Questions at Issue in Our English Speech

by Edwin W. Bowen

Indeed, the relation of the Norman French to the English dialects has given rise to so much popular misconception and error that it seems worth while, at this juncture, to indicate the true relation explicitly. When the Normans conquered England, as the philologists tell us, they did not seek to impose their language upon the English people. Such a policy would have been very unwise for obvious reasons, and would have produced untold trouble and conflict between the two races. The Normans did not despise the English tongue. They were content to let the natives speak their several English dialects just as before the Conquest. Of course, the Normans retained their own French patois and had no expectation of abandoning it in favor of English, as they had once before given up their Scandinavian vernacular for French. Yet in consequence of the overwhelming preponderance of the English natives over their Norman invaders it was inevitable, in the event of a struggle for supremacy between the two tongues, that the French should be forced to the wall. Fortunately, no such conflict was designed by either race, and it is quite reasonable to suppose that neither people ever seriously contemplated such a possibility.

It is evident, then, that the Norman Conquest did not tend to destroy the English tongue in Britain, as it was once the fashion to teach. The Norman Conquest did, however, interrupt the normal literary tradition of the English speech. For at the time of the Battle of Hastings, as has been intimated, the West-Saxon dialect was easily the foremost of the English provincial dialects and seemed destined to establish its claim as being the national speech. But the Conquest interrupted this natural process and drove West-Saxon from its coign of vantage, reducing it to the level of the rival provincial dialects. French being, of course, the language of the court and the official tongue generally, the West-Saxon dialect no longer offered any special inducement to intending authors to employ it, as had been the case ever since the days of King Alfred. Hence writers simply used their respective local dialects, there being no recognized standard speech.

Norman French and the several English dialects were now spoken side by side, and continued so for quite a long while. What more natural, therefore, than that each tongue should exercise some influence upon the other, however slight? It is usually stated that French influence hastened the decay of English inflections. But the English had begun to lose its inflections even before the coming of the Normans and to rely more largely upon position and prepositions to indicate case relations. No doubt, French influence accelerated this tendency. French influence was also a factor in modifying the idiom and vocabulary of the English tongue. But each language, as Anglo-Norman students assure us, reacted upon the other mutually; and the speech of the invaders was influenced by the English of the natives just as much as English was influenced by French.

The truth is, the influence of Norman French upon English was not so important in itself, as far as any immediate effect was concerned; but it paved the way for the subsequent influence of Parisian French which swept like a mighty tidal wave over England, leaving a considerable residuum and deposit in our speech alike in idiom and in vocabulary. Norman influence upon our tongue was, therefore, chiefly indirect, not direct. When Anjou was subdued by Philip Augustus of France in 1204, Normandy was forfeited by the English crown and from that day Norman French influence on English was practically at an end. But the Parisian dialect soon extended its sphere into Britain and began to exert a decided influence upon the English speech. In the fourteenth century English scholars industriously turned their attention to French literature, either adapting or closely translating many specimens. Norman French now gave place to the Parisian dialect which had established itself as the standard speech for all the provinces of France. English scholars who crossed the Channel, as many now did, learned the French of Paris; and when they returned to their native shores of Albion, they brought with them the best French of Paris. Having lost caste, the Norman dialect was no longer esteemed fashionable in polite society and consequently it fell to the lot of Parisian French to honor the heavy drafts which the English tongue made during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries upon the French language, for the enrichment and augmentation of its vocabulary. Nor, indeed, did the French importations into our speech cease even then. They continued, only with slightly diminished activity, during the Elizabethan and succeeding ages, down to the present time. However, during the last few centuries our vernacular has not borrowed so copiously from that source, although we still draw heavily on French in our art parlance.

Yet despite the French invasion, English held its own as the vernacular of the people, yielding but very little ground, except in its vocabulary, to the foreign tongue. So far from retreating before the vigorous onslaught of French influence, our sturdy English speech actually advanced its position and succeeded in driving French from its former stronghold of the court and high society. For the descendants of the Normans who were overwhelmingly in the minority, seeing that they were compelled by sheer force of circumstances to speak English also, gradually abandoned French as their mother-tongue and were finally content to use the language which was understood by everybody in the kingdom. Thus the English vernacular at last triumphed over French as the language even of the governing class in England; and French fell into disuse and survived as a spoken tongue only in polite society and among scholars, as an accomplishment.

So much for the true relation of French to English in the history of our speech. But to return to the question of the rise of the standard literary language in England. As has been pointed out, from 1066 to 1300 there was no recognized standard of English speech. In the existing confusion of provincial dialects there was felt an urgent need for a uniform speech throughout the entire country. The perplexity resulting from the babel of unfamiliar English dialects in use at the time of the introduction of printing was keenly felt by the people themselves, but by none more than by Caxton, who set up the first printing press in England. Now, Caxton himself used London English, as a rule. But he experienced no little embarrassment when he began to print books, because he was uncertain as to which dialect he should employ. In the prologue to his version of Vergil’s Aeneid he freely confesses his inability to determine which of the varying dialects he should adopt. Commenting on the dialectal differences he complainingly remarks: “And that common English that is spoken in one shire varyeth from another. Insomuch that in my days happened that certain merchants were in a ship in Thames, for to have sailed over the sea into Zeeland, and for lack of wind they tarried at the foreland and went to land for to refresh them. And one of them named Sheffield, a mercer, came into an house and axed for meat and specially he axed after eggs; and the good wife answered that she could speak no French. And the merchant was angry, for he could speak no French, but would have had eggs and she understood him not. And then at last another said that he would have eiren; then the good wife said that she understood him well. Lo, what should a man in these days now write, eggs or eiren? Certainly it is hard to please every man because of diversity and change of language.”

This incident related by Caxton serves to illustrate how almost unintelligible the southern dialect had become to the inhabitants of the northern part of England in the early fifteenth century. The several dialects spoken in England had diverged so much as to result in a serious handicap on trade and a practical embargo on letters. The Northern, the Southern and the Mercian (the last now split into two minor dialects distinguished as east and west) had each risen to the dignity of a literary language. But no one of them was recognized as the triumphant dialect, destined to vanquish all its rivals and to establish its sway over the entire country. At this juncture circumstances, somehow, conspired to raise the East Midland dialect to the primacy, enabling it to extend itself over the whole country as the received language, the national speech. This dialect had much to commend it to favor. To begin with, this dialect occupied a somewhat central position geographically and so offered a compromise to the inhabitants of the extreme northern and southern portions of England, whose dialects were so far apart. In the second place, East Midland was the dialect of London, the great commercial center—the emporium—of Great Britain. It was also the dialect of the famous university towns where the flower of the English nobility was trained. Furthermore, it was the dialect of the Court and Parliament whenever they spoke English. Finally, it was the dialect of Wycklif’s version of the Bible and of Chaucer, “that well of English undefiled” whose refreshing stream of song carried joy and gladness to every part of the island.

It is sometimes said that Chaucer’s poetic genius moulded the literary language of England. This is a pleasant illusion, but not quite in accord with the facts. Chaucer, in conformity to the custom of the times, simply wrote in his native dialect. That dialect, it is true, happened to be the dialect of the chief city of the realm and of the most powerful elements in the state, the ruling class. It was a mere accident that Chaucer spoke and wrote this same dialect as his vernacular. In no sense did Chaucer create the London dialect. Nor did he make it the received literary language, the standard speech of the English people. This dictum was once accepted, but needless to add it is now discredited by scholars. Yet Chaucer’s influence as the foremost English author of his age was assuredly not without weight in establishing the dialect of London as the standard literary language of the kingdom. It is a significant fact that this dialect (which was the dialect of the Court) had attained the distinction of being the literary language of England, by the first half of the fifteenth century, though perhaps it was a mere coincidence that this was only a short time after Chaucer’s death. It is quite possible, yea probable, that the East Midland dialect would have established its supremacy as the standard language of England even if Chaucer had written his works in French, or Latin, or Scotch. But it is not unreasonable to suppose that an author of such rare and commanding genius as Chaucer contributed not a little to hasten the process of the spread of his native dialect and its acceptance as the standard language of the realm. The acknowledged excellence of his poetic works tended, no doubt, to stamp the dialect in which they were written as literary English and furnished a sufficient guaranty, in after years, that his language was classic English.

The effect of the establishment of the East Midland dialect as the standard language of England was soon observed in the rapid declension and ultimate disuse of all the rival dialects. For as soon as the dialect of London was recognized as supreme, no author could be expected to court oblivion by employing any of the decadent provincial dialects as his medium of expression. Hence all the provincial dialects hitherto employed now either fell into disuse, or survived only as a mere local patois without any literary pretensions—a rustic lingo heard only on the lips of the illiterate and uncultured. Such was the fate of the various Middle English dialects, Scotch only excepted. The Northern dialect, or Scottish, seems to have maintained itself for quite a considerable time. Indeed, Scottish was recognized as the standard language of Scotland as long as that northern kingdom preserved its independence. Down to the time of James the First, therefore, there was a dual standard in the language of Great Britain, the English of London which was the vernacular of England and the Scottish of Edinburgh, which was the vernacular of Scotland. In 1603, upon the accession of James the First, the Scottish as a literary tongue was abandoned in favor of standard English, as a result of the political organic union of Scotland with England. From that time to the present there has been only one standard English language for Great Britain. Yet the language spoken in Scotland preserves not a few traces of the old Scotch dialect mingled with standard English, which imparts to it its Scotch characteristics. This is more particularly noticeable in the speech of the common people and occasionally in the works of a popular poet like Burns, although his language contains very few strictly Scotch words.

It has been shown how standard English was enriched in vocabulary and idiom by contact with the French language. It is to the Norman Conquest that our speech is largely indebted for its double vocabulary which gives English a unique place among modern languages. The skeleton of our English tongue has always remained Teutonic, despite the unusually large number of words it has assimilated from French and other foreign sources. In our vocabulary, which has been so vastly swollen by our French borrowings, the native English words, if one may venture to make a rough distinction, are employed to signify objects of domestic association, homespun ideas and thoughts, while the words of Romance origin are reserved to express objects that are associated with luxury and delicate culture and to convey subtle shades of thought. When two or more words are used to signify very much the same thing, the genius of the English speech tends to differentiate and to restrict the words to separate and special senses. This, of course, makes the language more flexible and more facile as a medium of expression.