The event that marks the end of the Old English period, and the beginning of the Middle English period, is the arrival of the Norman French in England, following their victory at Hastings under William the Conqueror in 1066. These French-speaking invaders became the ruling class, so that the language of the nobility, the government, the law and civilized life in England for the next two hundred years was French. It is the source of words like army, court, defense, faith, prison and tax.

Yet the language of the peasants remained English. The peasants worked on the land and reared sheep, cows and swine (words from Old English) while the upper classes talked about mutton, beef and pork (words of French origin). Hence the different terms in modern English to refer to these creatures “on the hoof” as opposed to “on the plate.”

Throughout this period, French (or, more accurately, an English version of French) was the prestige language and Chaucer tells us that one of his Canterbury pilgrims could speak it.

This is an example of Middle English, written in the late fourteenth century. It had changed substantially from Old English, but several changes were yet to take place before the language took on its modern form. Most significantly, the vowel sounds of Chaucer’s time were very different from those we hear in similar words today. Chaucer lived in what would have sounded like a “hoos,” with his “weef,” and “hay”

In the two hundred years, from 1400 to 1600, that separated Chaucer and Shakespeare, the sounds of English underwent a substantial change known as the “Great Vowel Shift.” The effects of this general raising of long vowel sounds (such as [oː] moving up to [uː], as in mo¯ na → moon) made the pronunciation of Early Modern English, beginning around 1500, significantly different from earlier periods. The introduction of printing in 1476 brought about significant changes, but because the printers tended to standardize existing pronunciations in the spelling of words (e.g. knee, gnaw), later pronunciation changes are often not reflected in the way Modern English (after 1700) is written.

Influences from the outside, such as the borrowed words from Norman French or Old Norse that we have already noted, are examples of external change in the language. There are also other types of changes that occurred within the historical development of English (and other languages) that don’t seem to be caused by outside factors. In the following sections, we will look at some of these processes of internal change.