Timothy Patrick Snyder ↑ Social and Cultural Foundations of Language

Dr. Paul B. Garrett

Is Middle English a Creole?

In historical linguistics, in regards to the English language, there is a

debate about whether or not a stage known as Middle English is a creole or not.

Unfortunately, it’s not as clear as one might think it to be to decide the answer to

this question. The reason it is so unclear is because Anthropological Linguists,

Linguist Anthropologists, or any of those in related fields, have not decided what

the full definition of a creole is. There are some general criteria for it, but it is not

specific enough to cover some cases which vary on the rules a little bit. So if we

take a perspective which is too linguistic and neglects cultural involvement, we

will get a different answer about whether Middle English is a creole than if we

took a more anthropological view of it. As a linguistics student, I tend to define

creole on a more linguistic basis, so thusly I believe that Middle English is indeed

a creole. However, even with that, I understand the perspective of others who do

not agree with this because of the fact that culture is an important part of how

people define who they are. The basic idea is that although I believe that it is a

creole, other people might disagree and define creole differently.

So we start with the history of English language. The first people in the

British Isles (that we know of) are the Celts who stretched from Ireland to Gaul.

Later on the Romans came with Julius Caesar, conquered parts of Southern

England, and called the island Britannia. Then the Romans settled in England

and held position there for many centuries. As the Roman Empire began to fall,

the Saxons were invited to help defend the Roman settlements against Irish and

Pictish (a Celtic confederation from Scotland before there were any Scots there)

raids and to settle there. The Saxon tribes then decided they wanted those lands

and conquered them. They brought with them the Runic alphabet and their own

variation of Old Saxon. They mixed with the Germanic Angle population that was

already there, and they became the Anglo-Saxons. There were also Viking raids,

especially from Denmark, which led to new vocabulary from the related language

of East Old Norse. This formed a new culture. The Anglo-Saxons had many

connections to the North Germanic languages of West and East Old Norse. This

would lead to similar cultural elements in ideals of honor, war, and religion. That

is why stories and sagas like that of Beowulf might resemble those we see in

West and East Old Norse texts.

Anglo-Saxon was one of the oldest known vernacular languages that was

ever written down. The oldest known text was the heroic epic Beowulf. There

was also still contact with the Old Saxon speakers in what is now Northern

Germany and an Anglo-Saxon influence can be seen in Heliand, which was a

text written about Christ in 9th century. There was also a direct connection to

Frisian in what is called Anglo-Frisian. One of the unique things about these

West Germanic Languages is that these three (Frisian, Anglo-Saxon, Old

Saxon) did not go through the High German Consonant shift.1 This might have

contributed to the continued trade and political connections. There were also

influences from the Celtic and the Latin languages through trade and conquest.

Normandy, on the other hand, was settled by a tribe of Viking people, who

were hired by the French to protect France against other Vikings. Norman

comes from Norð + Man2 (just like Norway was North + Way OE Norwegon).

These Vikings exchanged most of their language in favor of the Old French

language. They retained some of the sounds, which can still even be heard in

modern Normandy. However, even with that, they still were not speaking

“proper” Old French, but rather a dialect which was incredibly different than Old

Parisian or other Old French dialects.

In 1066, after the death of the English King Edward the Confessor, three

men had claim to the crown: Harald III of Norway, Harold Godwınson Earl of

Wessex, and Duke William of Normandy. Harold defeated Harald during the

fighting, but later William defeated Harold’s tired troops at the battle of Hastings

in 1066. William was later known as William the Conqueror and was a Norman

who spoke little English. William had brought many changes to England,

1 “The HGCS has four primary stages. The first would be the shift from the voiceless stops /p t k/ to their

corresponding fricatives in the same location of the mouth /f s x/. We call this consonant weakening, and it

happened between vowels (being that it was not geminated) and after vowels at the ends of words. The

second phase of the shift involves the same three stops /p t k/ shift to the affricates /pf ts / (/kx/) in initial

position, when geminated, and surrounding liquids and nasals. The final shift, /kx/ only occurred in the

highest of High German dialects. The third shift involved the three voiced stops /b d g/ becoming devoiced

to /(p) t (k)/. The shift from /d/ to /t/ was the only one that survived into standard High German. The

fourth phase which actually did affect Low German and Dutch. This involves the interdental fricatives /θ ð/

both becoming /d/. English did not have this shift, and thusly still retains both of those sounds.” – My

Paper Low German for History of the German Language taught by Dr. Anthony Waskie.

2 Man in this case does not mean a male person, but rather the meaning is “one.” Similar to the German

word Mann, or the French word On. The general terms likes Chairman “One who sits on a chair”,

Spokesman “One who speaks”, come from this same root.

including the Doomsday book which was used to make taxation easier. Most of

the nobility was replaced with Norman French nobility, instead of keeping the

original Anglo-Saxon nobility, which would create an almost complete Norman

French ruling class.

However, after the Norman invasion a good majority of the French soldiers

had decided to take Saxon wives, but they did not speak the language of these

women. The soldiers were not allowed to learn English, and the English were

not really allowed to learn French, so thus a pidgin probably began to replace

daily speech in domestic settings. How else would there be any communication

between wife and husband? This might help prove the point that there was a

definite class difference in some of the vocabulary. Examples would be that the

names of the nice foods would be from the Norman French, whereas the names

of the animals would come from the Anglo-Saxon (such as pork from French, and

pig from Anglo-Saxon).

Now the ruling class spoke Norman-French, and the common people

spoke Anglo-Saxon. Government issues and such were all conducted in French,

and many of the Kings did not speak English at all. At the same time, as we will

learn, the languages are mixing due to the Norman people interacting with the

AS people. That eventually leads to the language written in by Chaucer.

Chaucer was the most well known writer in the Middle English era. His most well

known work is Canterbury Tales. He wrote in his own Midlands dialect, and used

different spellings for even the same word in his writings. Other Middle English

texts include La Mort Darthur by Sir Thomas Malory, Sir Gawayn and the Grene

Knyght, Everyman, and Pearl. Most of the dramas (like Everyman, The Play of

Noah and Second Shepards’ Play) were religious dramas used to act out bible

stories and show examples of morality. Most of the texts in the Middle English

Era were written in individual dialects, which could have caused much confusion

amongst the different potential readers. The dialects were so severe in some

cases that in one region of England, the people might think another is speaking

another language. Such is the case with William Caxton, who was a famous

printer in English. As Bill Bryson writes of it in Mother Tongue: 3

“William Caxton, the first person to print a book in English, noted

the sort of misunderstandings that were common in his day in the

preface to Eneydos in 1490 in which he related the story of London

Sailors heading down the River “Tamyse” for Holland who found

themselves becalmed in Kent. Seeking food, one of them

approached a farmer’s wife and “axed for mete and specyally he

axyd after eggys” but was met with blank looks by the wife who

answered that she “coulde speke no frenshe.” The sailors had

traveled barely fifty miles and yet their language was scarcely

recognizable to another speaker of English. In Kent eggs were

eyren and would remain so for at least another fifty years.”

(Bryson 59)

In this we can see how radically different the dialects are. There are,

however, many different writers from different regions who used different

3 McWhorter also tells the same story on page 66 of The Power of Babel, but he leaves out all of the Middle

English words.

spellings, depending on what orthography they base it on. If they used an

Anglo-Saxon orthography, for example, one might see spellings such as

<hw> with the Norman French spelling <qu>, which would later become

the general spelling of <wh> (since this was the most common sort of

replacement for this devoiced sound). Some modern dialects have

retained some features of their ancestral Middle English dialects as well,

thusly keeping some phrases which preserve the pronunciation. Chaucer

and Caxton were probably some of the biggest influences on the standard

of spelling and grammar that was used in Shakespeare’s day.

The Middle English period lasted until the Great Vowel Shift which is just

prior to William Shakespeare, who was a writer of the era known as Early

Modern English. This was another radical change in the language and could be

a claim to the opposite of English being a creole, in favor of the argument that

English is just prone to large changes in a radically short period of time. The

changes were so different from it’s predecessor that, it would be likely that

mutual intelligentability would not exist or would be very little.

As for the languages themselves, it is obvious that Anglo-Saxon and

Middle English are very different from each other. The three largest difference

(although there are more than just these) would be the pronunciation, the

grammar, and the vocabulary. How much it would differ in the Middle English era

would of course differ by dialect.

Pronunciation is slightly different for both Old and Middle English. Anglo-

Saxon retained a lot of the sounds from Old Saxon, and as mentioned above like

its relative Old Saxon did not go through the High German Consonant shift. The

Saxons also brought over the Runic alphabet which was used before the

standard usage of the Latin alphabet in writing. However, there were not a lot of

large texts written in Anglo-Saxon runic. Beowulf was the first large text in the

Anglo-Saxon era, and was useful to understanding the basics of Anglo-Saxon

grammar. The orthography was probably originally based on Latin pronunciation,

and then had a life of its own. The spellings were radically different than that of

modern English, and resembled that of its cousins of Old High German, Old

Norse, and Old Saxon. However, Anglo-Saxon has phonetic rules which show

are very strange and are not incredibly different than modern Icelandic. It also

had something that is in Middle and Modern English, and all the Romance

languages (save Latin) and the North Germanic languages, but not in Old Saxon,

Dutch, or any other dialect of German. That is the rule of the velar consonants

becoming weakened by palatal vowels. This is probably the most complex part

of Anglo-Saxon phonology. The rule is that c /k/ and g /g/ become /ȷ/ and /j/

respectively when following or preceding i or in some sources also y. The letter g

also became /ȴ/ after n or in the combination cg, and it also became the voiced

velar fricative /dz/ between vowels. The combination sc would become either the

palatal fricative /ȓ/ next to front vowels, but kept the pronunciation of /sk/ next to

back vowels. This leaves the Anglo-Saxon word scip being a phonetic and

semantic cognate with its Modern counterpart ship. The fricatives /f θ s/ f, þ/ð, s

become the voiced forms /v ð z/ between vowels. When these fricatives are

geminated or doubled, they retain their devoiced status. The letter <h> was

pronounced /h/ initially, but /x/ after back vowels or /ç/ after front vowels. Later

on, this sound would become the Middle English gh which died away in the

Modern English era. Putting the letter h in front of many voiced consonants often

indicated a devoicing affect. Thusly hw, hr, hn and hl are pronounced like

voiceless forms of /ȝ, rɽ, nɽ, Ǽ /. Two of them, hn and hr, fell out of use entirely.4

The combination hl was used into the Middle English period, but it died away in

the Modern era. The last one, hw was spelt later as wh (qu if taken from French

orthography) and preserved in Modern English spelling, but the pronunciation is

now limited to some dialects in the Mid-west, as well as in quite a few dialects of

Scottish.

In the Middle English time period, c often became k especially sounds like

cn which would become kn (both pronounced /kn/) which would drop the /k/

sound. The letter c began to be used almost strictly for French loan words, and

for cases of /k/ next to a back vowel. In some dialects, they retained the / ȷ /

when others dropped them or replaced them with /k/. For example, some texts

spell the personal pronoun “I” as I, Y, ik, ich, or iche, depending on the author

and/or his dialect. The letter g lost the change to /j/ before front vowels in favor

of it becoming either /ȴ / or /Ȣ/ depending on the origin of the French word. The

Anglo-Saxon words which came into Middle English and still had the /j/ sound

4 The rh in rhyme, rhombus, and rhythm was not from Anglo-Saxon, but rather from Greek words which started with the letter <ρ>.

would spell it y. Since a common way to form the past tense involved adding the

prefix ge- /yǩ/, one could understand how Chaucer used y- /j/ or /i/. This would

be prominent in words that would use the /j/ to make a diphthongs, like dæg

which becomes day, and nægl which becomes nail (compare High German Tag,

Nagel). The pronunciation of -ig in AS was simply /i/, but in the ME time period,

it was spelt -y which is a common adjective ending to this day. The case in

which the g became a velar fricative instead often turned it into a /w/. Some

writers still used the letters þ/ð and æ, but they had fallen out of use and were

replaced with th and a respectively. Although v was introduced into the

language, it held a pronunciation close to the Latin which was v = /w/ and was

often interchangeable with u. The letters y and i were also interchangeable in

most cases, although some dialects of ME might have retained the AS

pronunciation of the high front rounded vowel /y/. Also unstressed syllables in

ME began to be pronounced as a schwa, no longer as pure vowels like in AS.

As for grammar, we can see the clearest of the radical changes from one

language to the other. In Anglo-Saxon we see features such as two distinctively

different verbs to be, which Modern English has only one. In Middle English,

however, we have a split, because in some texts like Brut,5 we find that there still

are two verbs to be, such as the line:

“Al swa muchel thu bist woruh, swa thu velden ært.”

(All as much thou art worth, as thou kind art)

5 Brut is out of the A Middle English Anthology and is said to have a lot of Anglo-Saxon features, especially

for a Middle English text.

You are worth as much as you are kind.

This shows that some of the Anglo-Saxon was retained although in most texts,

the form with the infinitive wesan was preserved (eom, eart, is, sind – am, art, is,

are) but the name of the infinitive was kept as beon (beo, bist, bið, beoð – am,

art, is, are).

Other grammatical features that Anglo-Saxon had was a four case system

with three genders, which was practically lost in Middle English.7 The three

genders became one, and the four cases were dropped in favor of two

(nominative and genitive). The conjugations changed in some of the endings,

but uniquely enough Middle English introduced the use of the ending –ynge,

which became the present participle –ing in Modern English.8 No traces of this

can be found in Anglo-Saxon or in Old French, so something might have

triggered this in the time period when the two mixed together. The loss of the

distinguishing vowel at the ends of adjectives and nouns would contribute to the

loss of the cases as well as to the loss of the gender. It might also be other

factors like something that formed out of the pidgin between Anglo-Saxon and

Old French.

Part of the general question of whether or not Middle English is a creole or

not, has to do with the question of whether or not there was a pidgin. Although it

is not necessary for a creole to have a pidgin if we take the definition from

Language Contact (see appendix C). However, most of the other definitions

indicate that a pidgin is required in order for there to be a creole. However,

7 See Appendix A for Noun declensions in both languages. 8 See Appendix B for Verb conjugations in both languages.

because of the silence in English vernacular between 1066 and Chaucer’s day

would lead us to believe that a pidgin could have possibly existed during that

time. There are slight mentions of an Anglo-Norman type of language which

evolved into Middle English, but that could just be a theory set forth by someone

who believed that Middle English was indeed a creole. The likely situation is that

in the homes of the people, they probably spoke a pidgin, due to intermarriage of

the French and the Anglo-Saxons. This pidgin probably was not written because

the husbands who spoke one language (usually French) would usually write in

that language. The Anglo-Saxon males and husbands would retain the original

Anglo-Saxon language, and would help contribute to the pidgin during normal

interactions. However, it should be noted that most of these people are those

who are not educated, and thusly would not write down their language. The

educated people most likely knew Latin, and almost always knew French, with a

few leftover educated Saxons who could read and write in Anglo-Saxon. There

was also a ruling class or “colonial” power to say, and a native culture, which

would resemble the situation of the many other more modern creoles around the

world.

To determine whether or not Middle English is a creole, we have to

determine what definition of creole to use. There is a list of several different

definitions of the word creole in Appendix C. Many of the definitions presented

are from Linguistic books, although a few are from outside sources which also

seem to line up with the Linguist definition. In the sense of the flexibility of the

term, the fact of whether or not English is a creole depends solely on each

linguist’s or anthropologist’s perspective on the meaning of the word.

In the time of Old English, as well as in the time of Middle English, there

were no sociolinguists who had such terminology as creole or pidgin. Without

these types of words in existence, then they could not possibly define themselves

as speakers of a creole. An anthropological perspective might say that a culture

must decide if it speaks a creole, regardless of what linguists or outsiders say.

There is also a large sense that creoles really form from a European and native

languages during the Imperialist Age or the Age of Colonialism. A Linguistic view

(much like those in Appendix C) would say that a creole is something that has

native speakers as opposed to Pidgin which has no native speakers. However,

it cannot be so simply defined that way, otherwise the question would be

resolved. In the cases of these modern Creoles, they formed when there were

linguists and other scholars around to record and experience the them first hand.

This way they can describe to the speakers the interesting things about their

languages, whereas in England in the Middle Ages, people probably noticed it

but were not able to describe it the same way. It was likely also looked down

upon to write about this effect on the language. This would mean that the

modern cultures could define their status as a creole, which Middle English

speakers did not know how to do so. This would mean Middle English is not a

creole according to the definition that a creole is self-defined.

So that might lead to the answer of the question still up in the air in some

respects. A linguist might define Middle English as a creole, based on the

evidence, but an Anthropologist might or might not define it as a creole, based on

his or her perspective on the word creole. Semantics is sometimes more of a

pain because of these things, but at the same time, it is what makes these social

sciences interesting.

Appendix A: Some Anglo-Saxon and Middle English Declensions

Nouns Anglo-Saxon Middle English

(Man) Singular Plural Singular Plural

Nominative

Accusative

Mann Menn

Dative Menn Mannum

Man Men

Genitive Mannes Manna Mannes Mennes

Nouns Anglo-Saxon Middle English

(Father) Singular Plural Singular Plural

Nominative Fæder Fædras

Accusative Fæder Fædras

Dative Fæder Fæderum

Fadir (fader)*

(fadyr)

Fadires (faderes)

(fadyres)

Genitive Fæder Fædra Fadires Fadires

* These indecated a variation in spelling, not variation in case.

Appendix B: Some Anglo-Saxon and Middle English

Anglo-Saxon Middle English

To call Infinitive Ceallian Calle

Person Singular Plural Singular Plural

1st ceallie calle

2nd ceallst callest

Present

3rd cealleþ

cealliaþ

calleth

callen

1st ceallede callede

2nd cealledest calledest

Past

3rd ceallede

cealledon

callede

calleden

Appendix C: Different definitions of Creole:

CREOLE LANGUAGE A mixed language that is the native language of a speech community. Like PIDGINS, creoles develop in contact situations that typically involve more than two languages; also like pidgins, they typically draw their lexicon, but not their grammar, primarily from a single language, the LEXIFIER language. Some creoles arise as nativized pidgins, some arise abruptly with no pidgin stage, and others arise gradually, with or without a pidgin stage. Crucially, the creators of a creole (unless it is a nativized pidgin) are not bilingual in their interlocutors’ languages. (Language Contact) Creole: a pidgin that has become the language of a community through an evolutionary process know as “creolization.” (The Psychology of Language) A creole language is created when a pidgin language is passed on to the next generation and becomes the first language of a community. (A concise Introduction to Linguistics) However, in some cases communities composed of individuals of divers first language have taken a pidgin as their common language and have raised children for whom it is native. When this happens, we cease to call the language a pidgin, and say that it is creolized. Creolization quickly fills out a pidgin with childish and nursery forms: the difference should not be underestimated. (A Course in Modern Linguistics)

When Children are born into a pidgin community, one of two things will happen. Either the children will learn the language of the ruling class, as was almost always the case with African slaves in the American south, or they will develop a creole (from French créole, “native). Most of the languages that people think are pidgins are in fact creoles. (Mother Tongue) Creolization, as this “evolutionary” process is called, is considered a natural linguistic process, and reflects the “maturation” of an inferior language (substrate) to reflect the sophistication and complexity of the dominant language (superstrate) with which it has had extensive and prolonged contact. When the structure of the language becomes stable enough to be passed on to the next generation, it has become a creole language. (Middle English as Creole)

Pidgins in several different parts of the world rapidly gave rise to new and completely adequate languges known as creoles. (Our Kind)

:A language that has evolved from a pidgin but serves as the native language of a speech community (Merriam Webster Online dictionary)

Works Cited and Additional resources:

Ann S. Haskell, ed. A Middle English Anthology. Garden City, New York.

Doubleday & Company, Inc. 1969.

Atherton, Mark. Teach Yourself Old English. Coventry, England, McGraw-Hill

Companies, Inc.: 2006.

Bryson, Bill. The Mother Tongue. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers Inc.,

1990.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. reprinted, edited by Howard, E.J. &

Wilson, G.D., New York: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1937.

“Creole.” Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary. Merriam Webster Incorporated

2006-2007. December 12, 2007.

Finegan, Edward. “English.” The World’s Major Languages.

Ed. Bernard Comrie. New York, NY Oxford University Press, 1990

Harley, Trevor. The Psychology of Language. 2nd Ed. New York, NY,

Psychology Press Ltd, 2001.

Harris, Marvin. Our Kind. New York, NY, Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. 1989.

Hockett, Charles F. A Course in Modern Linguistics. New York, The Macmillian

Company, 1958.

Hickson, Nancy Parrot Hickson. Linguistic Anthropology, 2nd Ed. For

Worth: Harcourt College Publishers 2000.

Levine, Diane P., Bruce M. Rowe. A Concise Introduction to Linguistics.

Boston, MA, Pearson Education Inc, 2006.

McWhorter, John. The Power of Babel. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers

Inc., 2001.

Ryan, Brandy. “Middle English as Creole.” Chass. 2005

http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~cpercy/courses/6361ryan.htm.

Thomason, Sarah G. Language Contact: An Introduction. Washington D.C.:

Georgetown University Press, 2001.

Waterman, John T. The History of the German Language. Washington, University

of Washington Press, 1991.

Willismson, David. Kings & Queens of England. New York, National Portrait

Gallery. Barnes and Nobles books 1998.