Middle English

The term “Middle English” describes the state of the English language during the Middle Ages of the late 11th through 15th centuries in Englad, Ireland, and Scotland. Middle English was characterized by a broad diversity of written and spoken forms.

These dialectic spoken and written styles developed most quickly in populous areas like London and Northunbria, which were major centers of literature at the time. Despite its diversity of form, Middle English produced remarkably little literature during the 12th and 13th centuries because of the contemporary prevalence of the Anglo-Norman and Latin languages in writing.

Not until the 14th century and the rise of such poets as Langland and Chaucer did Middle English become a pivotal literary language. The rise of Middle English marked the English monarchy's gradual movement away from the era of Norman political and cultural supremacy. The trilingual (Old English, Latin, and French) traditions of the Normans were replaced by a simpler system of speech, literature, and administrative communication.

In its construction, Middle English was distinguishable from Old English chiefly by its grammar. Concerning nouns, for example: where Old English relied on a tiered inflection system for indicating the states of nouns, Middle English used a simplified two-category organization in which a noun could be either strong or weak, and either singular or plural.

The strong plural – an appended -(e)s – has survived as the usual Modern English plural. The weak plural – an appended -(e)n – survives, although less conspicuously, in such plurals as “oxen,” “bretheren,” and “children.” Other distinguishing features of Middle English included distinctively spelled weak and strong verbs, pronouns borrowed from the Norse tongue, and the now-archaic pronunciation of all letters (with the exception of a final or non-final unstressed -e by the 14th century) in a word.

Middle English differs from Modern English most obviously in spelling. Several characters that appeared in Old English literature were survivors of the extinction of Old English, and the numerous and divergent dialects of Middle English created a wealth of local spelling conventions. The creation and spread of dictionaries, however, marked the beginning of the end of Middle English.

With standardized spelling and the death of the last of the characters shared by Old and Middle English, the written bureaucratic Chancery Strander English of London became the normative English by the middle of the 15th century. Ultimately, Chancery Standard English became standard enough to be called Early Modern English. Middle English was subsumed by Early Modern English with the advent of the printing press, which aided in the standardization of the English language as a whole.