The Middle English period began in 1100 and continued until around 1500. We know precisely when it began because a major historical event acted as the catalyst that affected the entire fabric of life in Britain, including the nature of the language. The event was the Norman invasion of Britain in 1066 by William the Conqueror.

While we know exactly the event that triggered the social and political changes that affected English, it, of course, would be unreasonable to state that the language itself changed overnight on the eve of the invasion. Nevertheless, the changes that resulted from the social alterations were huge, and the English language became markedly different from Old English.

Native speakers of English can access texts in Middle English, although often with difficulty, but Middle English is recognizable as English, unlike Old English, which typically must be studied as a foreign language even by native speakers of English. Examples of Middle English writings include The Canterbury Tales by Geoffery Chaucer or Piers Plowman by William Langland.

Key Features of Middle English

Three key features mark Middle English:

• The intermixing of English and French
• The loss of many of the affixes that were present in Old English
• The vowel system containing both short and long vowels

The Mixture of English and French

The mixture of English with French is the most notable feature of Middle English. After the Norman invasion, English-speaking people were ruled by French-speaking nobility. The two languages inevitably mingled, first as a pidgin, then becoming a creole, and finally turning into a new language. The resulting version of English became the Middle English of Chaucer and Langland.

A pidgin is the linguistic term for a mixture of two languages. Pidgins often arise when people of two different cultures and two different languages first establish contact. In order to communicate with each other, people from each group learn something of the language of the other group and mix the two languages as they seek to interact with each other. Typically in a pidgin, one language dominates, so to speak, and serves as the base structure for the mixed language. In the intermix of French and English after the Norman invasion, English served as the base, and French added ingredients of new vocabulary and new sounds.

When a pidgin language is taught to a new generation, and the children learn it as the only language they know, linguists say that the pidgin has become a creole. A creole language is a full language system in its own right. Middle English seems to have been a creole language. The initial contact of French-speaking nobility with English-speaking subjects forced an intermingling of the two langauges first as a pidgin, but as generations passed, chuildren came to know the intermixed language as their only language, and this is the language we call Middle English.

The Loss of Affixes

In our review of Old English, we noted that the language was marked by many affixes. In particular, nouns carried suffixes to show their role in a sentence. In Middle English, many of those affixes of Old English were lost, and others were reduced and on their way to total loss.

It is likely that since French didn't share the same suffixes with Old English, that suffixes were either reduced, simplified, or deleted when the French speakers used Old English. Old English speakers may have imitated the forms used by the French speakers, and thus the pidgin language created lacked the many affixes, and those losses were then adopted for good. As a result, Middle English lacked many suffixes, or display only weak forms for suffixes on their way out.

The Vowel System

A big third major feature of Middle English is the vowel system. Modern English speakers should notice a big difference between Middle and Modern English: Middle English has both long and short versions of all the vowels, but Modern English has lost most of the long vowels.

To understand the long vowels of Middle English, you must set aside your notions of "the long a" sound and "the short a" sound you learned in elementary school for a moment. Thetwo sounds you learned are not truly a long and a short version of the same sound; they are in fact, two different sounds.

Activity: Understanding Long Vowels

Compare the pronunciation of these two words :

You should have heard that the first word sounded a lot shorter than the second, but otherwise that the vowel was pretty much the same. This pairing respresents the vowel system in Middle English: The same exact vowel sound was made in different words, but was held out longer in some words than in others. The long vowels were literally spoken for a longer period of time than the short vowels.

Now compare the following two words:

With these two words, one did not really take any longer to say than the other. The difference was not in length, but in the pronunciation or sound of the vowel. This pairing follows the vowel system we use in Modern English, and although we say the word mate has a long a, and the word mat has a short a, the terms are a poor characterizations of what is really happening with pronunciation.

Activity: Looking at Middle English

Use the following excerpt from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to see the three major features of Middle English just discussed.

1. Try to see the English parts and the French parts by focusing on vocabulary. Which words seem English in origin and which seem French in origin?
2. Look at the suffixes. Do you notice the number of words that seem to have "e" at the end? Some of these words were losing their suffixes and only a brief vowel remained at this point.
3. Note that some sounds are written with double letters, and others with single letters. The double letters indicated that the word would be pronounced with a long sound. (This was true for both vowels and consonants.)