers, and what you take away
from your journey will also be subjective, coloured by who you are as a reader.
There exist mountains of scholarship in English historical linguistics, and we
have had to be selective in what we include. It’s also important to remember that
the history of English is not a closed book: new evidence is still coming to light,
and new interpretations of old evidence are frequently proposed. Just like the
English language itself, the received wisdom as to the history of the language is
variable, and constantly in flux.
Having reached the final destination and packed with knowledge, you’re pre-
sented with a little snack to help you consolidate all this knowledge (and possibly
get ready for your exam, if you’re taking a course on the history of English).

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 Suggested exercises

Suggested exercises

E.1 Variation everywhere?

List two examples of variation found in Present Day English regarding:

1. orthography/spelling

2. phonetics and phonology

3. morphology

4. syntax

5. lexicon

6. pragmatics/discourse

Don’t be surprised if some of your examples seem to bridge more than one
linguistic level (e.g. both morphology and syntax, or both morphology and
phonology).

E.2 The Sower and the Seed revisited

Below are four versions of the Parable of the Sower and the Seed from
the New Testament (Matthew 13, verses 3–4), from different points in time,
across a thousand years of the history of English. This exercise is repeated
from Chapter 1 (§1). If you did it then, it’s worth revisiting now in order
to reflect on how much you’ve learned. If you didn’t do it then, well, it’s
still a good exercise!
• A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some
fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up.
(New International Version, 1973)

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8 Wrapping up

• Behold, a sower went forth to sow; And when he sowed, some seeds fell
by the way side, and the fowls came and devoured them up.
(King James version, 1611)

• Lo! he that sowith, yede out to sowe his seed. And while he sowith,
summe seedis felden bisidis the weie, and briddis of the eir camen,
and eeten hem.
(Wycliffe version, c. 1395)

• Soþlice ut eode se sædere hys sæd to sawenne and þa þa he seow. sume

hig feollon wiþ weg. and fuglas comun and æton þa;
(West Saxon Gospels, c. 990)

Try to identify differences between the texts in terms of each of the lin-
guistic levels we’ve discussed in the book:

• Phonetics & phonology

(of course, here you’ll need to make an educated guess, based on
spelling)

• Morphology

• Syntax

• Lexicon

• Pragmatics/discourse

Tips for teachers: If you’d like to make this exercise a bit more novel, re-
place these specific extracts with other ones, or add some more.

E.3 Timeline
Below is a blank timeline covering the years 400 to the present. Print it
out or photocopy it, and try to fill in the timeline with important events
and changes in the history of English. If you find it useful, you can distin-

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 Suggested exercises

guish between historical changes that are relevant for the history of the
language (like the Norman Conquest) and changes in the language itself
(like the Great Vowel Shift) by putting historical events above the line and
language changes below the line.

400 800 1200 1600 2000

Tip for students: This works well as a revision exercise.

Tip for teachers: In class, this exercise can be carried out in small groups.
Give the students 20–30 minutes to put the timeline together, then
compare the results in plenary.

Tip for teachers: Different groups will have different timelines, and not
all of the differences will be straightforwardly errors. You can use this
to start a discussion about the subjective nature of history-telling, if
appropriate.

Tip for teachers: If students have included historical figures (Shakespeare,

Alfred, Columbus...) on their timelines, you can also use this to start a
discussion about gender representation in history-telling and the reasons
behind this.

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8 Wrapping up

E.4 Irregularities

Think of three to five irregularities in Present Day English. Can you say
anything about where these irregularities come from?

E.5 Food for thought

“Consider one aspect of the history of English for which we don’t have
completely sufficient evidence and, on the basis of this example, discuss
the challenges of trying to learn about a language from the past. How
have scholars tried to meet these challenges regarding this aspect of the
history of English, and how successful have been their attempts?” (Liu
2019: 104)

Fare well, and may the bumblebees be with you!

Míša and George

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Answers to exercises
Chapter 1
E.1
Here we only mention a few salient features, including those suggested in the
hints.

• Phonetics and phonology: <seed> vs. <seedis> vs. <sæd> suggests differ-
ences in the first vowel, but also the difference of one as opposed to two
syllables in one case

• Morphology: endings such as -ith (third person singular) and -en (third per-
son plural) in the Wycliffe version, which are no longer found today. There
are also archaic word forms like yede (Wycliffe) and eode (West Saxon Gos-
pels), an old past tense form of the verb GO.

• Syntax: the New International version has was scattering, using the pro-
gressive (see §3.4.1 for details), which the earlier versions do not have.

• Lexicon: there are some different word choices in the earlier versions, such
as DEVOUR (a verb of French origin) rather than EAT in the King James
version. The King James version and the West Saxon Gospels both use a
form of FOWL rather than BIRD – in Present Day English, FOWL is very
restricted in usage to a particular type of bird, and only used in technical
contexts.

• Pragmatics/discourse: the earlier versions have discourse markers like Be-

hold and Lo! that are not used in Present Day English (or at least not unless
specifically trying to evoke an archaic tone). In speech, the modern words
Hey and So have a roughly similar function at the beginning of a statement,
though they don’t tend to be used in writing in this way.

E.2

1. • brillig, mome: noun or adjective

Answers to exercises

• slithy, mimsy, fruminous, uffish, tulgey: adjectives

• toves, borogoves, wabe, raths: nouns
• gyre, gimble, outgrabe, whiffing, burbled: verbs
• Jabberwock, Jubjub, Bandersnatch: proper nouns

2. • -y: e.g. lucky, happy

• -ous: e.g. obvious, luminous
• -ish: e.g. ticklish, Spanish
• -(e)s: most plural nouns (e.g. houses, doors)
• -ing: present participles (e.g. sleeping, running)
• -ed: most past tense verbs (e.g. waited, opened)

E.3

1. Everyone

2. bumblebees

3. should

4. appreciate bumblebees (the whole VP)

5. IP

6. should (the head I) and appreciate bumblebees (the whole VP)

7. appreciate (the head V)

E.4
Below we provide suggested answers to the first of the four questions:
Q1:

1. B, D, H

2. depending on who you ask also E: even standards are subject to change

Q2:

1. A: double from

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 Answers to exercises

2. C: dunno, wi; these are seen as non-standard when spelt, but in spoken
language most of us actually pronounce these in a reduced way without
even noticing!
3. C and E: some people would also say that kind of, sort of, you know, and sort
of thing are not standard; they are definitely more informal and colloquial
4. E: the preposition in laughed upon would be considered archaic and occa-
sionally even non-standard by some
5. F: divvent, negative concord nt + nowt
6. G: us used with a singular referent; negative concord never + no
7. H: lexical hadn’t (rather than didn’t have) is archaic and would be consid-
ered non-standard by some
8. I: fur-sty (this is known as TH-fronting)

Chapter 2
E.1
1. Quotative BE like
2. Singular verb agreement with collective noun (team is)
3. New words associated with social media: photobomb and selfie (the original
tweet also contains two emoji)
4. GET -passive (got arrested)
5. Absence of third-person singular -s (on like and want)
E.2
A. 1. The word fuck is found with fluctuating frequency before 1820, then
disappears until the 1950s, when it starts to rapidly increase in fre-
quency.
2. Texts from before 1820 are often printed with the long s, <ſ>, in some
contexts rather than <s> – including word-initially. Optical charac-
ter recognition (OCR) software struggles to distinguish <ſ> from <f>.
Therefore, these early apparent instances of fuck may in fact be in-
stances of suck. See for instance the text in §1, where a ſucking child
is mentioned.

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Answers to exercises

3. Another possibility to consider is a potential semantic change in fuck:

if a word has different meanings, or even connotations, in differ-
ent periods, it wouldn’t be surprising to see different frequencies at
which it’s used.

B. 1. It depends on the period.

2. In the corpus “English (2012)”, the word biscuit is more frequent until
about 1977.
3. In the corpus “American English (2012)”, biscuit is overtaken by
cookie earlier, around 1973. In the corpus “British English (2012)”,
biscuit remains more frequent, though cookie increases in frequency
throughout the 20th century.
4. The word cookie is an innovative Americanism.

C. Use your own initiative here.

D. It’s difficult to tell whether BE like and BE all increase over time, though it
seems as if they do increase from about 1965 onwards. In British English,
the increase seems to start somewhat later, in the 1970s. One problem with
this search is that BE like and BE all are hard to search for: you need to
search for all word forms in the paradigm of BE. Both forms remain van-
ishingly rare compared to SAY according to this data.

E. The problem with searching for the GET -passive is that it is a syntactic
construction, and the N-gram Viewer is set up to search for words, not
for constructions. You can try to search for common combinations (e.g. get
paid, got fired), but there are many possible combinations of a form of GET
and a participle, and it would take forever to search for all of them.

F. Google Books is a corpus of books. Books represent literary language, not

(on the whole) spoken language. (This is indeed most likely why we’re
getting surprising results for BE like in E.) We also don’t know what sort of
authors are represented in the corpus, and whether this is stably balanced
over time. (For instance, there are probably many more women authors
from the 20th century than from the 17th.)

G. Again, this one is up to you and your imagination!

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 Answers to exercises

Chapter 3
E.3
At least two reasons suggest themselves:

• No man is less inclusive than no one in terms of gender.

• No man is also less inclusive in terms of species. Star Trek is full of a range
of beings!

E.4
I love the look of the new house, but it is still building, so I should not go in
there yet, even though I want to. I would probably be hit by falling bricks
and cry out “Owwww3 , this was not a good idea!” I must be patient.
E.8
Words restricted to North America: butte, cougar, woodchuck. Comparing the in-
formation in the OED and your own familiarity with how these are used may
give you different results. Words restricted to specific regions in North America:
butte, woodchuck. First attestation and etymology:
• to antagonise, 1634 (OED, 2020, s.v. antagonize, v.), from Greek (criticised
by Brits as an Americanism in the past)

• to belittle, 1785 (OED, 2020, s.v. belittle, v.), coined by Thomas Jefferson
(criticised by Brits as an Americanism in the past)

• butte, 1805 (OED, 2020, s.v. butte, n.), from French

• coca-cola, 1887 (OED, 2020, s.v. Coca-Cola, n.), information provided for
the individual words, not the compound as such

• cookie, 1754 (OED, 2020, s.v. cookie, n.), from Dutch

• cougar, 1774 (OED, 2020, s.v. cougar, n.), from French, possibly ultimately
from Guarani

• creek, 1300 (OED, 2020, s.v. creek, n.1), from French but also Dutch

• funky, 1680 (OED, 2020, s.v. funky, adj.1), origin of funk is uncertain, but
funky first occurs in the context of Buddy Bolden’s Blues in the US
3
Or Good Lord!

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Answers to exercises

• lengthy, 1759 (OED, 2020, s.v. lengthy, adj.), Americanism

• woodchuck, 1670 (OED, 2020, s.v. woodchuck, n.), from Algonquian, prob-
ably Ojibwe

E.9
Here we only mention which cases could be analysed as cases of amelioration
and/or pejoration. These are simplistic answers, and you’ll have to engage with
the OED to reach more detailed and more critical interpretations.

• baboon: may be a case of pejoration, but we don’t see a clear time-line

progression whereby the more negative meanings would be attested in
later stages (2020, s.v. baboon, n.)

• churl: pejoration (2020, s.v. churl, n.)

• gay: pejoration (2020, s.v. gay, adj., adv., and n.); but also amelioration, in
the context of the reclamation of the term by the gay community

• girl: some instances of pejoration are attested after the word changed from
its original meaning, ‘a child of either sex’, to refer to ‘a female human’
(2020, s.v. girl, n.)

• hussy: pejoration (2020, s.v. hussy | huzzy, n.)

• mouse: amelioration and pejoration depending on the meaning (2020, s.v.

mouse, n.)

• weed: pejoration (2020, s.v. weed, n.1)

• artful: pejoration (2020, s.v. artful, adj. (and n.))

• coy: pejoration (2020, s.v. coy, adj.)

• crafty: pejoration (2020, s.v. crafty, adj.)

• cunning: pejoration (2020, s.v. cunning, adj.)

• fond: amelioration (2020, s.v. fond, adj. and n.)

• funky: amelioration (2020, s.v. funky, adj.1)

• jolly: pejoration (2020, s.v. jolly, adj. and adv.)

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 Answers to exercises

• lewd: pejoration (2020, s.v. lewd, adj.)

• nice: amelioration (2020, s.v. nice, adj. and adv.)

• shrewd: amelioration (2020, s.v. shrewd, adj.)

• silly: pejoration (2020, s.v. silly, adj., n., and adv.)

• subtle: complicated (2020, s.v. subtle, adj. and n.)

• to await: amelioration (2020, s.v. await, v.)

• to shit: pejoration (2020, s.v. shit, v.)

• to smite: complicated (2020, s.v. smite, v.)

• to tease: complicated, but limiting ourselves to OED only pejoration, oth-

erwise also amelioration (2020, s.v. tease, v.1)

Chapter 4
E.1
Simplistic answers are provided here, and you may well disagree with them for
a range of reasons:

A.

• diphthongal: Greater Manchester, Kent, London, North Yorkshire, Co. Tip-

perary

• monophthongal: Newcastle, Orkney, Perthshire

B.
Monophthongal realizations are more conservative.

E.2
1.

• A. Attorney General switches from the respectful you form (V form) to the
less respectful thou forms (T forms).

• B. Hamlet addresses the Ghost with thou forms until he realizes the Ghost
is his father – he momentarily switches to the more respectful you.

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Answers to exercises

2. They are in line with the use of the pronouns. For instance, Attorney General
addresses Raleigh as thou traitor in the passage in which he switches to the less
respectful forms.

3., 4. Use your own imagination here.

E.3
See §4.4.1 if you need to check the notions covered in these answers.

1. What saies he: This shows movement of the lexical verb from V to I to C
in an interrogative, since the finite verb saies precedes the subject he. In
Present Day English, we would insert DO here: What does he say? (or, with
the progressive, What is he saying?).

2. you know not: you do not know, with DO-support in a negative declarative.

3. why call you: why do you call, as in the first example.

4. saw you him: did you see him, with DO-support in an interrogative.

5. Fear me not: Present Day English Do not fear me (or Don’t fear me). This
is an imperative, which we didn’t discuss in the chapter, but the principle
is the same as for the other types of clause we’ve discussed: lexical verbs
can’t move from V to I to C any more, and instead DO must be inserted.

E.5
In the below, the originally Germanic word is given on the left, and the rough
Latin or Romance equivalent on the right.

• bless: consecrate • free: emancipate

• break: disintegrate • go: depart

• chew: masticate • job: position

• drink: imbibe • lie: prevaricate

• flood: inundate • think: cogitate

All the Germanic words given here are monosyllabic, and all the Latin/Romance
words are polysyllabic. In some cases, the Latin/Romance words are semantically
narrower: for instance, to disintegrate something is to break it in a very specific

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 Answers to exercises

way, into tiny pieces. In general, the words on the right are found more often in
formal registers.

E.6

• analysis: analyses (Greek, via Latin)

• cherub: cherubim (Hebrew, via Greek and Latin)

• index: indices (Latin)

• matrix: matrices (Latin/French)

• medium: media (Latin)

• nucleus: nuclei (Latin)

• species: species (Latin)

• stigma: stigmata (Greek, via Latin)

• stratum: strata (Latin)

E.7
The following words are of Germanic origin: clean, borrow, tongue, never, keep,
house; as are the following affixes: -ed, -ing, un-. So Cheke himself uses plenty of
borrowings.

Chapter 5
E.1
The take-home message is this:
• We don’t have uniform results in any of the levels (not within lexical vari-
ables, not within phonological variables, not within syntactic variables). It
follows that variation found in one level doesn’t have to be reflected in the
other levels of (a/the) language.

• The important thing to realize here is that the data can be very messy and
whilst some variables may be very or fairly clear indicators of a divide of
some sort (such as the North-South divide), others may indicate divides
in a more subtle way, and yet others may not really indicate anything in
terms of regional differences. Variation is messy more often than not.

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Answers to exercises

E.2
On the whole, Chaucer is indeed consistent in assigning features typical of
southern ME to the Miller and the Narrator, and those typical of northern ME
to Aleyn and John. But see lines 4066, 4072, and 4073 for the southern character
using the third person plural pronoun they.

We can only speculate what happened here:

• Perhaps they had creapt into the south by this stage, at least to some ex-
tent?

• Maybe this comes from a manuscript copied by a speaker natively speaking

a more northern variety of Middle English than Chaucer did?

In any case, Chaucer is suspiciously consistent here. As is obvious from the

previous exercise, variation tends to be more on the messier side.

E.5

1. s(c)he 6. ye
2. ye
7. I or ich
3. hie
8. thei
4. thou
5. thei 9. he(o)

E.6

1. • (23): strict V2
• (24): either strict V2 or IS-V2
• (25): IS-V2
• (26): either strict V2 or IS-V2
• (27): IS-V2
• (28): strict V2

2. All the examples from Astrolabe are strict V2 or compatible with a strict
V2 syntax. All the examples from the Parson’s Tale are IS-V2 or compatible
with IS-V2 syntax.

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 Answers to exercises

3. Eitler (2006) argues that variation in Chaucer’s syntax can be explained

by the audience he is writing for. Chaucer himself was mainly a user of a
strict V2 variety, and uses this when writing for himself and those close to
him (as in Astrolabe, for his son), but when writing for a wider audience –
as in the Canterbury Tales – he uses much more IS-V2.
E.7
• guardian: someone who guards (and often has legal responsibility, as in
parent or guardian)
warden: a watchman or official

• garderobe: a storeroom or toilet

wardrobe: a cupboard for storing clothes

• guard (noun): someone who protects/watches over

ward (noun): someone or something protected

• guarantee: an assurance
warranty: security, a legal assurance
warrant: authorization, permission
E.8
1. his vs. her; his is not feminine, but her is. The former relies on grammatical
gender, the latter on biological sex.

2. his vs. her – see above; eyre vs. eggs: here we see different plural strategies
(-re vs. -s).

3. Present Day English uses a loan from Latin.

4. semantic change: Middle English brides refers to young birds, whereas

Present Day English birds refers to winged creatures generally (hence
chicks).

5. semantic change: Middle English mete refers to food generally, rather than
edible flesh, as is the case in Present Day English (hence meat).

6. /h/-dropping (hit vs. it); Middle English shows a prefix (i-), unlike Present
Day English.

7. two different verbs are used: the Middle English one is strong, the Present
Day English one is weak.

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Answers to exercises

8. Middle English thorn vs. Present Day English <th>; wilde shows an ending,
wild doesn’t; bowe shows an ending, branch doesn’t; bowe and branch are
two different words.

9. different words: Present Day English shows a loan from French.

E.9

1. Middle English shows thorn, which is gone today; we see spelling differ-
ences in ceased – today’s version shows the effects of the Great Vowel Shift,
not visible in the spelling

2. the Middle English spelling suggests that the second syllable contains an
/u/ and carries stress, unlike the situation in Present Day English

3. Middle English shows thorn, which is gone today; Present Day English
earth does not have an inflectional suffix, but the Middle English version
does

4. inflectional suffix present in Middle English

5. inflectional suffix present in Middle English

6. inflectional suffix present in the Middle English noun; the verbal suffix
must have contained an unstressed vowel in Middle English

E.10

• cause and effect problem: sound change happened first here and this be-
came reflected in the spelling

• it’s true the first sound is a dental fricative, but it makes no sense to call it
“definite” (or “indefinite”!)

• bad logic: both are lexical words; they are not related

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 Answers to exercises

Chapter 6
E.1

1. ash 8. might
2. bed 9. over
3. kin
10. ship
4. day
11. thorn
5. fish
6. hill 12. thorn

7. man 13. thin

E.2
[ʍæt weː gaːrdena in jæːɑrdaɣum]
Don’t worry if you put [g] instead of [ɣ] in the final word – we didn’t cover this
in the book. See Hogg (1992: 91) for details of this voiced velar fricative.

E.3

• Voiceless: sæ, wif, flota, ceaster, lyft, yrhðo, offrian, oððe, wæs, þegn, be-
secgan

• Voiced: broðor, hræfn, weorþe, ofer, risan, æþele, bosom, efne, nosu, bliþe,
heofon, hæslen

E.4

1. Accusative, singular, masculine, strong

2. Nominative or accusative, plural, neuter, strong

3. Nominative, singular, feminine, strong

4. Genitive, singular, masculine or neuter (in fact it’s masculine – but you can
only know this by looking at a dictionary or at other forms), weak

5. Genitive, plural, any gender (in fact it’s neuter – but you can only know
this by looking at a dictionary or at other forms), weak

373
Answers to exercises

6. Accusative, singular, masculine, weak

7. Accusative, singular, feminine, strong

8. Dative, plural, any gender (in fact it’s masculine – but you can only know
this by looking at a dictionary or at other forms), weak or strong (in fact
it’s strong – but you can only know this by looking at a dictionary or at
other forms)

E.5

1. The fruma (chief).

2. The hlæfdige (lady).

3. The fruma was making unwanted advances, including using violence.

E.6
A. No – the morpheme -as was just one of many ways of forming the plural in
Old English, and was restricted to the strong masculine nouns. See §6.3.3.

B.

1. sheep ∼ sheep: strong neuter long

2. man ∼ men: athematic

3. deer ∼ deer: strong neuter long

4. fish ∼ fish: strong neuter long (actually, in Old English fish was a strong
masculine noun, but ran over to another paradigm camp later on)

5. knife ∼ knives: strong masculine

6. ox ∼ oxen: weak

7. wolf ∼ wolves: strong masculine

C.

1. tooth ∼ teeth: i-umlaut (see §6.2.2)

2. louse ∼ lice: i-umlaut

374
 Answers to exercises

3. child ∼ children: this is a trickier one (sorry!); -en indicates a weak noun,
but there is actually also a plural -r affix, representing a marginal class
not shown in the magic sheet; today’s children have historically two plural
suffixes!

E.7
Only the main differences are commented on here:

1. Old English lacks a reflexive pronoun (him vs. himself )

2. Old English shows no article; solitary is a loan from French; Old English
shows an ending (-a)

3. Object Verb in Old English, Verb Object in Present Day English; Old En-
glish has a different verbal ending than Present Day English; Old English
again has a suffix on the noun (-e)

4. Old English shows no articles; Old English shows the genitive suffix -es
where Present Day English uses the preposition of

5. Old English shows verbal endings (-e, -an) where Present Day English has
none; <sc> corresponds to <sh>; /hr/ is gone in Present Day English

6. Old English has a dative plural suffix (-um) where Present Day English has
a suffix marking only number (-s)

7. Old English uses a ligature which is no longer present in today’s English

(also, notice the effects of the Great Vowel Shift)

8. V2 in Old English; Old English shows no article; the eth grapheme is not
used in Present Day English; the noun has an ending in Old English (-a)

9. what is expressed through the preposition of in Present Day English is

expressed through an ending in Old English (-a)

E.8

1. “But he must reconcile the quarrelsome” (head-final)

2. “that he can do no good” (head-final)

3. “he wanted to kill King David” or “who wanted to kill that king David”
(head-initial)

375
Answers to exercises

4. “if she would tolerate that disgrace” (head-final)

5. “that he wanted to reach his hut” (head-initial)

E.14

1. “gendered” means something different than “having grammatical gender”

2. adverbs don’t have cases

3. English has descended from Germanic, as have various other languages

(such as Swedish)

4. a verb in the infinitive can’t have tense; a verbal ending cannot function
as a plural marker of nouns

5. “casing” means something different than “morphologically marked cases”

6. it was inherited from Germanic

7. Old English did not have a free word order; V2 does not mean that the
finite verb is going to show up at the end of a sentence

8. verbal mood morphology is not determined by nouns

9. thorn is a letter and has nothing to do with morphemes (or phonemes, for
that matter)

Chapter 7
E.1

1. *slāpan 3. *mūsi 5. *hand

2. *skip 4. *skāp 6. *skīnan

E.2

1. Old Frisian is fun 3. The truth is out there

2. I see dead people 4. One small step for man

376
 Answers to exercises

E.3

1. pedal: foot 5. piscis: fish 9. cornu: heart

2. genu: knee 6. granum: corn 10. tres: three

3. dens: tooth 7. glaces: cool 11. genus: kin

4. cor: heartily 8. dicere: teach 12. edo: eat

E.4
1. *gōs-i (plural noun) > gēs: /oː/ becomes /øː/ by i-umlaut. Subsequently the
final /i/ in the unstressed syllable is lost. The /øː/ later unrounds to /eː/.

2. *fōd-jan > fēdan: /oː/ becomes /øː/ by i-umlaut. Subsequently the /j/ in the
unstressed syllable is lost. The /øː/ later unrounds to /eː/.

3. *stel-idi > stilþ: /e/ becomes /i/ by i-umlaut. Subsequently the vowels in the
unstressed syllables are lost. (Don’t worry about the details of the changes
in the unstressed syllables here.)
E.5
1. Weak; regular

2. Strong; irregular. It’s a class V strong verb. The stem vowel alternation in
the 2sg.pres form is caused by i-umlaut.

3. Strong; regular

4. Weak; irregular. The giveaway is the coronal /t/ consonant in the past tense
ending, and the fact that the stem vowel /oː/ in this form does not corre-
spond to any of the strong verb classes. The sound changes that lead to
this irregularity are complex and we won’t discuss them here. Interest-
ingly, forms like bringst (2sg.pres) and brang (3sg.past) are also attested,
suggesting that some speakers had reanalysed the verb as a class III strong
verb.

Chapter 8
E.2
See the answers to the Chapter 1 version of this exercise.

377
Glossary of linguistic terms

agreement A syntactic configuration in which a morphosyntac-

(concord) tic feature on one word systematically covaries with
the same feature on another. For instance, in many
varieties of English, the subject agrees with the verb
for person and number (-s for third person singular;
no ending elsewhere).
allophone A variant realization of a phoneme which is not con-
trastive. For example, in most varieties of Present
Day English limb has an initial [l] produced pri-
marily with the movement of the front part of the
tongue. On the other hand, at the end of syllables,
the /l/ phoneme typically has a dark or a darker al-
lophone, [ɫ], as in mill, which includes the raising of
the back part of the tongue in addition to the rais-
ing of its front part. But the distinction is never im-
portant for lexical meaning, i.e. in English we don’t
find pairs of words where the darkness, or velar-
ization, of /l/ leads to two different words in mill:
[mɪɫ] and [mɪl] would still refer to a ‘place where
grains are ground’. There are many more examples
you can think of, e.g. /t/ being pronounced as a glot-
tal stop, as in water [woːtə] vs. [woːʔə], or even as
a tap [wɔːɾə].
case A morphological category for nominals that is re-
lated to the grammatical function played by the
nominal constituent (subject, direct object, etc.). In
Old English, the four major cases we find are nomi-
native, accusative, dative and genitive.
Glossary of linguistic terms

clitic A morpheme that behaves syntactically like a free

word but is phonologically dependent on another
word or phrase. A Present Day English example is
possessive ’s.
compounding A type of morphology alongside inflection and
derivation. Compounding is the process of form-
ing a new word by putting two independent
words together, e.g. green + house = greenhouse.
Compounding can sometimes create unpredictable
meanings; a greenhouse is not the same as a green
house!
corpus A collection of linguistic material (e.g. texts) suit-
able for use as a data source in linguistic research.
An example is the Corpus of Contemporary Amer-
ican English (Davies 2008), which contains more
than a billion words of text from 1990 onwards (25+
million words per year). A corpus (plural corpora) is
usually intended to be representative of a partic-
ular variety (e.g. American English), and balanced
in its selection of material (e.g. with respect to the
gender of the author).
deixis The use of words for a specific time, place, person
or direction whose reference is dependent on the
context. For instance, tomorrow refers to different
days, and you refers to different people, depending
on when the word is used. Pronounced /daɪksɪs/ or
/dɛɪksɪs/.
derivation A type of morphology alongside inflection and
compounding. Derivation is the process of forming
a new word by adding an affix (e.g. punch > punch-
ability) or altering the root (e.g. sing > song). Un-
like inflection, derivation can change the category
of the word: in the two examples given here, a noun
is formed from a verb.
diachronic Across time. A study of how English verbs change
between Old English and Present Day English, for
example, would be a diachronic study. The opposite
of synchronic.

380
 Glossary of linguistic terms

diacritic A distinguishing mark added to a grapheme, such as

a dot (e.g. <ċ>) or a macron (e.g. <ū>). Usually used
to indicate differences in pronunciation compared
to the unmarked grapheme (e.g. <c> or <u>).
geminate Long consonant, as in Old English cwellan /kwɛlːan/
‘to kill’. Geminates are phonemic in Old English, i.e.
they distinguish lexical meaning; compare cwellan
with cwelan /kwɛlan/ ‘to die’.
given Information that has already been mentioned in the
information discourse, e.g. the woman in reference to someone
who has previously been mentioned. The opposite
of new information.
grammatical- Historical process by which lexical material be-
ization comes grammatical, open-class words (like nouns
and verbs) become closed-class words (like pro-
nouns and complementizers), and free words be-
come bound morphemes (often through an inter-
mediate clitic stage). Very common in language
change (see Hopper & Traugott 2003). See also uni-
verbation.
/h/-dropping The non-pronunciation of /h/ in words that histori-
cally had an /h/ (and which often still do in standard
spelling). See §3.2.1 and §5.2.3.
indicative A type of mood found in all stages of English. The
indicative is the default mood and does not convey
any particular stance towards the meaning of the
clause.
inflection A type of morphology alongside derivation and
compounding. Inflection is the process of forming
a word-form within a paradigm, e.g. adding the
grammatical morpheme -s to the verb love to get the
third-person singular form loves. Unlike derivation,
inflection cannot change the category of the word.
lexicon Quite simply, the words of a language (as opposed
to its phonetics, syntax, etc.). The corresponding ad-
jective is lexical.

381
Glossary of linguistic terms

mood A morphological category applying to verbs, allow-

ing speakers to express their attitude towards an
event or statement. All stages of English have an in-
dicative and an imperative mood; Middle and Old
English also have a subjunctive mood.
morpheme The smallest meaningful morphological unit that
cannot be further divided. The word played consists
of two morphemes: the root play and the inflec-
tional morpheme -ed. The word replayable con-
sists of three morphemes: the derivational prefix
re-, the root play, and the derivational suffix -able.
negative The use of multiple negative-marked words in a sin-
concord gle clause to express only one semantic negation,
e.g. I didn’t do nothing to no one rather than the
“standard” I didn’t do anything to anyone. A type of
agreement.
new Information that is newly introduced into the dis-
information course, e.g. a woman who has not been mentioned
before in the discourse. The opposite of given in-
formation.
orthography How a language is written: primarily, spelling and
punctuation.
overdotting The practice of adding a diacritic dot over cer-
tain graphemes in editions of Old English texts, rep-
resenting the palatal consonants /ʃ/, /tʃ/, /dʒ/, and
/j/ in Old English as <sċ>, <ċ>, <ċġ>, and <ġ> re-
spectively. Overdotting is purely editorial and is not
found in the original Old English manuscripts used
in this way.
paradigm The set of word-forms that belong to a particu-
lar lexical word. For the verb LOVE, for instance,
the possible forms are love, loves, loved, and loving.
Paradigms are often displayed as tables. Determin-
ing the members of a paradigm is the job of inflec-
tional morphology.

382
 Glossary of linguistic terms

passive A syntactic construction in which the grammatical

subject expresses the theme or patient of the lexi-
cal verb. Often passive sentences have a correspond-
ing active sentence: the building was destroyed (by
him) is passive, and he destroyed the building is ac-
tive. A major difference between passive and active
constructions is that the passive construction is not
required to express the agent: in the previous exam-
ple, by him is optional.
pejoration Semantic process whereby a word or a phrase ac-
quires negative value judgement connotations.
phoneme A perceptually distinct unit of sound that dis-
tinguishes lexical meaning. The classic test for
phoneme status is the presence of minimal pairs:
since the words pat and bat differ only in their
initial consonant, we can be sure that /p/ and /b/
are distinct phonemes and not just allophones be-
cause their substitution with one another changes
the lexical meaning.
phrasal clitic A clitic that attaches to a whole syntactic phrase,
(phrasal affix) rather than to a single word. A Present Day English
example is possessive ’s.
prestige The level of regard or value that a feature, vari-
ety, or language is associated with, i.e. whether it
is viewed positively or negatively. Typically, the
term is used for overt prestige associated with stan-
dard varieties. However, other varieties can also be
associated with covert prestige within particular
groups, associated with group identity.
preterite- Class of verb whose present tense form derives his-
present torically from a past tense form. All of the survivors
from this class in Present Day English are modals:
can, shall, etc.
purism The belief that a language should only contain ele-
ments that are not borrowed from other languages.

383
Glossary of linguistic terms

Received The pronunciation characteristic of the Present Day

Pronunciation British English standard variety. Traditionally asso-
(RP) ciated with the south of England, RP is now found
all over the world, though it has few if any native
speakers.
standardization The historical process by which a standard variety
of a language emerges, involving selection, elabora-
tion, codification, and acceptance. See §4.1.1.
synchronic At a specific moment in time. A study of English
verbs in the present day, for example, or a study of
the vocabulary used in one of Shakespeare’s plays,
would be a synchronic study. The opposite of di-
achronic.
stative A class of verbs that convey a condition or state
rather than an activity or event. The verbs LOVE
and KNOW are typical stative verbs.
subjunctive a) The “subjunctive construction” in Modern En-
glish is a type of embedded clause without a finite
verb form, e.g. ... that he be good; see §3.3.2. b) The
subjunctive in Middle and Old English is a type of
mood, a category of verb forms; see §6.3.1. Both the
modern subjunctive construction and the older sub-
junctive mood are used to express irrealis mean-
ing: they’re typically used to describe a situation or
event that is not known to the speaker to have hap-
pened at the time of utterance, i.e. not a known fact.
s.v. Stands for Latin sub voce ‘under the expression’ or
sub verbo ‘under the word’. It means that what fol-
lows s.v. is what you should look up in a dictionary.
For instance, “OED, s.v. bumblebee” is an invitation
to look up the word bumblebee in the Oxford En-
glish Dictionary.
syncretism When the same morphological form is used to ex-
press multiple different combinations of features
within a paradigm. The form cut, for instance, is the
infinitive and finite present tense form of the verb
in Present Day English, but also the finite past form
(Yesterday I cut my finger) and the past participle (I
have cut my finger).

384
 Glossary of linguistic terms

thorn Name of the grapheme <þ>, found in Old English

and early Middle English texts, and originating
from the runic alphabet. Represents a dental frica-
tive phoneme. Alternates with <ð> “eth” in Old En-
glish.
univerbation Historical process by which two independent words
become a single word, as in police + man > police-
man, where the independent word /man/ becomes
the bound -/mən/ suffix. See also grammaticaliza-
tion.
verb-second Syntactic rule according to which the finite verb
(V2) must occupy the second position in the clause, with
only one constituent preceding it. An example is
modern English wh-questions: Which book should I
read?, not *Which book I should read?. Old and early
Middle English were characterized by a variety of
V2.
yogh Name of the character <ȝ>, found in Old English and
early Middle English texts. Pronounced /jɒx/. In Old
English, yogh is the normal way of writing the <g>
of the Latin alphabet, and so editions of Old English
texts usually normalize it to <g>. In Middle English,
yogh is a grapheme in its own right, distinct from
<g>.

385
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419
Name index

Aarts, Bas, 81, 86 Baranowski, Maciej, 74, 76, 77

Adams, Max, 243 Barber, Charles, 70, 153, 172, 173
Ælfriċ, 246, 272, 274–276, 279, 280, Barðdal, Jóhanna, 270
300 Barnes, Michael P., 242
Æþelberht (King of Kent), 298, 341 Baron, Naomi S., 50
Æthelthryth of Ely, 248 Bately, Janet M., 146, 243
Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y., 266 Beal, Joan C., 11, 24, 29, 32, 39, 50, 60,
Aitchison, Jean, 25 70, 74, 75, 84, 119, 138, 147
Alcorn, Rhona, 267, 285, 304, 305 Bech, Kristin, 275, 315
Alfred (King of Wessex), 242, 246, Becker, Kara, 72–74
249, 265, 302, 303, 307, 359 Bede, 246, 310, 311, 338
Algeo, John, 82, 120 Behn, Aphra, 146
Allen, Cynthia L., 204, 269, 270 Bekker, Ian, 42
Allen, Woody, 72, 103 Benskin, Michael, 124
Amador Moreno, Carolina P., 48 Benson, Larry D., 231
Ammon, Matthias, 345 Bergmann, Anouschka, 11
Anderson, John Malcolm, 305 Bergs, Alexander, 179
Anderson, Rindy C., 43 Biber, Douglas, 50
Anderson, Stephen R., 203 Bissell, Robin, 67
Anderwald, Lieselotte, 48, 80, 84, 85 Blair, Tony, 70
Androutsopoulos, Jannis, 32 Blake, Barry, 269
Anthony, David, 317, 346 Blount, Thomas, 152
Arnovick, Leslie, x Bluetooth, Harald, 321
Arvaniti, Amalia, 42 Boberg, Charles, 41
Askew, Anne, 171 Boethius, 246
Astley, Rick, 49 Bogetić, Ksenija, 47
Auer, Anita, 124 Bohn, Ocke-Schwen, 288
Austen, Jane, 84 Bolze, Christine, 263
Börjars, Kersti, 203
Bailey, C.-J., 316 Bosworth, Joseph, 285
Baker, Peter S., 259, 304, 305 Bour, Anthony R., 8
Baragona, Alan, 96 Boyd, Matthieu, 60
Name index

Boyle, Robert, 125, 146 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 180, 181, 191, 193–
Braber, Natalie, 194 196, 199, 207, 209, 210, 213,
Bradford, Barbara, 42 217, 224, 229, 264, 370, 371
Bradstreet, Anne, 142, 165 Chauvet, Elie, 252
Breeze, Andrew, 283 Cheke, John, 161, 369
Bresnan, Joan, 7 Cheshire, Jenny, 30, 35
Brinton, Laurel J., 332 Ching, Marvin K. L., 88, 89
Britain, David, 42 Clackson, James, 316, 331, 347
Brontë, Charlotte, 63 Clark-Platts, Alice, 148
Brown, Roger, 138, 139, 194 Clarke, Sandra, 35, 41, 43, 45
Bruckmaier, Elisabeth, 48 Cnut, 242
Buchstaller, Isabelle, 47 Coates, Richard, 282
Buck, R. A., ix Cohen, Roger, 30
Burchfield, Robert, 120 Cole, Marcelle, 45, 195
Buringh, Eltjo, 175 Colm Cille (Columba), 307
Burkette, Allison, viii Columbus, Christopher, 127, 129, 176,
Burnley, David, 237 359
Butcher, Andrew, 35 Conde-Silvestre, Juan Camilo, 179
Butters, Ronald, 46, 47 Conrad, Susan, 50
Bužarovska, Eleni, 48 Conrod, Kirby, 196
Bybee, Joan, 141 Corbett, Greville G., 266
Byrhtferth, 246 Corrigan, Karen P., 24
Coupland, Nikolas, 120
Cædmon, 246, 248 Coverdale, Miles, 125
Cameron, Deborah, 354 Cox, Felicity, 39
Campbell, Lyle, 92, 93, 308, 318, 323, Crosby, Alfred W., 129
347 Crystal, David, 30, 63, 121, 136, 145
Capgrave, John, 198, 199, 208 Cukor-Avila, Patricia, 45
Carnie, Andrew, 9, 27, 199 Curzan, Anne, 120, 270, 354
Carrie, Erin, 19, 61, 96
Carroll, Lewis, 21 D’Arcy, Alexandra, 35, 47
Cartlidge, Neil, 218, 233 Da Rold, Orietta, 179
Cassidy, Frederic G., 94, 95 Dallaston, Katherine, 43
Cavell, Megan, 239 Dalrymple, William, 36
Cavendish, Elizabeth (Bess of Hard- Dalton-Puffer, Christiane, 207
wick), 169, 170 Dance, Richard, 242, 305
Caxton, William, 123, 175, 181, 201, Dasher, Richard B., 207–209
220 Davenport, Mike, 38
Chambers, Jack K., 16, 77 Davidson, Mary C., 181, 237

422
 Name index

Davies, Mark, 82, 380 Faulkner, William, 15

Davis-Secord, Jonathan, 281 Feddema, Sanne, 71
de Haas, Nynke, 45, 191 Feist, Sigmund, 333
Dekeyser, Xavier, 205 Fennell, Barbara A., 65
den Besten, Hans, 198 Filppula, Markku, 34, 245
Denis, Derek, 32, 49, 50 Findell, Martin, 320, 347
Denison, David, 85, 201, 203 Firth, Alan, 62
Deterding, David, 42 Fischer, Olga, 145, 173, 201, 202, 237,
Devis, Ellin, 147 275, 278, 305
Dickens, Charles, 111 Fisher, John Hurt, 93, 95, 124
Diller, Hans-Jürgen, 78, 79 Fishman, Joshua A., 26
Discenza, Nicole G., 243 Fitch, W. Tecumseh, 317
Docherty, Gerard, 43 Fleisher, Nicholas, 48
Donaher, Patricia, 80 Fleming, Robin, 308–312, 346
Drinka, Bridget, 332 Fletcher, Janet, 42
Drinkwater, John F., 313 Foucault, Michel, 123
Drout, Michael D. C., 252 Fought, Carmen, 120
Drummond, Rob, 19, 61, 96 Fox, George, 139
Dryden, John, 126, 146, 147 Foxe, John, 172
Dubois, Sylvie, 6, 16 Freeman, Aaron, 331
Duffell, Martin J., 188 Freidin, Robert, 146
Durkin, Philip, 151, 152, 173, 178, 205, Freund, Nina, 85
283, 284 Fritz, Clemens W. A., 120
Fulk, Robert D., 267, 305, 323, 347
Ecay, Aaron William, 144
Eckert, Penelope, 40 Gaiman, Neil, 333
Eddington, David, 39 Gaskell, Elizabeth C., 105, 113
Edward the Confessor (King), 177 Gee, James Paul, 27
Edwards, J. G. Hansen, 120 Genee, Inge, 144, 245
Eisikovits, Edina, 35, 44 Gerrard, James, 308, 311
Eitler, Tamás, 199, 371 Giancarlo, Matthew, viii
Elenbaas, Marion, 281 Gildas, 310
Eliot, T. S., 349, 353 Gilman, Albert, 138, 139, 194
Ellegård, Alvar, 144 Gimbutas, Marija, 317
Ellwood, Thomas, 139 Godden, Malcolm, 243, 281, 302
Elphinston, James, 71 Godwinson, Harold, 177
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 109 Gomi, Taro, 102
Emma of Normandy, 177 Gordon, E. V., 215, 223, 224
Esposito, Lewis, 43 Gordon, Elizabeth, 120

423
Name index

Gorelik, Victoria, 42 Hickey, Raymond, 33, 34, 41, 102, 120,

Görlach, Manfred, 65, 316 137, 245, 305
Gove, Michael, 167 Higham, Nicholas J., 245, 308–311
Gower, John, 180, 181 Hild of Whitby, 248
Gowers, Ernest, 82 Hilles, Sharon, 324, 347
Green, Lisa, 6, 68 Hills, Catherine, 312
Gregory (Pope), 243, 279, 307 Hiltunen, Risto, 281
Grimm, Jacob, 192, 322, 323 Hobsbawm, Eric J., 123
Grimm, Wilhelm, 322 Hogg, Richard M., 247, 252, 267, 285,
Grimmer, Martin, 245 304, 305, 373
Grivičić, Tamara, 43 Holmes-Elliott, Sophie, 38, 39
Grünewald, Christoph, 311 Holtijaz, Hlewagastiz, 346
Gussenhoven, Carlos, 27 Honey, John, 65
Guthrum, 242 Hopper, Paul J., 18, 326, 381
Guy, John, 128 Horobin, Simon, 183, 184, 191, 237
Horvath, Barbara M., 6, 16
Haak, Wolfgang, 317 House, Jill, 42
Hadley, Dawn, 241 Howe, Darin, 80
Haeberli, Eric, 143 Hsy, Jonathan, 181, 237
Hall, Joan Houston, 94, 95 Huang, Nick, 8, 200
Hall, Kathleen C., 38 Huddleston, Rodney, 81, 141
Hall, Kira, 62 Hundt, Marianne, 46, 48, 82, 84
Halsall, Guy, 309 Hurston, Zora Neale, 104
Hannahs, Stephen J., 38 Hyllested, Adam, 334
Hardrada, Harald, 177
Hardwick, Margaret, 35 Ihsane, Tabea, 143
Harland, James M., 310, 312 Ingham, Richard, 178, 277, 278
Harrington, Jonathan, 3 Irwin, Patricia, 72
Harris, Wendell, 44 Iyeiri, Yoko, 277
Haspelmath, Martin, 27, 278
Haugen, Einar, 123, 125, 126, 172 Jacobs, Haike, 27
Hayes, Mary, viii, 91, 92, 126, 129, 132, Jardine, David, 155
135, 136, 149, 189 Jefferson, Judith A., 237
Heaney, Seamus, 292–294 Jenkins, Jennifer, 62
Heather, Peter, 314 Jespersen, Anna, 42
Hejná, Míša, 27, 41, 77 Jespersen, Otto, 277, 291
Hernández-Campoy, Juan M., 179 Johansson, Stig, 82
Herold, Ruth, 66 Johnson, Keith, 27
Johnson, Samuel, 66

424
 Name index

Jones, Charles, 120, 176 Lass, Roger, 120, 133, 305, 323, 334
Jonson, Ben, 146 Lawson, Eleanor, 72, 154
Joseph, John E., 122 Layamon, 180
Jucker, Andreas H., x, 139, 173, 194 Leech, Geoffrey, 58, 82
Julian of Norwich, 179 Lees, Clare A., 248
Jüngling, Fritz, 195 Lehmann, Christian, 204
Leimgruber, Jakob R. E., 120
Kachru, Braj B., 6 Leith, Dick, 140
Kastovsky, Dieter, 305 Leslie, Stephen, 311
Katz, Seth, 80 Levey, Stephen, 24, 353
Keats, John, 75 Liddicoat, Anthony J., 27
Kelis, 51 Lightfoot, David W., 201, 202
Keller, Wolfgang, 264 Lil Nas X, 30
Kempe, Margery, 179 Lippi-Green, Rosina, 65, 122, 126
Kershaw, Jane, 241 Liu, Yin, 360
Kilpiö, Matti, 263 Lloyd, Cynthia, 207
Kim, Susan M., 68 Locke, John, 209
Koerner, Konrad, 16 Lorenz, David, 88
Koivulehto, Jorma, 334 Los, Bettelou, 142, 145, 173, 199, 202,
Kolísková, Barbora, 5 237, 275, 305
Krajewski, Grzegorz, 203 Louro, Celeste R., 35, 47
Kranich, Svenja, 120 Lowth, Robert, 147
Kroch, Anthony, 144 Luke, Kang Kwong, 120
Kroeger, Paul, 27 Luther, Martin, 125
Krug, Manfred, 87, 88 Lutz, Angelika, 242, 245, 264, 281,
Kuhn, Hans, 315 305
Kümmel, Martin J., 325 Lyall, Sarah, 70
Lynch, Jack, 66
Labov, William, 16, 17, 19, 37, 38, 41,
74 MacDonald, C. A., 120
Ladefoged, Peter, 27 Machan, Tim William, 354
Laing, Margaret, 276 Mahomet, Dean, 116
Laker, Stephen, 251 Marcus, Imogen, 169
Lakoff, Robin, 11, 92 Maroldt, Karl, 316
Lanehart, Sonja, 6, 68 Marshall, David F., 136
Langer, Nils, 152 Martin, Peter, 66, 120
Langland, William, 180, 324 Martin, Toby F., 311, 312
Langstrof, Christian, 41 Mascuch, Michael, 171
Lanham, Len W., 120 Matyiku, Sabina, 278

425
Name index

McCaskill, Carolyn, 68 Newton, Isaac, 125

McCulloch, Gretchen, 50 Nickelback, 88
McCully, Chris, 324, 347 Nilep, Chad, 43
McFadden, Thomas, 281 Nolan, Brian, 48
Mchombo, Sam A., 7 Nolst Trenité, Gerald, 135
McLemore, Cynthia A., 42 Norde, Muriel, 204
McMahon, April, 133, 173 Nunn, Nathan, 129
McWhorter, John, 270
Mesthrie, Rajend, 35, 36, 58, 120 O’Callaghan, Conor, 56
Meyerhoff, Miriam, 58 Ogura, Michiko, 280
Middle English, Southern, 198 Ohala, John J., 253
Millar, Robert McColl, 125, 172, 176, Ohthere, 242, 298, 302, 303
269 Oosthuizen, Susan, 308, 309, 311, 312
Millward, C. M., 91, 92, 126, 129, 132, Orkin, Mark M., 120
135, 136, 149, 189 Orm, 179, 236
Milroy, James, 178, 270 Orosius, Paulus, 242, 247, 302
Minis, Cola, 308 Őrsi, Tibor, 206
Minkova, Donka, 71, 75, 133, 185, 189, Orwell, George, 153
237, 251, 258, 305 Övergaard, Gerd, 82
Minnis, Alastair, 181 Overing, Gillian R., 248
Mitkovska, Liljana, 48 Overty, Joanne Filippone, 184
Mohamad, Nur Raihan, 42
Palethorpe, Sallyanne, 39
Montgomery, Michael, 74
Palmer, Frank R., 81
Morrison, Donald Alasdair, 276, 277
Paraskevas, Cornelia, 102
Mossé, Fernand, 191
Paston, John, 222
Mugglestone, Lynda, 60, 62, 63, 70,
Paston, Margery, 222
71, 74, 75, 119
Paterson, Laura, 19
Mulcaster, Richard, 152
Paulasto, Heli, 7
Murray, Lindley, 147
Pelteret, David A. E., 245, 309
Myhill, John, 44
Peters, Pam, 82
Nagy, Naomi, 72 Philo, John-Mark, 128
Nakamura, Fujio, 78 Pichler, Heike, 24, 353
Nance, Claire, 33 Piller, Ingrid, 123
Nesbitt, Monica, 40 Pinker, Steven, 327
Nesse, Agnete, 152 Pintzuk, Susan, 274
Nevalainen, Terttu, 129, 140, 172, 173, Plantagenet, Richard (King Richard
204 III), 178
Newson, Linda, 129 Pons-Sanz, Sara M., 283, 284

426
 Name index

Poplack, Shana, 87 Rowlandson, Mary, 163

Poser, William J., 318 Røyrvik, Ellen C., 241
Pound, Ezra, 295, 296 Rusten, Kristian A., 330
Poussa, Patricia, 316 Rutten, Gijsbert, 171
Pratt, Lynda, 85
Presser, Jacques, 171 Sailaja, Pingali, 6, 36
Pryce, Gwilym, 32 Saint Augustine, 71
Pullum, Geoffrey K., 78, 81, 141 Sairio, Anni, 147
Purnell, Thomas, 67 Samuels, M. L., 124, 195
Purvey, John, 208 Sancho, Ignatius, 118
Putter, Ad, 237 Sando, Yves, 42
Sawyer, Peter H., 241
Qian, Nancy, 129 Scheler, Manfred, 205
Schilling-Estes, Natalie, 34, 66–68,
Rajendran, Shyama, 6 120
Rambaran-Olm, Mary, 309 Schleef, Erik, 38, 39
Ramisch, Heinrich, 254 Schneider, Edgar W., 44
Rask, Rasmus, 322, 323 Schreier, Daniel, 58
Rau, Andreas, 311 Schrijver, Peter, 240, 309
Raumolin-Brunberg, Helen, 140, 172 Schulman, Jana K., 294
Rees, Sophie, 88 Scott, Alan, 203
Reiff, Raychel H., 194 Scott, Walter, 205
Reynolds, Susan, 309 Sebregts, Koen, 255
Riaz, Fahmida, 30 Shakespeare, William, 60, 139, 142,
Richards, Jack, 120 146, 148, 152, 155, 158, 168,
Richards, John, 204 359
Rihanna, 55 Shapiro, Rebecca, 66
Ringe, Donald, 273, 308, 316, 319, 322, Shaw, George Bernard, 135
323, 325, 326, 347 Sheehan, Michelle, 275
Ritchart, Amanda, 42 Shobbrook, Katherine, 42
Roberge, Paul T., 333 Shokeir, Vanessa, 42
Roberts, Ian, 81, 144, 275 Sicoli, Mark A., 43
Robinson, Jonnie, 194 Sims, Andrea D., 27
Robinson, Orrin W., 316, 346 Skeat, Walter W., 301
Rogers, John, 125 Smith, Jennifer, 38, 39
Rollo of Normandy, 177 Smith, Jeremy J., 136, 176, 183, 184,
Rosenbach, Anette, 202, 204 191, 237, 304, 305
Röthlisberger, Melanie, 104 Smith, K. Aaron, 68, 88, 89
Rothwell, William, 178 Sommerer, Lotte, 269

427
Name index

Stein, Achim, 207 Traugott, Elizabeth Closs, 18, 207–

Stenbrenden, Gjertrud Flermoen, 209, 326, 381
133, 137, 173 Treharne, Elaine, 179
Stevens, Mary, 3 Trips, Carola, 207, 236, 274
Stiles, Patrick, 315 Tristram, Hildegard L. C., 270, 305
Stockwell, Robert, 133 Trousdale, Graeme, 26
Strang, Barbara M. H., 59, 62, 70, 77, Trudgill, Peter, 19, 26, 31, 32, 58, 77,
84, 183 270, 282
Strycharczuk, Patrycja, 76 Trump, Donald, 310
Stuart, Anne (Queen Anne), 126 Tudor, Elizabeth (Queen Elizabeth I),
Stuart, James (King James I), 20, 125, 128, 169
127, 137, 138, 167, 358, 361 Tudor, Henry (King Henry VIII), 125
Stuart, Mary (Queen of Scots), 128 Turner, Marion, 181
Stuart-Smith, Jane, 32, 72 Turton, Danielle, 76, 77
Swift, Jonathan, 126 Tyndale, William, 125
Sylvester, Louise, 209, 237
Szarmach, Paul E., 243, 294 van Bergen, Linda, 85
Szmrecsányi, Benedikt, 204, 332 van der Auwera, Johan, 144, 245
van der Wal, Marijke J., 171
Taavitsainen, Irma, x, 139, 173, 194 van Gelderen, Elly, 123, 196
Tacitus, Publius Cornelius, 313, 314 Van Herk, Gerard, 41
Tagliamonte, Sali, 32, 47, 49, 50, 87 van Kemenade, Ans, 45, 191
Taylor, Ann, 273, 274, 319, 347 Van Zanden, Jan Luiten, 175
Taylor, Michael, 39 Velupillai, Viveka, 31
Thim, Stefan, 281 Verner, Karl, 323
Thomas, Alan R., 120 Virgil, 220
Thomas, Erik R., 72
Thomas, George, 152 Wagner, Johannes, 62
Thoreau, Henry David, 109 Wakelin, M. F., 244
Thorkelsdóttir, Gytha, 177 Wales, Katie, 137–139
Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid, 147, Walkden, George, 3, 119, 165, 170, 172,
172 275–277, 315, 330
Timofeeva, Olga, 243 Walker, John, 63, 74
Todd, Malcolm, 313 Wallage, Phillip, 276
Tolkien, J. R. R., 215, 223, 224 Waller, Tim, 82
Toller, Thomas Northcote, 285 Warner, Anthony, 145, 201, 242, 270
Toon, Thomas E., 319 Warren, Paul, 42
Townend, Matthew, 242, 283, 305 Watt, Diane, 248
Webster, Noah, 66, 115, 120, 125

428
 Name index

Weinreich, Uriel, 26
Wells, John C., 33, 34, 36, 38, 42, 58,
74, 76, 77, 134, 255
Wells, Ronald A., 161
Westergaard, Marit, 199
White, R. M., 236
Wilde, Oscar, 332
William the Conqueror, 177, 178, 304
Williams, Colin H., 33
Williams, Jeffrey P., 58
Willis, David, 276, 277
Wilson, Thomas, 152
Wilton, David, 309
Windsor, Elizabeth (Queen Eliza-
beth II), 51, 55
Winford, Donald, 282
Wischer, Ilse, 263
Wolfram, Walt, 34, 66–68, 120
Wood, Johanna L., 22, 160, 213, 269,
287, 288, 290, 337, 338
Woolf, Alex, 245, 305, 309
Wright, Elizabeth Mary, 267, 286,
305
Wright, Joseph, 267, 286, 305
Wright, Laura, 124, 172
Wulfila, 314
Wulfstan, 242, 246, 297, 298
Wycliffe, John, 20, 196, 208, 358, 361

Yáñez-Bouza, Nuria, 146, 147, 173

York, Alexandra, 63
Yuasa, Ikuko P., 43

Zwicky, Arnold M., 78

429
Language index

Afrikaans, 36, 49, 315, 325 African American, 6, 19, 44, 45,
Algonquian, 127 67, 68, 72, 80, 104, 278, 351
Arabic, 150, 162, 318 Alabama, 44, 278
Moroccan, 277 American, 10, 19, 29, 30, 32, 34–
Palestinian, 277 35, 39, 41–43, 45, 47, 48, 52,
Armenian, 317 53, 61, 65–68, 71, 72, 74, 78,
Austroasiatic, 36 80, 82, 88–90, 92–95, 101,
109, 115, 120, 136, 202, 318,
Bantu, 266 354, 364, 380
Basque, 316 Australian, 32, 35, 39, 41–43, 46,
Bengali, 162 47, 82, 120
Berber, 277 Belfast, 42
Black American Sign Language, 68 Boston, 72, 103
Breton, 244, 277 Brazilian, 30
Burmese, 277 British, 32, 33–34, 39, 41–43, 45,
47, 48, 52, 53, 61, 71, 72, 78,
Celtic, Brythonic, 244–245, 251, 264,
80, 82, 88–90, 92–94, 136,
264, 270, 282, 305, 309, 311,
202, 364, 384
355
Brunei, 42
Chinese, 31, 115, 117, 138, 150, 162, 195,
Cajun, 6, 16
266, 329
California, 41
Cornish, 128, 244
Californian, 42
Czech, 15, 36, 44, 138, 146
Canadian, 35, 41, 42, 47, 49, 120
Danish, 315, 326 Caribbean, 120
Dharug, 150 Charleston, 74
Dravidian, 36 Chicano, 67, 120
Dusun, 31 Devon, 16
Dutch, 68, 136, 198, 255, 277, 297, 315, East Anglian, 44
326, 365 East Midlands, 194
Hong Kong, 120
English Indian, 6, 32, 35–36, 49, 116, 134
Language index

Inland North, 16, 39, 41 Faroese, 315, 326

Inner Sydney, 44 Finnish, 316, 318, 325, 334
Irish, 33, 41, 48, 67, 76, 77, 120, French, 34, 66, 68, 70, 81, 128, 138, 139,
227 146, 148, 151, 160, 162, 173,
Jamaican, 47, 48 178, 181, 184, 185, 205–207,
Labrador, 43 207, 210, 221, 244, 251, 253,
Midwest, 16 276, 305, 317, 356, 361, 365,
Mongolian, 30 369, 372, 375
Multicultural London, 30 Anglo-Norman, 178
New York, 72, 74, 103 Norman, 178, 184, 206, 316
New Zealand, 32, 35, 41, 42, 46, Old, 71
47, 49, 80, 82, 120 Frisian, 315
Newfoundland, 43, 45 Old, 318, 334–336, 376
Northern British, 45
Northern England, 44, 76, 77, Gaelic, Scottish, 33, 67, 244
105, 113, 185, 200, 211, 255 Georgian, 318
Northern Ireland, 72, 200 German, 66, 81, 125, 138, 139, 146, 193,
Pakistani, 30 198, 201, 277, 297, 315, 325,
Philippine, 46 326
Public School, 65 Old High, 324, 335, 336
Reading, 44 Gothic, 314, 315, 319, 322–324, 326,
Received Pronunciation, 65, 120, 330, 331, 345
384 Greek, 80, 81, 81, 125, 128, 148, 151–
Scottish, 29, 33, 67, 72, 120, 182, 153, 160, 317, 322, 330, 365,
185, 200, 252, 253, 255 369
Singapore, 10, 29, 46, 48, 49, 120 Guarani, 365
South African, 32, 35–36, 41, 42, Guugu Yimidhirr, 150
49, 120
Hebrew, 125, 318, 369
South African Indian, 120
Hindi/Urdu, 150, 162, 280
South Asian, 120
Hungarian, 316, 318
Southern American, 89, 200
Standard, 29 Icelandic, 315, 325
Standard Southern British, 65, Igbo, 150
72, 77 Indo-Iranian, 317
Tyneside, 23, 57–58 Irish, 33, 67, 128, 228, 244, 282, 292
Welsh, 7, 23, 41, 72, 77, 120, 134 Italian, 66, 128, 329
Zimbabwe, 30
Estonian, 277, 316, 334 Japanese, 150

432
 Language index

Latin, 71, 80, 81, 81, 125, 128, 138, 146, Scots, 120, 128, 176
146, 147, 148, 151–153, 160, Slovak, 36
173, 178, 181, 193, 205, 207, Spanish, 34, 44, 66, 94, 129, 162
210, 239–241, 246, 248, 252, Swedish, 315, 376
253, 282, 283, 302, 305, 310,
311, 317, 319, 322, 330, 332, Taíno, 94, 150
334, 336, 355, 356, 368, 369, Telugu, 150
371, 384 Tibetan, 150
British, 240, 309 Turkish, 150

Malay, 150 Welsh, 33, 37, 49, 67, 67, 72, 86, 128,
Manx, 244 134, 144, 244, 264, 277
Maori, 35, 49
Yiddish, 315
Munda, 36

Norse, 195, 205, 240–242, 244, 245,

253, 270, 270, 270, 271, 274,
275, 276, 277, 282–284, 302,
315–317, 324, 333, 334, 345,
355
Norwegian, 66, 315, 326

Ojibwe, 94, 366

Pali, 150
Persian, 150
Pidgin Delaware, 69
Polish, 66, 67
Portuguese, 31, 129, 150
Powhatan, 94
Proto-Finnic, 334
Proto-Germanic, 308, 317, 324, 326,
326, 328–334, 339, 345
Proto-Indo-European, 308, 317, 318,
322, 328–331, 333, 334, 339

Russian, 34, 162, 193

Sanskrit, 193, 317, 322–324, 330

Saxon, Old, 316, 318, 322, 324, 325,
334, 335, 340

433
Subject index

ablaut, 325, 327–328, 333, 334, 339 borrowings, 70, 94, 124, 133, 134, 148–
accentism, 19, 42, 43, 61, 62, 65, 67, 74, 153, 160, 185, 195, 205–207,
96 210, 245, 251, 253, 282–284,
actuation problem, 3 328, 334, 336, 369, 371, 372,
affixes, 7, 21, 49, 77–79, 98, 149, 191, 375, 383
192, 202–204, 206–207, 245, British Empire, 33, 35, 36, 59, 110,
272, 275, 280–281, 297, 324, 127–129, 153
325, 369, 371, 372, 375 bumblebees, 6, 14, 16, 22, 23, 44, 46–
ain’t, 30, 56, 60, 80 48, 60, 83, 86, 87, 149, 158,
alliteration, 223, 248, 300, 324, 340, 275, 276, 289, 291, 350, 360,
347 362, 384
amelioration, x, 90–92, 101, 366–367
Americanisms, 90, 93–95, 100–101, case, 193, 195, 196, 202, 203, 217, 240,
364–366 264–271, 279, 287, 297, 325,
analogy, 71, 194, 329 330–332, 376, 379
analytic, 330–332, 339 chain shifts, 39–42, 130–137, 162, 323
Anglo-Frisian Brightening, 318, 334, Chancery, 124
340 Christianity, 20, 65, 67, 115, 125, 127,
archaeology, 13, 241, 244, 308–313, 138, 139, 176, 240, 242, 246,
317, 346 248, 283, 300, 307, 310, 313,
articles, 185, 196, 203, 210, 268–269, 333, 334, 341
271, 278–280, 356, 375 clitics, 18, 77–79, 202–204, 275, 380,
ash, 249 383
aspect, 83–86, 104, 281, 332 clusters (consonant), 5, 90, 185–187,
auxiliaries, 44, 78, 86, 87, 141–145, 192, 239
192, 332 collective nouns, 45–46, 363
colonialism, 33, 34, 34, 44, 59, 60,
birds, 11, 20, 21, 45, 105, 111, 209, 217– 67–69, 94, 127–129, 148–150,
219, 229–233, 345, 357, 361, 153, 163, 176, 308, 356
371 Columbian Exchange, 129
Black Death, 136, 175 Comparative Method, 308, 318, 322,
329, 334
Subject index

complaint tradition, 25, 63, 83, 145, 98, 141, 148, 185, 190, 199,
153 205, 210, 258, 263, 351, 363,
consonants, xv, 5, 41, 69–76, 90, 129, 364
185–189, 192, 236, 249–255, futurity, 18, 87, 88, 263–264, 353
257, 266, 287, 318, 322–325,
328, 335, 336, 355, 377, 381– geminates, 251, 266, 381
383 gender (grammatical), 104, 265–271,
constraints problem, 1, 2, 40 286, 287, 297, 371, 373, 376
conversion, 148–149, 151 gender studies, ix, 15, 62, 92, 162, 248,
corpora, x, 15, 24, 50, 52, 53, 57, 78, 311, 359, 365
82, 85, 88, 119, 144, 163, 165, genetics, 309, 311, 312, 317, 317
170, 172, 205, 245, 246, 364, globalization, 29, 32, 33, 42, 47, 49–
380 50, 58, 60, 129, 354
creaky voice, 39, 43 glottalling, 2, 3, 4, 38–39, 379
creoles, 31, 68, 316 grammaticalization, 18, 79, 87, 195,
196, 202–204, 269, 280, 281,
deixis, 210, 380 326, 381
demonstratives, 195, 196, 203, 264, Great Vowel Shift, xiii, 124, 129–137,
269, 271, 278–280 153–155, 173, 188, 189, 192,
dictionaries, 6, 26, 49, 63, 65, 66, 70, 193, 239, 256, 322, 323, 353,
71, 86, 98, 100, 101, 115, 116, 359, 367, 375
136, 140, 149, 151, 152, 160,
161, 193, 205, 215, 216, 245, High Rising Terminals, 39, 42–43,
262, 284–287, 290, 291, 352, 350
373, 374 historical pragmatics, x, 11, 43, 47,
diphthongization, 131, 132, 134, 154 138–140, 173, 194, 207–209,
discourse markers, 209, 361 350, 352, 355, 361
dual (number), 266 hypercorrection, 71, 72, 75

East India Company, 36 industrial revolution, 59, 123

embedding problem, 2, 3, 40 inflection, xiii, 6, 9, 44–46, 77–81,
eth, 251, 375 140–141, 160, 189–193, 259–
evaluation problem, 3, 90 271, 328, 330–332, 351, 372,
381
First Sound Shift, 322–323, 325, 336– information status (given/new), 198,
337, 377 199, 202, 217, 271, 272
fixing to (finna), 87–89, 353 inkhorn controversy, 148, 151–153,
FOOT-STRUT split, 69, 76–77 161, 173, 369
frequency, 16, 38, 39, 42, 47, 48, 50, irregularities, 14, 132, 133, 140–141,
52, 70, 72, 82, 84, 85, 87, 88, 160, 161, 188, 189, 192–193,

436
 Subject index

196, 251, 263, 289, 325, 327– NICE properties, 141–143, 200
329, 338, 351–352, 360, 369 Norman Conquest, 13, 177–179, 205,
206, 239, 242, 359
Jespersen’s Cycle, 277, 291 Northern Cities Shift, xiii, 39–41, 131,
kennings, 282 162, 189, 323
Northern Subject Rule, 45, 191
language variation and change
(field), viii, xiii, 1–4, 27, 37, object-verb (word order), xiii, 273–
40, 50, 61, 64, 95 275
legal language, 14, 15, 124, 245, 246, orthography, 4–6, 20, 38, 66, 72, 75,
283, 341–344, 371 79, 88, 90, 99, 115, 123, 124,
lexical doublets, 206, 218, 371 133–136, 162, 179, 182–185,
ligature, 249, 375 187, 188, 204, 211, 212, 216,
literacy, 175, 176, 178, 246, 307 220, 236, 249–252, 254, 256,
259, 284, 287, 296, 319–321,
manuscripts, 128, 135, 175, 176, 183– 349, 351, 352, 357, 358, 372,
188, 196, 214–215, 221, 223, 373, 382
224, 228, 231, 233, 235, 241,
243, 246, 248–251, 254, 272, palatalization, 252–255, 382
272, 298, 300, 302–304, 344, paradigms, 6, 44, 190, 192, 193, 240,
345, 370 259, 263–264, 267, 267, 268,
media, viii, ix, 1, 7, 13, 32, 37, 49, 282, 364, 374, 382
50, 54, 59, 159, 204, 310, 354, passive, 46, 48, 52, 84, 85, 350, 364,
355, 363 383
merger, 66, 70, 129, 132, 250, 318, 325 pejoration, x, 90–92, 101, 209, 366–
migration, 31, 41, 59, 66, 67, 124, 124, 367, 383
136, 165, 241, 241, 308–313, pidgins, 31, 68
334 plurals, 14, 45, 46, 60, 69, 137, 138, 140,
modals, 8, 18, 78, 80, 81, 82, 83, 86–89, 141, 160–162, 190, 191, 193–
141, 145, 190–192, 197, 200– 196, 213, 220, 251, 257, 258,
202, 263, 272, 326, 353, 383 260, 261, 263–268, 270, 289,
multilingualism, 34, 128, 181, 237, 290, 297, 325, 326, 337, 351,
240, 245, 284, 355 361, 362, 369–371, 373–377
poetry, 21–22, 56, 75, 84, 85, 134, 146,
nation-states, 34, 115, 122–124, 126, 165–167, 180, 188, 196, 210,
153, 206, 356 223–233, 236, 248, 249, 255,
native-speakerism, 62 273, 281, 282, 292–297, 299–
negation, 8, 60, 77–80, 88, 141, 143– 302, 324, 330, 339, 350
145, 271, 272, 275–278, 291–
pre-glottalization, 38
292, 363, 368, 382

437
Subject index

preposition stranding, 125, 145–148, relative clauses, 147, 278–280

159, 173 Renaissance, 151
prescriptivism, x, 48, 60–64, 71, 77, rhoticity, 72–75
79–81, 83, 84, 88–90, 96, 99, Roman Empire, 307, 309, 313, 314
120, 122, 125, 137, 145, 147, runes, 248, 250, 252, 319–321, 336,
196, 278, 354, 355 339, 345–347, 376, 385
prestige, 65, 74, 121, 136, 152, 153, 178,
200, 205, 206, 278, 283, 383 scientific language, 49, 60, 116, 121,
preterite-presents, 201, 262, 263, 383 124, 125, 151, 246
printing press, 62, 123, 124, 135, 136, scribes, 179, 183, 184, 246, 247, 247,
175, 176, 220 250, 270, 319
productivity, 206, 207, 280, 281, 283, slavery, 31, 67, 118, 129, 245, 281, 309
328 sociolinguistics, 3, 16, 26, 50, 58, 59,
progressive, 83–87, 104, 120, 350, 361, 66, 90, 119, 122, 122, 136, 145,
368 171, 172, 179, 199, 270, 296
pronouns, 45, 69, 137–140, 162–163, split, 69, 76–77
168, 173, 185, 189, 193–196, standard language ideology, 121, 122,
199, 213, 216–217, 220, 237, 126, 145, 153
240, 264–266, 269, 280, 330, standardization, 17–19, 23–24, 26, 29,
331, 350, 352, 355, 368, 370, 30, 36, 45, 46, 54, 58, 59,
375 62, 63, 65, 74, 79, 102, 103,
purism, 65, 115, 152, 153, 161, 383 115, 121–127, 135, 136, 145–
148, 151–153, 172, 173, 175,
Quakers, 139 176, 179, 182, 252, 354, 355,
quotatives, 46–47, 52, 363 384
stress shift, 183, 280, 324–325
reconstruction, 264, 308, 317, 324, strong verbs, 189, 190, 192–193, 240,
326, 328–332, 334–337, 347, 260–263, 325, 327–329, 333,
350, 376 338, 371, 377
regional variation, 8, 11, 16, 24, 32– subjectification, 209
37, 39, 42, 44, 45, 50, 57, 67, subjects, 7–9, 44–46, 87, 104, 137, 138,
71–73, 77, 82, 88, 89, 92, 93, 141, 142, 191, 193, 197–200,
100, 120, 124, 134, 140, 154, 202, 265, 271, 272, 279, 329–
162, 179, 181, 183, 185, 191, 331, 355, 368, 379, 383
194, 195, 199, 200, 211–213, subjunctive, 77, 80–83, 88, 191, 260,
216, 224, 246, 252, 253–255, 325, 384
270, 276, 365, 369 syntactic trees, 8, 9, 22, 23, 142–144,
regularity of sound change, 38, 39, 197–199, 199, 269, 271–276,
194, 308, 322, 323, 328, 329 278, 329, 352

438
 Subject index

synthetic, 330–332, 339 337, 353, 355, 359, 361, 372,

375, 377
T-V system (pronouns), 138, 139, 155–
158, 162, 194 weak verbs, 189–193, 240, 260, 261,
taboo, 92 263, 325–328, 338, 339, 346,
technology, 32, 37, 49, 50, 59–61, 321, 377
354, 355 word formation, 6, 7, 9, 98, 124,
third person -s, 6, 16, 44–46, 138, 140, 149, 206–207, 280–282, 293,
189, 191, 192, 200, 363 333–334
thorn, 184–186, 251, 297, 319, 372, 376, word order, 7, 8, 87, 141–148, 158–159,
385 197–200, 217, 240, 271–276,
transition problem, 2, 175, 179, 197, 288, 296, 297, 331, 332, 355,
199, 210, 355 376
wynn, 250
umlaut, ix, 252, 255–258, 267, 337,
377 X-bar theory, 9
uniformitarianism, 37
unrounding, 250, 258, 259 yogh, 184, 385

V-to-I movement, 142–144, 272, 368

verb-second, xiii, 197–200, 217, 240,
271–273, 297, 355, 370, 371,
375, 376, 385
Vikings, 177, 240–242
voicing allophony, 251, 252, 286, 287
vowel lengthening, 188–189, 239,
249, 355
vowel lowering, 1, 2, 4, 41, 162, 189
vowel reduction, 70, 187–188, 250,
258, 267, 269, 325, 325, 352,
377
vowel shortening, 7, 76, 133, 188–189,
192, 266, 355
vowels, xv, 1, 2, 4, 7, 16, 39–41, 63, 66,
75–77, 79, 99, 124, 129–137,
153–155, 162, 173, 183, 185,
187–190, 192, 193, 236, 239,
249–251, 253, 253, 254–259,
261, 262, 267, 269, 287, 318–
319, 322–325, 325, 327, 328,

439
A history of English

Where does today’s English language come from? This book takes its readers on a jour-
ney back in time, from present-day varieties to the Old English of Beowulf and beyond.
Written for students with little or no background in linguistics, and reflecting the latest
scholarship, it showcases the variation and change present throughout the history of
English, and includes numerous exercises and sample texts for every period.
The reverse-chronological approach taken by this book sets it apart from all existing
textbooks of the last fifty years. Innovative features also include its focus on variation,
multilingualism and language contact, its use of texts from outside the literary canon,
and its inclusion of case studies from syntax, sociophonetics and historical pragmatics.