16 Facts About Middle English

1.

Middle English was a form of the English language spoken after the Norman conquest until the late 15th century.

FactSnippet No. 985,980
2.

The Middle English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old Middle English period.

FactSnippet No. 985,981
3.

Middle English saw significant changes to its vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, and orthography.

FactSnippet No. 985,982
4.

The more standardized Old Middle English language became fragmented, localized, and was, for the most part, being improvised.

FactSnippet No. 985,983
5.

Middle English was succeeded in England by Early Modern English, which lasted until about 1650.

FactSnippet No. 985,984
6.

Middle English saw considerable adoption of Norman vocabulary, especially in the areas of politics, law, the arts, and religion, as well as poetic and emotive diction.

FactSnippet No. 985,985
7.

Conventional Middle English vocabulary remained primarily Germanic in its sources, with Old Norse influences becoming more apparent.

FactSnippet No. 985,986
8.

Viking influence on Old Middle English is most apparent in the more indispensable elements of the language.

FactSnippet No. 985,987
9.

Norman conquest of England in 1066 saw the replacement of the top levels of the Middle English-speaking political and ecclesiastical hierarchies by Norman rulers who spoke a dialect of Old French known as Old Norman, which developed in England into Anglo-Norman.

FactSnippet No. 985,988
10.

Once the writing of Old English came to an end, Middle English had no standard language, only dialects that derived from the dialects of the same regions in the Anglo-Saxon period.

FactSnippet No. 985,989
11.

Early Middle English has a largely Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, but a greatly simplified inflectional system.

FactSnippet No. 985,990
12.

Chancery Standard of written English emerged c in official documents that, since the Norman Conquest, had normally been written in French.

FactSnippet No. 985,991
13.

Chancery Standard's influence on later forms of written Middle English is disputed, but it did undoubtedly provide the core around which Early Modern Middle English formed.

FactSnippet No. 985,992
14.

Early Modern Middle English emerged with the help of William Caxton's printing press, developed during the 1470s.

FactSnippet No. 985,993
15.

Middle English retains only two distinct noun-ending patterns from the more complex system of inflection in Old English:.

FactSnippet No. 985,994
16.

Grammatical gender survived to a limited extent in early Middle English, before being replaced by natural gender in the course of the Middle English period.

FactSnippet No. 985,995