The Middle English creole hypothesis is the conjecture that the English language is a creole, ie. a language that developed from a pidgin. The vast differences between Old and Middle English have led some historical linguists to claim that the language underwent creolisation at the time of either the Norse or Norman Conquests, or during both. The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... // A creole language, or just creole, is a well-defined and stable language that originated from a non-trivial combination of two or more languages, typically with many distinctive features that are not inherited from either parent. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... Old English (also called Anglo-Saxon) is an early form of the English language that was spoken in parts of what is now England and southern Scotland between the mid-fifth century and the mid-twelfth century. ... Middle English is the name given by historical linguistics to the diverse forms of the English language spoken between the Norman invasion in 1066 and the mid-to-late 15th century, when the Chancery Standard, a form of London-based English, began to become widespread, a process aided by the... The Danelaw (from the Old English Dena lagu) was an area of England under the administrative control of the Vikings (or Danes, or Norsemen) from the late 9th century. ... Bayeux Tapestry depicting events leading to the Battle of Hastings The Norman Conquest of England was the conquest of the Kingdom of England by William the Conqueror (Duke of Normandy), in 1066 at the Battle of Hastings and the subsequent Norman control of England. ...

Differences between Middle and Old English

The argument in favour of calling Middle English a creole comes from the extreme reduction in inflected forms from Old English to Middle English. The system of declension of nouns was radically simplified and analogised. The verb system also lost many old patterns of conjugation. Many strong verbs were reanalyzed as weak verbs. The subjunctive mood became much less distinct. Syntax was also simplified somewhat, with word order patterns becoming more rigid. Inflection or inflexion refers to a modification or marking of a word (or more precisely lexeme) so that it reflects grammatical (i. ... In linguistics, declension is a paradigm of inflected nouns. ... A noun, or noun substantive, is a part of speech (a word or phrase) which can co-occur with (in)definite articles and attributive adjectives, and function as the head of a noun phrase. ... A verb is a part of speech that usually denotes action (bring, read), occurrence (decompose, glitter), or a state of being (exist, stand). Depending on the language, a verb may vary in form according to many factors, possibly including its tense, aspect, mood and voice. ... In linguistics, conjugation is the creation of derived forms of a verb from its principal parts by inflection (regular alteration according to rules of grammar). ... A strong inflection is an irregular inflection, in which the stem of a word changes. ... In Germanic languages, weak verbs are those verbs that have a regular inflection, in which the stem of a word is not changed by ablaut. ... The subjunctive mood (sometimes referred to as the conjunctive mood) is a grammatical mood of the verb that expresses wishes, commands (in subordinate clauses), and statements that are contrary to fact. ... Mood may refer to: chese Grammatical mood Emotional mood This is a disambiguation page, a list of pages that otherwise might share the same title. ... Syntax, originating from the Greek words συν (syn, meaning co- or together) and τάξις (táxis, meaning sequence, order, arrangement), can in linguistics be described as the study of the rules, or patterned relations that govern the way the words in a sentence come together. ...

These grammatical simplifications resemble those observed in pidgins, creoles, and other contact languages, which arise when speakers of two different languages need to communicate with one another. Such contact languages usually lack the inflections of either parent language, or drastically simplify them. A Pidgin, or contact language, is the name given to any language created, usually spontaneously, out of a mixture of other languages as a means of communication between speakers of different tongues. ... Inflection or inflexion refers to a modification or marking of a word (or more precisely lexeme) so that it reflects grammatical (i. ...

However, many say that English is probably not a creole because it retains a high number (283) of irregular verbs. In contrast to regular verbs, irregular verbs are those verbs that fall outside the standard patterns of conjugation in the languages in which they occur. ...

Causes of grammatical changes

It is certain that English underwent grammatical changes, e.g., the collapse of all cases into genitive and common. However, the reduction of unstressed vowels to schwa due to a fixed stress location contributed to this process, a pattern common to many Germanic languages (although several, such as dialects of Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese, have not undergone the reduction of vowel sounds). The process of case collapse was also already underway in Old English. For example, in strong masculine nouns, the nominative and accusative cases had become identical. Thus, the simplification of noun declension from Old English to Middle English may have had causes unrelated to creolisation. Grammar is the study of rules governing the use of language. ... The genitive case is a grammatical case that indicates a relationship, primarily one of possession, between the noun in the genitive case and another noun. ... Note: This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. ... Vowels Near-close Close-mid Mid Open-mid Near-open Open Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right represents a rounded vowel. ... The Germanic languages form one of the branches of the Indo-European (IE) language family. ...

French influences

French and English both put auxiliaries before the main verb and invert them to make questions. In Old English, Verb-Subject-Object word order made questions. Today, and at that time, French used the same process to make questions. Today, English inverts auxiliary verbs and their subjects to make a question. If English were a pidgin, it seems logical to presume that VSO word order would continue to be used. The change, moreover, comes with Early Modern English, not Middle English; Shakespeare and the King James Bible continued to ask questions with the old pattern: Knowest thou? The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... In linguistics, an auxiliary or helping verb is a verb whose function it is to give further semantic information about the main or full verb which follows it. ... Verb Subject Object—commonly used in its abbreviated form VSO—is a term in linguistic typology. ... Wikipedia does not yet have an article with this exact name. ... This page is about the version of the Bible; for the Harvey Danger album, see King James Version (album). ...

No one denies that English had an unusual amount of French and Norman loanwords. However, most of the borrowing happened after 1400, two centuries after the nobility ceased to be French speaking. The most striking Norse borrowing, their pronouns, cannot be attributed to creolisation either. It was more likely a result of ambiguity between hiem and him etc. The Norman language is a Romance language, one of the Oïl languages. ... Events Henry IV quells baron rebellion and executes The Earls of Kent, Huntingdon and Salisbury for their attempt to have Richard II of England restored as King Jean Froissart writes the Chronicles Medici family becomes powerful in Florence, Italy Births December 25 - John Sutton, 1st Baron Dudley, Lord Lieutenant of... This is the approximate extent of Old Norse and related languages in the early 10th century. ... In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a pro-form that substitutes for a noun phrase. ...

Most Romance languages have only two grammatical genders, masculine and feminine. Most Germanic languages have masculine, feminine, and neuter. It has been suggested that since these two gender systems are incompatible, English responded by dropping genders altogether, but this is only conjecture. The loss of agreement between modifiers is perhaps attributable to the reduction to schwa. The Romance languages, also called Romanic languages, are a subfamily of the Italic languages, specifically the descendants of the Vulgar Latin dialects spoken by the common people evolving in different areas after the break-up of the Roman Empire. ... In linguistics, noun classes, also called grammatical gender is a type of inflection. ... Proto-Indo-European Indo-European studies The Germanic languages form one of the branches of the Indo-European (IE) language family, spoken by the Germanic peoples who settled in northern Europe along the borders of the Roman Empire. ... Vowels Near-close Close-mid Mid Open-mid Near-open Open Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right represents a rounded vowel. ...

The plural form in English originates from a neuter nominative plural and is cognate with the general Scandinavian plural ar. The French plural descends from oblique formations in Old French and is ultimately of pronominal, not nominal origin so the plural forms in the two languages are not related. Look up Plural in Wiktionary, the free dictionary Plural is a grammatical number, typically referring to more than one of the referent in the real world. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... Scandinavia is a region in Northern Europe named after the Scandinavian Peninsula. ... Old French is a term sometimes used to refer to the langue doïl, the continuum of varieties of Romance language spoken in territories corresponding roughly to the northern half of modern France and parts of Belgium and Switzerland during the period roughly from 1000 to 1300 A.D...

There is at least one change that may be a direct result of French influence: the loss of Thou. Under Norman influence, Thou came to be parallel with Tu. Due to politeness among English speakers, Thou fell into disuse. However, a similar process took place across Western Europe, including Spain and Germany; see T-V distinction. Most modern English speakers think of thou as a relic of Shakespeares day The word thou (pronounced with the th as in the) is a second person singular pronoun of the English language. ... Europe is conventionally considered one of the seven continents of Earth which, in this case, is more a cultural and political distinction than a physiographic one, leading to some dispute as to Europes actual borders. ... In sociolinguistics, a T-V distinction describes the situation wherein a language, unlike current English, has pronouns that distinguish varying levels of politeness, social distance, courtesy, familiarity, or insult toward the addressee. ...

The combination of a largely French speaking aristocracy and a largely English speaking peasantry gave rise to many pairs of words with a Latinate word in the higher register and a Germanic word in the lower register. For example, the names of barnyard animals tend to be Germanic, from the names the English farmers and herders used: chicken, cow, ox, sheep, swine. The names of the animals when they appear on one’s plate, as the aristocracy saw them, are of Latin origin: poultry, veal, beef, mutton, pork. Other such doublets include: bellicose/warlike; benediction/blessing; close/shut; commence/begin; decapitate/behead; desire/wish; gentle/mild; labor/work; novel/new; verity/truth.

During the reign of the Normans, many words related to the ruling classes and the business of government entered English from French. Among these words are: attorney, bailiff, baron, city, conservative, countess, county, damage, duchess, duke, empire, executive, felony, govern, judicial, jury, justice, legislative, liberal, marriage, nobility, parliament, perjury, petty, prince, prison, regal, representative, republic, royal, senator, sovereign, state, traitor, viscount. A few words retain the French construction of noun followed by adjective, in contrast to the typical English construction of adjective plus noun: attorney general, court martial, malice aforethought.

See also

• History of the English language