Abstract
In a sense, the English language is not indigenous to the British Isles. Over the better part of a millennium, waves of outside invaders displaced Britain’s indigenous Celtic speakers and introduced a new West Germanic language. The languages of the Anglo-Saxon and Danish conquerors gradually morphed into Old English, a language best known from early epic Beowulf, which is quite unintelligible to modern English speakers. 1 French-speaking invaders from Normandy in 1066 prodded the transformation of Old English into Middle English, the language of The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–1400), which modern readers find very tough slogging. Finally, various forces promoted the development of Modern English, in its early modern form the language of Shakespeare and the King James Bible, which most modern English speakers find familiar, if a bit quaint. This in brief is the first part of the story of English, the story of how the languages of the conquerors changed and spread in England and lowland Scotland, which is examined in somewhat greater detail in the first part of this chapter.
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Notes
Norman Blake, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge History of the English Language (hereafter CHEL), vol. 2, 1066–1476, ed. Norman Blake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 9.
Richard M. Hogg, “Introduction,” CHEL, vol. 1, 1066–1476, ed. Richard M. Hogg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 2–5.
Venerable Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation (London: J. M. Dent; New York E. P. Dutton, 1910), Book I;
Daniel Donoghue, “Early Old English (up to 899),” in A Companion to the History of the English Language ed. Haruko Momma and Michael Matto (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. 2008), p. 156; Thomas E. Toon, “Old English Dialects,” in CHEL 1:422.
Gregory the Great, “Introduction to Pastoral Care,” in Readings for Use of the Students in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Boston, MA: George H. Ellis, 1916), 14–15.
For a critical discussion, see Alfred P. Smyth, King Alfred the Great (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 551–66.
Richard H. Bailey, Images of English: A Cultural History of the Language (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 21–22;
Robert McCrum, Robert McNeil, and William Cran, The Story of English 3rd ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 75–77 (quotation 77);
Christopher Brooke, A History of England, vol. 2, From Alfred to Henry III, 871–1272 (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson, 1961), 224–36.
Paula Blank, “Languages of Early Modern Literature in Britain,” in The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, ed. David Lowenstein and Janet Mueller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 169.
David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 175–77;
cf. Lawrence Stone, “Literacy and Education in England, 1640–1900,” Past and Present, 42 (1969): 101–12.
Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (London: A. Strahen, 1785), 75.
Gareth Elwyn Jones and Gordon Wynne Roderick, A History of Education in Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002), 28–57.
Dylan V. Jones and Marilyn Martin-Jones, “Bilingual; Education and Language Revitalization in Wales: Past Achievements and Current Issues,” in Medium of Instruction Policies: Which Agenda? Whose Policies? ed. James W. Tollefson and Amy B. M. Tsui (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004), 44–47; Löffler, “English in Wales,” 351–52.
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© 2013 David Northrup
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Northrup, D. (2013). The Language of the British Isles. In: How English Became the Global Language. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137303073_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137303073_2
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