Dialects of English in the 1300s
Standard English, the sort of English you learn at school and read in books, the kind I am writing in now, was born in the government offices of London in the early 1400s and given shape by London printers in the late 1400s and early 1500s.
In the 1300s there was a great poet – Chaucer – and a famous translation of the Bible – Wycliffe’s. Either one could have led to a standard, a model of written English that most people follow. It was not to be: Chaucer’s English was too different than spoken English, even back then, and Wycliffe’s Bible became suspect when he got in trouble for his religious views.
Likewise, there is no proof that England’s two great seats of learning, Oxford and Cambridge, had any effect on creating a standard.
Instead the standard was formed by those who produced the most written material in English: the government and the printers in London.
Most well-to-do people in London (but not the poor) spoke in a East Midlands dialect because that was where most of them came from: the East Midlands region north of London. In those days people in the south of England could not understand those in the north – but everyone could understand people from the East Midlands. So that made middle- and upper-class London English a workable standard.
Standard English began to take shape about 1400 among the clerks of the Chancery. They wrote legal documents that went to courts all over the country. Being used to writing in Standard French and Standard Latin, they tended to write English in a standard way too, preferring certain forms and spellings over others. They wrote English in their own dialect, the London English of the well-to-do. It became the language of government.
The spellings graciously, humbly, said, these, them and any, for example, go back to the Chancery clerks. So does -ly, as opposed to -li or -lich. That was where and when the k and e in knife were said and therefore written. And the same for all those other silent letters. To us English spelling is half mad. To them it was how it sounded. Even see and sea sounded different to them – and so to this day we write them differently.
Chancery English, as the language of government, spread beyond its offices so that by 1450 it became hard to tell where most pieces of written English came from.
In 1476 William Caxton opened the first printing press in London. Others soon followed. Each printer produced books in its own particular sort of London English, each loosely based on Chancery English. Over time their English became more and more alike so that by about 1525 there was a clear standard, which by then had become unstoppable.
In the 1600s its spelling and grammar became more or less fixed in its present form. In the 1700s people began to see it as “good” English, everything else becoming “bad” or “dialectical” – even though Standard English itself is just as dialectical.
– Abagond, 2010.
See also:
Abagond 
Great post.
The idea of the standardization process of languages is fascinating, in general.
What’s also interesting is how printing and writing tend to slow down linguistic change drastically, as well as to unify ideas of standard language across wide areas. I’ve studied a fair amount of Latin and Greek, and what we know of as Classical Latin basically didn’t exist about 200 years before the Classical Age. Further, Athenian Greek (the type of ancient Greek taught in most non-religious university courses today) was quite deifferent from all the other dialects of the various Greek city states, like Corinth, Sparta, etc.
There’s this stupid politics around language dialects now, and people don’t realize it doesn’t have to be that way.
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The book on the evolution of language that I found most accessible to laymen (like myself) was Guy Deutscher’s The Unfolding of Language.
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What I always found intriguing is that certain languages are quite consistent in pronunciation to their spelling, like Italian, German and to some extent Spanish, whereas others pronounce their written language all over the place like French and English. I think it’s pretty complicated in slavic languages too. Indonesian is also fairly consistent with its spelling. I don’t know any language that has a non-latin alphabet. There may also be big differences.
For instance in English, the letter ‘e’ is sometimes pronounced like ‘ee’, sometimes like ‘ae’. Or ‘i’ is sometimes ‘ai’, sometimes ‘ee’. In some words the ‘w’ is pronounced, in others it’s muted, same with ‘k’ etc… ‘Th’ alone is a difficult lisp sound to learn for many non-English speakers.
There are thousands of examples in French too where the pronunciation has basically nothing in common with the spelling.
In Italian it’s quite consistently the same pronunciation with the same letters, with a few exceptions. For instance ‘c’ on its own is usually pronounced ‘tche’ and only like ‘k’ if it’s ‘cc’ or ‘ch’. Like cioccolato (tchockolato).
I think that is one major turnoff for many people to learn a foreign language, when spelling and pronunciation are extremely inconsistent.
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@ Scipio Africanus:
What’s also interesting is how printing and writing tend to slow down linguistic change drastically, as well as to unify ideas of standard language across wide areas.
Chinese is a good example of that – it is still considered a single language, because it is unified by a common script, even though its “dialects” (like Hokkien, Mandarin, Cantonese) are as different as say, French and Italian.
@ Femi:
thats because Indonesian has only been written in it’s current form for a relatively short time – its still an accurate representation of what the language is right now. (Prior to colonialism, they used alphabets derived from Arabic and Sanskrit.)
Although actually, if you went back 50 years, you would find Indonesian a bit more difficult because they were using a Dutch-influenced spelling system. Then they changed it in the 60s or 70s to be more consistent with Malay, which uses an English-derived spelling system.
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Femi,
I am in a Linguistics seminar right now (I’m debating whether I’ll pick up Linguistics as a secondary focus in grad school), and we are looking at a lot of studies on bilingual and language mapping, lexical access, etc. And I teach English as a Second Language, and my poor students have so many pronounciation obstacles: b/v, g/w, j/y…and list goes on.
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@Femi
There are thousands of examples in French too where the pronunciation has basically nothing in common with the spelling.
I don’t think this is true. French actually has remarkably regular phonological spelling when you consider a few basic rules.
It’s spelling certainly by no means as regular as, say, Italian, but I would say that the “unpredictable” words in French number closer to the hundreds rather than the thousands, and perhaps even less. The only example I can think of now would be the word “fis,” in which the ending consonant is actually pronounced.
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@ David:
perhaps one thing Femi was getting at is that French, like English, has a helluva lot of silent letters. And what is the point of a silent letter, really?
Of course there are are rules which make sense once you get your head around them. But for an objective outsider trying to pronounce French, the spelling doesn’t really make a lot of sense unless you have had those rules drummed into you.
Whereas in the case of, say, Tagalog, or Italian, a novice could pronounce them pretty well based on spelling alone.
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David, are you thinking of “fils”, pronounced “fis”?
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Femi: “There are thousands of examples in French too where the pronunciation has basically nothing in common with the spelling.”
Yeah. One good example is “hors d’oeurve”. Americans often have trouble spelling this phrase. And when they see it in writing, they also have problems pronouncing it. I’ve heard it pronounced “horsed overs”, “horde overs” and (my personal favorite) “horse ovaries”….
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Without getting too much into French because this post is about English, but Eurasian Sensation got what I meant.
Btw I grew up bi-lingual French-English but French is what I use most of the time.
If you go through the French alphabet, with French phonetics of course, you will realise how inconsistent the ‘original’ sound of each letter is with their pronunciation in an actual word. The ‘i’ is sometimes pronounced like ‘ee’ which is its original sound, sometimes with the nasal sound most people associate French with. Same with ‘e’. Then there are also subtleties within those nasal sounds.
A prime example for different spellings and meanings but with identical or very subtle differences in phonetics :
sans, cent, sang, son, sein…
Then if you look at the inconsistencies between proper names – and then between names and nouns – it is confusing for a non-native speaker. Especially when there’s an ‘s’ at the end. Sometimes you pronounce it (Senlis), sometimes you don’t (Paris).
Fils (son) is pronounced ‘fis’ but fils as the plural of ‘fil’ (cable) is pronounced ‘fil’.
You’re right David, you have to consider rules in every language but I think, intuitively, there are way too many exceptions in French and English. I’m obviously not aware of it when I speak but I often hear it when non-native speakers are struggling, to the point that they are hard to understand.
Perhaps it’s just a few hundred, I haven’t counted them. However in Italian and German for instance you just have a handful of those phonetic exceptions.
Not much we can do about it except for trying to find learning methods that might be more efficient than the classic ways.
Allez, fini le français… 😉
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Very interesting post! once again, well done abagond.
From finnish point of view, almost every language is alien to us. We pronounce words like we write them. But I studied english from the third grade on and swedish, our second official language, from the fifth. In high school we were supposedly to study a thord language but I did not. I attented ot the german classes but barely managed. Eine flasche coca cola, gross und kalt, bitte. That is all of my german.
Finnish, as an official language, did not exist before middle ages, and we do have strong dialects. A guy from Savo region speaks totally different than a guy from west coast town Rauma. They have different words for same things etc. but we all do understand each other. Just like a scott and englishman can, if they use english.
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@Paisley
Horse ovaries. lol… I’ve never heard that one before. 😀
It always cracks up English speakers in my region when they see buses with the sign ‘Hors service’ (out of service). Where are the horses? the bus is empty…
@ Jasmin
Best of luck. More power to the teaching people! My mother was a school teacher. Contrary to popular belief, it can be a tough and exhausting job – especially when you take it seriously and with idealism.
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@ Sam
“Just like a scott and englishman can, if they use english.”
Only if they make an effort. Otherwise the most frequent word in that conversation would be ‘ay?’ 😉
The most difficult for me to understand are the Brummies (Birmingham, UK). For instance when they mean ‘thanks’ they say ‘funks’. Now try to get all twisted words in a context when they chat away at 200kms/h. They still call it English though…
But you’re right, at least theoretically all native English speakers should be able to communicate easily. At least in written… although today in the SMS age even that can be a major decrypting effort 😉
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This bloke nailed it pretty well
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@ femi 😀 Yerright! Once met an cockney who, as an older bloke, spoke that with, let us say,very heavy accent. I did not understand shit what he was saying, specially when in the older cockney slang you have the word plays where one word is replaced completely with another.
We have the traditional slang in our capital region which uses foreign words in it and twists them around. In the old slang the words came mainly from russian and swedish but since 1950’s more english words have crept in.
Just to give you an example: a city in finnish is kaupunki. In Helsinki slang it is stadi, from the swedish word stad. But some younger people specially in rural cities use the word Citi from the english one. To make it even more confusing, is a person is speakin Stadi, he means Helsinki, but using stadi he means just any town or city.
I have no idea where from word kartsa comes from since it means street. “Hengaillaan kartsalla” means hanging out on the street. But Kartsa is also a name twisted from the official name Kari.
So when speaking english as a foreigner that can be a very difficult thing indeed when one tries to understand what the other is saying. One of my irish friends sometimes does his best to confuse everybody by using very heavy irish accent. Then the most common word is, indeed: Ay? 😀
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English has had many influences. It is wise to know some rules of French, when it comes to spelling English. That is why certain combination of vowels do not always sound the same. Knowledge of Latin is also very helpful in decoding some words.
A second language used to be required to get into college and Latin was taught in high school even in rural schools. This is not the case as much anymore.
I don’t think I’m a language slob, but I think Americans are quick to let the street vernacular permeate more formal situations and misuse words to the extent that meaning changes too quickly. When people live longer, you can find yourself making a faux pas using a word in a context which has changed since your youth.
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If anyone’s interested, here’s the IPA symbols for vowels (there’s a symbol to represent every spoken vowel–and consonant–); you can click on the chart and hear the pronunciation. My professor, who’s from Rochester, has a funny way of pronouncing the symbol in the bottom right corner (the one that looks like a regular lowercase “a”); she says in her dialect she wants to pronounce “palm” (which corresponds with the vowel sound represented by that symbol) like “pom”.
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My bad, here’s the link:
http://www.paulmeier.com/ipa/vowels.html
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@ sam
Talking about old cockney blokes, my father grew up in London Hackney. His parents only spoke Polish at home and they only understood ‘proper’ English. They tried everything to keep cockney out of the house, to no avail. Still to this day when I hear my father chat with his brother on the phone I switch my senses off. Indecipherable. Gor blimey! Me ole cock! Every other phrase ends with “an’ all dat innit ay”. My mother, proper French African with principles, always urged my father to speak ‘real’ English to us kids because those “primitive grunts sound nothing but trouble”. lol
But the real knee slapper, my father spoke Jamaican patois, fluently. His best mate from toddler’s age on was a British Jamaican so he picked it up through the parents. As a white man it got him into and also out of a few beefs with the yardies in the fifties. My grandfather said patois is at least the language of a whole country, cockney is just a mockup language for city crooks. 🙂
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@femi: 😀
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@ Jasmin:
My professor, who’s from Rochester, has a funny way of pronouncing the symbol in the bottom right corner (the one that looks like a regular lowercase “a”); she says in her dialect she wants to pronounce “palm” (which corresponds with the vowel sound represented by that symbol) like “pom”.
If I’m reading you right, that’s actually how most of the English speaking world would pronounce “palm”. Another example – the standard English word “guard” sounds exactly like how Americans would say “god”. The only places I can think of that would share the North American way of pronouncing “pom” would be Ireland and the Caribbean.
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sometimes like ‘ae’. Or ‘i’ is sometimes ‘ai’, sometimes ‘ee’. In some words the ‘w’ is pronounced, in others it’s muted, same with ‘k’ etc… ‘Th’ alone is a difficult lisp sound to learn for many non-English speakers.@Femi, what you’re referring to is a phenomenon that I call “pretentiousness.”
This is why I have shunned English English, and refuse to pronounce some words the way I am told to. In British English, there are many redundancies. For example: Programme. The “me” are not necessary.
But worse. Older Canadians, who insist they’re still British, insist on pronouncing “Lieutenant” as “left-tenant” which I find quite annoying and pretentious.
I think I complained to Abagond about his use of British English before.
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I wish the English-speaking world would get together and overhaul spelling. That iz, bi making it al fonetik.
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@Eurasian Sensation
Most of the English speaking world is based on North American English where 65% of global Native English speakers hail from.
The origins of all North American English dialects come from England, and most North American English dialects retain many features of 17th century and 18th century English that became obsolete in the rest of the English speaking world, including England itself.
Your notion that American Standard English deviates from Global Standard English is a bit strange. I think Global Standard English, esp. outside of the former British Commonwealth countries, tends to link itself more with American Standard English, the variety that dominates international media including Hollywood and the internet, although this is not absolute.
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