The emergence of standard English

One consequence of the Norman conquest of 1066 was to make England a triglossic nation. The new Norman ruling class spoke a language similar to French, which had developed from the Latin spoken by Roman settlers in Normandy, and had been influenced by subsequent contact with Norsemen in the seventh and eighth centuries. This is called Norman French – or, with specific reference to varieties spoken in England, Anglo-Norman. By virtue of its association with the small but powerful ruling élite, Anglo-Norman became the prestige spoken language of England for at least two centuries, with Latin also enjoying prestige as a language of education, writing and religious practice.

English at this time was very much the ‘poor relation’ of the three in terms of prestige, and this lowly status of English post-Norman conquest finds echoes in the modern English lexicon. When people say: ‘He uttered an Anglo-Saxon expression’ as a euphemism for ‘he swore’, they do so with good reason: much of our modern earthy or taboo vocabulary carries the stigma of low-status English in medieval England, while its socially acceptable equivalents have generally been borrowed from Norman French. The social divide between the new ruling class and the subjugated English is also evident elsewhere in the lexicon. Pork, mutton and beef, delicacies available only to the Norman-speaking élites in the Middle Ages, are terms of Anglo-Norman origin, but the names of the animals which provide them, pig, sheep and cow, all come from Anglo-Saxon, the language of the farmers who produced the meat for the rulers’ table.

By the end of the thirteenth century, however, English had risen from its lowly status to become the favored language within England, and Anglo-Norman was in decline. The factors favoring English over its prestigious rivals were, of course, social and economic rather than linguistic. For all its prestige as a lingua franca, classical Latin was a dead language, which had never in any case been widely spoken in Britain at the time of Roman occupation (first to fifth centuries AD). To learn Latin required an expensive education and/or a clerical background, and a significant investment in time. Anglo-Norman, on the other hand, was the living language of a very small élite, deprived of their continental lands after the fall of Normandy to Spain in 1204 and forced to focus on their English possessions, and needing to work with – and increasingly marry – the numerically superior English-speaking population. In addition to its numerical advantage, English gained increasingly in prestige with the emergence of a growing and ever more prosperous anglophone mercantile class.

As the English experience shows, selection of norms is a continuous process, in which the relative statuses of languages can change quite radically. English was now emerging as a prestige language, but which variety of English would be selected as the standard? The variety which emerged as ‘first among equals’ in fifteenth-century England was the east Midlands dialect spoken in and around London, the prestige of which was boosted by Thomas Caxton, England’s first printer, who selected it for publication. Caxton discusses the motivation for his choice in the Preface to his Eneydos (a translation of the Aeneid). He first laments the rapidity of change, and diverse nature of the English language:

And certaynly our langage now used varyeth ferre from that whiche was used and spoken whan I was borne (…) And that comyn englysshe that is spoken in one shyre varyeth from a nother

His selection of the emergent London English koiné, infused with features from northern and midland dialects as the capital became a magnet for migrants, was merely a reflection of the socio-linguistic reality that the English of educated people within the London–Oxford–Cambridge triangle was already perceived as a desirable speech norm. Equally importantly, from the perspective of a publisher needing to sell books, it was a dialect that could be readily understood even outside that zone.