Gone Medieval - Origins of English

Episode Date: May 9, 2023

Approximately 1.35 billion people use it, either as a first or second language, so English and the way that we speak it has a daily impact on huge numbers of people. But how did the English language develop? In this episode of Gone Medieval, first released in July 2021, Dr. Cat Jarman speaks to Eleanor Rye, an Associate Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics at the University of York. Using the present day language, place names and dialects as evidence, Ellie shows us how English was impacted by a series of migrations. If you’re enjoying this podcast and are looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, I'm Dr. Kat Jarman, and this is Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast dedicated to the Middle Ages. And sometimes we might wonder what effects particular events that took place in the past really had in the longer term. We might wonder what a period like the Middle Ages really did for us. Hopefully, this podcast will give you lots of great answers to that question. But today I want to focus on something that affects pretty much everyone listening to this right now, namely the English language. Because English was essentially created and developed

in the Middle Ages. And a big reason why it is what it is today is because of the impact of a series of migrants. Now the wonderful thing is that we can find evidence for who those people were by picking apart the language we speak right now. And if you travel across England, you can find clues to that history and dialects and place names that you see on roadside. So to really understand this, I've invited Dr Ellie Rye to the podcast. Ellie is an associate lecturer in English language and linguistics at the University of York. Her research has focused especially on place names and what they can tell us about things like medieval settlement, land use and even travel. So welcome Ellie and thanks for joining me today.

Hi Kat, it's lovely to be here. Now, I do realise that this is a pretty huge topic and one that you teach at university level over a whole term or more. So thanks for agreeing to come along and give us. a sort of crash course in the next half hour or so. No problem. You're very welcome. So first of all, so I'm an archaeologist and I work on very physical objects, probably out of the ground. So I wanted to start a little bit with the basics. Can you just explain to us really? How do we actually study the development and evolution

of a language, especially if we haven't always got a very representative selection of written sources? Well, one thing we can do is use all the evidence we have available to us. So that might mean going back to the earlier stages of the language we have records for. So if we're talking about English, we've got English recorded in texts, in snippets from the 8th century, and we've got much more extensive records from the 9th century and later. But that already takes us over 1,000 years back into the history of English. And in fact, we can go back earlier than this in the case of the manuscript evidence and the writings in the Latin alphabet. Those come in after Christianity.

So they come in from more or less the century and later. But we can go a little bit earlier than that, so we can look at things like runic inscriptions, which we've got from the sixth, maybe even from the fifth century. We can do other things too. We can look at things like names that might be recorded in other written traditions. I'm not going to give you an English example here, but we could take the example of names from Britain

that are recorded in Roman period sources. So we haven't got many written representations of that language, but we have got some evidence for it in Natives. names recorded elsewhere in Latin or Greek documents. But the other thing we can do is what we term in linguistics as reconstruction. So the main method that's quite useful in the history of English is what we call comparative reconstruction. In this method, we look at systematic correspondences between forms in related languages. So if we take an example, we'll take the English word farther as an example,

we could look at other words in related languages, so related Germanic languages like Icelandic or like German. We have the form Icelandic Fadir, we have German Fartar. Looking at these, we'd say, okay, there's something in common. They all start with an initial first sound. They've got a final R sound. And then in the middle, there's something which is a little bit tricky to work out from the modern forms, but it's going to be a te oder d. And I'm kind of combining this with our earlier knowledge of these different languages.

We can come up with a reconstructed form of Fadder. So we can bring together the different available evidence we have for the languages and we compare this cross-linguously and work out what the most likely ancestral form would have been. So it's a bit of a sort of jigsaw puzzle then, so having some of the written sources and some sort of detective work of just pulling apart what we're doing today, essentially.

Yeah, absolutely. We've got lots of different sources available to us, and people have been studying this kind of thing for a long period of time as well. So we kind of bring together all the evidence we've got to bear on the question. So let's go onto English then properly and the Middle Ages. So if we go right back to the sort of start

of the medieval periods, maybe around about 500s or so. So we've got some Germanic-speaking people here. And when people are coming into this country, what sort of languages are they faced with? What do they meet? What would be here at that time? We know that Germanic-speaking migrants turn up before about 500,

and there would have been at least a couple of languages they would have encountered across most of Britain. And we have two subgroupings of these languages. We have the languages which we term Britonic. That's the languages like Welsh and Cornish. and Breton. We have another subgrouping which we can term goidelic. This is languages like Irish, like Scots Gallic and like Manx. The most significant in terms of what Germanic-speaking migrants come into is going to be the Protonic group of languages. So an early form of the language that will

ultimately develop into languages like Welsh and Cornish is going to be spoken across most of England, lots of Scotland, Wales, Cornwall too. And this is the language that the Germanic It's going to come into the closest contact with. The gridelic languages are going to be important at a later stage. These are being spoken in Ireland, in the west coast of Scotland, the Isle of Man. We can come on to those later, but for the purposes of the earlier period, it's the botanic languages, which are most significant. There's also quite a big question about whether people are still speaking Latin.

So it used to be thought that Latin in the Roman period was basically restricted to the most Romanised settings, so to Roman towns, to the elite. to people in the army. Those are the people we thought would be speaking Latin. Everyone else we thought, well, they're just carrying on speaking this British language, this early Britonic language. And to some extent, we still think this is true. So particularly in Western Britain, we think that people pretty much always carried on speaking British.

It's been suggested in more recent years that in parts of the country, people might have been actually speaking Latin. And this really only applies to the southeast of England, where this might have been true. And one reason that this is quite interesting is that there are lots of early Latin loan words in Old English. The problem is that we're not quite sure when they were borrowed. So we know that Germanic speakers came into contact with people speaking Latin at some point,

but actually we know they came into contact with them at lots of different times. So we think there were Germanic-speaking soldiers in the Roman army. We know there would have been trade and other kinds of contact. So the question is whether these Latin loan ones are borrowed into a kind of very early form of what would go on to be English in a much earlier period or whether some of them might have been borrowed in Britain. And that's quite an interesting question because we do find some place name evidence for Latin words being associated with Latin remains in place names. So it's kind of one thing that might be taking place. But after I've said all of that, the evidence is actually pretty inconclusive. So we don't have very widespread evidence that place names were ever being given in Latin.

I think of the names from Roman period sources, only about 8% of them are in Latin. So there isn't really much evidence for widespread use of Latin in naming. So the evidence is pretty inconclusive. There might have been some spoken Latin, but we can't really be sure either way. These Germanic people then coming in, can you tell me a little bit more about who they were and that sort of early impact that they had. Sure. The Romans withdrew officially from Britain in the early 5th century, so by 409 or 410, they'd kind of officially given up claims to Britain.

And into this power vacuum, we think Germanic-speaking migrants came. So we've talked already a little bit about the Germanic languages. So what we meet by this is people speaking an early form of the language family that includes English and Norwegian and German and Dutch and so on. We think that Germanic migrants exploited this power of vacuum and started settling in England. We have some idea about where they came from, from two kinds of sources, one of which is the evidence of what English is like in general. So we know English is most closely related to other languages spoken around the North Sea.

So we think this is the most likely point where these Germanic-speaking migrants came from. These are the most likely places. The other thing is that we do have evidence from later writers. So Beed writing in the 8th century, so he's about 200, 300 years later than this is all meant to be happening. He tells us about his understanding of the situation, and he associates the migrants with different groups of people who are in the kind of North Sea world. And he tells us that there are three groups of people. He tells us about a group called the Jutes, and as their name implies, they're generally associated with Jutland. so westernmost part of what is now Denmark.

And these people are meant to have settled in Kent, in the Isle of White and in some parts of Hampshire. Then we get reference to the Angles. And these people are meant to have settled in East Anglia, in Northumbria, and in the Midlands. And the Anglians are meant to have come from a little bit south of the Jutes, so the kind of North German, southern Danish area. And then finally we get reference to a group of people called

Saxons and these Saxons are meant to have been a little bit further to the south still on the North Sea coast and they're meant to have given rise to the people that Beed knows as the East Saxons, the West Saxons and the South Saxons. And of course, these are what gives us some county and regional names today. So we get Sussex from the South Saxons. We get Essex from the East Saxons. We get the region of Wessex from the West Saxons, a little bit of evidence that corroborates, Bede's account. So we do see evidence for people identifying themselves. as Saxons or Anglians or whatever it may be in some of these regional and county names. I've talked about Wessex and Sussex and Essex. We can also note East Anglia. It contains

these Anglians as well. But we probably shouldn't take his word entirely at face value. It's likely to be something of a simplification and something that reflects his position, looking back from a few hundred years later, when he knows that there are these groupings that identify themselves as Anglians and Saxons in different parts of the country. And in fact, there is some place name evidence that suggests the picture is a little bit more complicated. So we do have evidence for groups of people who are calling themselves Saxons or Anglians or whatever it may be in places where we wouldn't expect them. One example of this would be Saxon Dale in Nottinghamshire. So this is an area where we think we should be in an Anglian area, but we've actually got some Saxons referred to in the first part of this place name.

This is the valley of the Saxons. So names like this, whilst we can't tell exactly when they arose, maybe they arose a bit later than this initial. migration phase, they do at least tell us that things are a little bit more complicated than Bede's pictures that just that there is a little bit more diversity in these groupings. Okay, so we've got some ideas of possibly then where they came from, but is there anything we can say about the nature of those migrations from the language or the way it evolved? Maybe not so much about the nature of the initial migrations themselves, but we can say something about the situation that prevails afterwards. So the most obvious point, and once we're

making is that we're not actually speaking a language right Welsh today. Kat and I are talking in English. And this kind of switch to speaking English seems to have taken place pretty early. By the time we have reasonable levels of documentation from concerning England, concerning Southern Scotland, we've got evidence that a form of English is being spoken in a pretty widespread way. And this is the language that we call old English. So we can turn this language old English up to about 1,100. Of course, people carry on speaking Britonic languages in the West, particularly, and these still survive for many centuries in Cornwall, survived to this day in Wales. So in the west of the country, the people carry on speaking Britonic languages. But elsewhere, there must have been some kind of pressure for people to switch over and start speaking English.

Now, it used to be thought that the previous, so the Britonic speaking inhabitants of England had basically either been killed or caused to flee by Anglo-Saxon migration. We don't think this is the situation anymore. There's a lot more evidence for continuity and populations and people gradually adopting aspects of the culture of these Germanic-speaking migrants, though we can't necessarily directly equate that with language, of course. But whatever happened, there must have been quite a lot of pressure for people to switch over to speaking English. And this probably tells us something about power relations between the groups of people. So if people tend to switch over to speaking the language, if it's advantageous to them, so we think that this might tell us something about the social dynamics of this period,

the language of the Germanic-speaking migrants is the more powerful or the more prestigious, and people must be switching over to speak this language. And back before people realised there was quite a lot of continuity, people thought that really there hadn't been that much contact between Britonic and early English speakers. So we've got a few loan words, got things like, the dialect word brock for a badger. We've got a coom for a small valley, term east in certain parts of the country.

And we've got quite a lot of place names and especially river names that get transferred. So we get things like Breeden Hill. So this is a name that occurs in several parts of the country. But the Brebit comes from a British name for the hill. So Bray. And then we get Old English Dune, a word for a hill, the kind of level summit,

that's added to this. So this is literally hill, hill. And then in later times in modern English, we get hill added again in some of these cases like the Worcestershire example of a Breeden Hill. So it used to be thought that this was all there was, that the small number of loan words, which indicates some degree of contact, but not very much, was all there was. But now we think there was more continuity and that Britonic speakers shifted over to start speaking English. People have started to wonder whether there's actually a bit more structural impact on English.

The idea behind this is the same kind of thing that happens when you learn a foreign language and maybe you start speaking that language, but your pronunciation is a bit off target and you maybe use some sounds from another language you speak, not the one you're trying to speak. And maybe you get the word order wrong. Maybe you put an adjective before and noun like you would in English when you mean to put it after,

something like that. But the idea is that collectively, if enough people do this for a long enough period of time, they can influence a language in structural ways. And this seems quite plausible, given what we think took place in this early period in the history of English. The difficulty is that identity,

identifying secure examples of this kind of influence is pretty tricky. And lots of the evidence is quite contentious. So we get things like the way English users do to form negatives and questions, like do you listen to the podcast, which are recorded much, much later than this period of contact and could in theory have lots of other origins too. So it's an interesting area for research, but it's not an easy one.

So the next big impact in the medieval period come from another set of migrants a little bit later on, starting from the late 8th century onwards, so the Vikings or the Scandinavians. Now, they also spoke a related Germanic language. For those Scandinavians coming into the country at that time, would they be able to understand those who are already here? Yeah, so that's an interesting question. And I think my answer is a kind of qualified yes. So the Vikings or the Scandinavians spoke another Germanian. language, so a language that's already related to English, as he said. And this means that some words in the language would have basically been identical. So if you wanted to talk about your

house in either language, well, in old English, you'd talk about your hoose, and in old Scandinavian, you'd talk about your hoose too. So obviously, you could communicate about the house in some kind of relatively straightforward way and successful way. There are other words which differ only in one or two sounds. So we can think of an example, like the word for fish, which in old English would be a fish and in old Scandinavian would be a fisc, and people would begin to spot these correspondences. But these kind of general similarities must have meant that there was some degree of mutual intelligibility from the outset, though it might have been quite limited. We can imagine that people might have been able to carry out basic transactions, but that some

sorts of conversation might have been more problematic. So there were lots of differences too. We could take just as an example, the Old English word for law in early Old English would have been air and the old Scandinavian word which you think would have had a form like to argue. So more complicated interactions might have been a little bit more problematic. But the fact that the languages were similar and the differences were predictable must have made it quite straightforward to become reasonably proficient in the other language or to understand someone who was speaking the other language and be able to figure out what they meant. For example, once you knew that old English shur sound was equivalent to a skuss sound in old Scandinavian, like in our fish and fisk example, you could kind of unlock a lot of other vocabulary.

So you could say, okay, well, I can translate between an old English ship and an old Norse skip or the word shear in Old English and skier in Old Norse, a word meaning clear or bright. So he'd be able to unlock lots of other vocabulary basically and either use it or understand it. And of course people living in mixed communities and especially in mixed households might have been much more proficient in both of the languages. And in the early 2000s, my colleague at York Matthew Tannan worked extensively on this. And he showed, using a lot of place name evidence actually, that people in Viking Age England seem to have been quite aware of these predictable differences and being able to apply them in communication. And he uses the term adequate intelligibility and contrasts that with perfect intelligibility. and I think that's quite a useful way to think about it. Excellent.

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every Monday and Thursday. So join me on American History Hit, a podcast by History Hit. So thinking a bit more about the Scandinavians than that obviously come to settle in large parts of England, what was the actual effect of those people, of the language that they were speaking on what was to become the later versions of English? Well, quite extensive. So the most obvious place to start is with the words borrowed into English from Scandinavian, so loan words. And we can divide these into two periods, roughly.

So we can talk about those which are recorded in the old English periods, so up to about 1,100. And these are quite limited. So we've only got about 100 of these words. And very often, they're words that are in some way associated with Scandinavians, their activities, their culture. So we get lots of terms for legal matters, so we can talk about the word law.

So our word law is a borrowing from Scandinavian, from this early Scandinavian form, LaHue. We've also got terms for things that would be military, like a tapar axe, a particular kind of axe, which is a borrowing from Scandinavian. In the later period, in later records, so later medieval English and indeed later, we see much more extensive evidence

for use of Scandinavian vocabulary in English. And it's not just more numerous, so maybe about 1,500 words listed in the Oxford English dictionary, I think. But it also covers a much wider range of semantic areas. So we've got quite basic vocabulary, like window and sky and egg, for example. And these are all words that English already had perfectly good words for. So these represent a slightly different kind of boring. They can't all be put down to the need for a new word to describe something you weren't describing.

before. And there are other ways from which English has been affected too. We've borrowed some grammatical forms from Scandinavian and particularly important are the pronouns they, them and there, which are borrowed from Scandinavian. And there might be some other effects on things. And contact between English and Scandinavian might have also affected other things. It might have hastened, for example, the loss of the extensive system of inflectional endings, so word endings, that existed in Old English and which get lost going into the Middle English and later modern English periods. So there's quite a good footprint of the Scandinavian migrations then essentially in modern English. Yeah, certainly. Are there ways then that we can try and look at what we know about

the Scandinavians and the Vikings coming here and finding out something about where they lived and where they settled? Yeah, absolutely. So I'll come on to place names in a minute, but we can just talk a little bit about dialects to begin with. Once we get quite extensive records of English from the later medieval period and modern English period, we see that the language in certain parts of the country bears more traces of Scandinavian than in others. So in areas where we know there was Scandinavian settlement, we see really extensive Scandinavian influence on dialects, so the north-west and Yorkshire and parts of the East Midlands. And some of this survives today. So if you might hear someone in the north of England to describe a stream as a beck, this is a

Scandinavian loan word from old Scandinavian Becker, but you'd be very unlikely to hear someone in the south use that word. So some of these distinctions still visible today. But place names allow us to track these differences further back in time. So in general, place names began life as descriptions of places that they now name. There are two things that come out of this, one of which is that they can tell us what languages are being used. The other is that they tell us something about the place that they now name. If we're talking about languages, many place names in England are recorded by 1086 in the survey known as Doomsday Book. So we've got a lot of evidence for English place names by the end of the 11th century. And by this period, we see an awful

lot of Scandinavian place names. And these are particularly found in the areas where we know that Scandinavians were settling from other evidence, from the archaeological and from the historical sources. So the area east of Watling Street that comes to be known as the Dane Law in later centuries. And we see lots of Scandinavian place names in this area. We can think of examples like Derby, the Deer Settlement or Grimsby, Grimmers settlement, which contain this bee in modern English, old Scandinavian bure, which is a word for a settlement or a village. So we've got words that refer to settlements.

We've got others that tell us something else about what's going on in these societies. So quite a nice example of this is Thingwall in Wirral, so in the northwest Midlands between the Mersey and the D. Thingwall comes from an old Scandinavian compound, a Thingvuller. The thing part refers to a legal assembly, so a place where people got together to deal with legal matters. The Vuller bit means plain or area of level ground. But this tells us that basically there was a legal assembly at Thingwall in Wirill. So this tells us something about social organisation in the period. So there's another question about whether we can spot different groups of peoples in this material.

And the most obvious way of looking into this question is to look at place names that we can call ethnonyms. So these are place names which contain some kind of ethnic label as part of them. We've talked about one of these names already. So we talked about Saxondale a bit earlier. So referring to these Saxons. And there are lots of ethnonyms from areas of Scandinavian settlement. So we can think of the numerous places called things like Dan B, and Norman Bee and I.O.B.

And the first element in the Danby names is Old Scandinavian Danir, which we can translate as Danes. The first element of the Norman bee names is Old Scandinavian Northmen or Norwegians. And the first element of the IAB names is Old Scandinavian, Nira, so Irish people, and perhaps more loosely, gales. And however we translate the ethnonyms, we should be aware that they're not likely to map exactly onto them, modern equivalents.

But whatever exactly they meant, the people who used them, and that might have varied across time and across space, they do tell us that people are perceiving different groups of peoples and labelling them with these ethnic terms. And someone called Jane Carroll has looked at these quite recently and spotted both variation across space, but also that some of these names seem to occur in clusters, which might suggest that there are particular parts of the country where people were particularly attuned to these differences, perhaps because the populations were particularly diverse. We can approach that question of whether we can identify different groups from a slightly different linguistic angle as well.

And we can look to see whether we see different types of linguistic input in different parts of the country. So the kind of traditional view of things is that there was mainly settlement from people from the area of Norway in the northwest of the country. There was mainly settlement from the area of Denmark in the east of the country. But actually, if we start looking for these sort of mapping things that we associate with later Norwegian and later Danish, then it's a bit messier than we'd expect. We don't get a neat distribution of features that look Danish in the east of the country and features that Norwegian in the northwest of the country. And what might be happening is that groups are more mixed and their languages are reflecting that kind of mixture of peoples in these groups of Scandinavians. but there is a little bit of evidence for differences that emerge in Britain, which is quite interesting. So one thing that's quite interesting is that we can see some evidence for dialectal differences emerging in Britain.

So we know that the Scandinavians in Western areas of Britain were pretty closely involved with gridelic-speaking people who are already in Western areas of Scotland, in the Scottish Islands, in the Isle of Man and in Ireland. and there are some ways in which the language of these Gwedelic-speaking people has affected the kind of Scandinavian being used in these areas. A couple of nice examples of this are some of the lone words we get in Scandinavian. So one of these, which we use on a fairly regular basis today, is the word cross, so the religious symbol. This is a word which makes its way into English from Mold Norse, and before that we think it comes from Gaudelic. And we can kind of track the spread of this word from place names and other evidence from the North. west of England and then further through other areas of the Scandinavian speaking England and then

much more widely in later periods into English more generally. And we also get a word for a shelling, so a temporary pasture, which is borrowed from Goidelic into Old Norse. This in Old Norse would have had the form of something like Erie. And this survives in some place names like Erie Home in North Yorkshire, but we only see evidence for this in the northwest and in parts of Yorkshire. We don't ever see the spreading more widely. So we think this word was only ever used in some. types of Scandinavian. Obviously then, Scandinavians had a quite huge impact, but moving on through time, the next big event, really, in the history of England is the Norman invasion, and they also had quite significant impact on the language. Can you tell us some more about that?

Yeah, sure. So after the Norman conquest, the king, the aristocracy, high-ranking clergy, and other members of the elite, were basically replaced by French speakers. So whereas you'd had English speakers in these positions immediately beforehand, at least in many of them. After the normal conquest, you have French speakers in these kind of positions. And we think that everyone else carried on speaking English, though over time, some people would have had various reasons to either learn French or some people would have been born and brought up in mixed households. So we would have had access to both French and English. And there are lots of borrows from French in later medieval English, so the language you call Middle English. And many of these, at least in the

earliest period, quite closely related to the fact that the French are the people in power, the people in positions of authority. So we get examples of words like prison and castle and sergeant, which are all borrowed from French, and you can imagine that you might be arrested by a French-speaking sergeant and then put in prison, maybe in a castle. So all quite closely related to the fact that the French are the people who would have been dealing out law and living in castles from which they'd have been controlling the surrounding areas. But this isn't all we find. And And especially in a little bit later on, so particularly from the later 13th century onwards, to have evidence for much more extensive borrowing of French vocabulary from a much wider range of areas too.

So we get quite basic vocabulary like age and flower. We get things to do with more domestic settings like curtains and blankets. And we get things to do with things like literature and the arts like the word poet. In terms of the lasting impact, so some of these words still have quite formal. ring in English, not all of them by any means, nothing like age and flower, but some French borrowings still have a slightly more formal aspect to them than synonymous English terms. So we can think of pairs of words like ask and question where ask comes from English, question from French, or rise and mount, where rise comes from English and mount comes

from French. And we can think we'd be more likely to use the question and mount in slightly more formal context, though we might use rise and ask. So the fact that French were the elite, the French was used in more formal contexts, still has some kind of lasting effects on English that we speak today. One different type of effect is that English gets replaced as a language being used for kind of official written documents. So before the conquest, English was used to write quite formal documents. He might record laws or wills and things like that in English.

Latin was also used for recording important documents too, but English was an old. option. And the English that was used was very often based on the language of the south-west of the country, so the area of Wessex. So this is the kingdom that had survived the Scandinavian settlement and had gradually taken over or conquered parts of the country from the Scandinavian. So it was the kind of in later Anglo-Saxon England. And the kings of this kingdom remained the kings of later Anglo-Saxon England and had their bases in the southwest of the country in Winchester. And in later Anglo-Saxon in England, we can see something beginning to emerge.

It's a bit like a standard language that's based on the language of this part of the country. So people in York might speak quite differently from people in Wessex, but they might be writing a bit as if they came from Wessex. With the Norman Conquest, this emerging standard disappears entirely and gets replaced by French. So people use Latin and people use French after this period to write down documents like laws and wills and so on. This doesn't last forever. and English does emerge again as a language in which you can do quite formal and official things. But at least initially, when we see people writing things in English,

they don't have this model that's based on a particular part of the country to work with. So they start writing in a way that's very close to the language they speak. So if you come from York, you'll write something that represents your local dialect quite closely. If you come from the southwest, you'll write in a way it reflects that. So we lose this kind of emerging standard and people start to write. write in the way that they speak when they start writing in English again. OK, so that's a really interesting point then, that we've got these regional differences and things. And what happens later on then? I mean, is there anything similar to that later on?

Or do you're saying that they go back to a more sort of English again later? Particularly from the 15th century, we get a lot more official documentation being written in English. But by this point, the English being used is that of the part of the country that's now politically and economically dominant. So that's the area around London, encompassing the university towns of Oxford and Cambridge. And that goes on to develop into the standard form of English that we're used in writing up to today. But this is ultimately based on the part of England, which is politically and socially dominant in its periods, it's based on the southeast. Thinking about the end of the period that we referred to us, the Middle Ages, so around about

1,500 or so, how similar was the language English spoken at that time to what we're speaking right now. So we've entered what we'd call the modern English period and this reflects the fact that actually is pretty similar. Certain aspects of the language would certainly be pretty familiar to you. So if you were to read some of the language, that probably wouldn't cause you too many problems. There would be a lot more variation in spelling. So spelling was a lot less standardized and then you might see the same word spell in multiple different ways. You'd probably be able to figure out what's going on. And some, if you came across a word like the modern English word night, you might well find that spelled K-N-I-G-H-T back.

in 1500. And some of this familiarity reflects the fact that modern English spelling is pretty conservative and it reflects the way English was spoken centuries ago. But this makes reading older texts a little bit easier for us because we're used to some of these spellings. But understanding spoken language might be a bit trickier. There have been some quite significant changes that affected the vowel system that had kind of started before 1500 but hadn't fully worked their way through. So in middle English, for example, the word green would have been pronounced Grain rather than green, or the word dame would have been pronounced dama, not dame. And some of these changes would have begun, but they wouldn't have progressed all the way.

So those kind of things might cause you some confusion. And going back to our example of knight, to take a different example, we'd still pronounce the kuh at the beginning at this period. So you might hear something like kneit or knight, which might not be so familiar to you. There would be some differences in pronouns and verb endings. For example, you might hear something like thou sayest rather than you say, using a pronoun thou, which was used to talk to one person and to talk to someone who you're either very familiar with, very close to, or who's a social inferior.

If you want to be more formal and more polite, you'd use ye or you. And you might hear a F ending on some verbs like you sayeth, that kind of thing. These features, though, might not be too problematic if you were transported in your time machine back to 1500. So you'll probably be familiar with some of these forms from things like Shakespeare, from certain versions of the Bible, or from poetry, which might still use these more archaic forms. In terms of vocabulary, much of the vocabulary you'd be likely to come across would be pretty familiar, especially for basic concepts.

One thing you wouldn't hear would be the Latin and Greek borrowings that have been made in more recent centuries to describe things like scientific and medical concepts. And of course, English hadn't yet borrowed extensively from a whole range of languages around the globe, which English and other Western European languages came into contact with during periods of colonial expansion. So, for example, you wouldn't be hearing about potatoes, a word that makes its way into English, via Spanish from Taino, a Caribbean language, or pajamas are words which makes its way into English from Urdu. So there would be quite a few significant differences, too. And the other more general thing that you might notice is that you might spot more variety in a range of contexts.

If you were reading a letter from someone, you might notice that they were writing in a way that reflected their regional dialect. And similarly, if you were listening to lots of people speaking around you, you might notice that people, even amongst the elite, speaking with their local regional accents. So the notion of a particularly prestigious accent based on the language of the Southeast hadn't yet emerged at this period. Ellie, thank you so much for sharing your brilliant knowledge of the English language with us today and I hope all the listeners have enjoyed Ellie's insights as much as I did and if you did enjoy this do feel free to leave us a review or recommend history hits Gone Medieval podcast to your friends and family.

Thank you for listening. I'm Dr Kat Jarman and I will be back with more essential medieval knowledge next week.