Dialect variations in Middle English

The beginning of the ‘middle’ period in the history of the English language is a stretchy notion. Bearing in mind that the entire eleventh century is ‘transitional’, we still talk of pre- and post- Conquest English, taking a major historical event, the Norman Conquest of 1066, as the symbolic start of the ‘middle’ period. [14(p.184)]

The most important dialect in the ME period was the London dialect: In the 12^th -13^th c. the London Dialect became the literary L and the standard, both in written and spoken form. The reasons why this happened: The capital of the country was transferred from Winchester, Wessex, to London a few years before the Norman Conquests. The East Saxon Dialect, that was the basis of the London Dialect got, became the most prominent in the ME period.

Most writers and authors of the ME period used the London Dialect in their works.

Features of the London Dialect: The basis of the London Dialect was the East Saxon Dialect and the East Saxon Dialect mixed with the East Midland Dialect and formed the London Dialect.Thus the London Dialect became more Anglican than Saxon in character. The London Dialect is an Anglican dialect.

The dialectal position of Middle English is basically a continuation of that of Old English. The most important extra linguistic fact for the development of the Middle English dialects is that the capital of the country was moved from Winchester (in the Old English period) to London by William the Conqueror in his attempt to diminish the political influence of the native English. NORTHERN This dialect is the continuation of the Northumbrian variant of Old English. Note that by Middle English times English had spread to (Lowland) Scotland and indeed led to a certain literary tradition developing there at the end of the Middle English period which has been continued up to the present time (with certain breaks, admittedly).

Velar stops are retained (i.e. not palatalised) as can be seen in word pairs like rigg/ridge; kirk/church.

This is the most direct continuation of an Old English dialect and has more or less the same geographical distribution (Kentish).

The two most notable features of Kentish are the existence of /e:/ for Middle English /i:/ and so-called "initial softening" which caused fricatives in word-initial position to be pronounced voiced as in vat, vane and vixen (female fox).

West Saxon is the forerunner of this dialect of Middle English. Note that the area covered in the Middle English period is greater than in the Old English period as inroads were made into Celtic-speaking Cornwall. This area becomes linguistically uninteresting in the Middle English period. It shares some features of both Kentish and West Midland dialects (Southern).

Speaking about West Midland .This is the most conservative of the dialect areas in the Middle English period and is fairly well-documented in literary works. It is the western half of the Old English dialect area Mercia.

The retention of the Old English rounded vowels /y:/ and /ø:/ which in the East had been unrounded to /i:/ and /e:/ respectively.

Speaking about East Midland. So, this is the dialect out of which the later standard developed. To be precise the standard arose out of the London dialect of the late Middle English period. Note that the London dialect naturally developed into what is called Cockney today while the standard became less and less characteristic of a certain area and finally (after the 19th century) became the socialist which is termed Received Pronunciation. In general those of the late embryonic Middle English standard.

The grammatical differences between the ME dialects include differences in inflections, and in the forms of the personal pronouns. During the ME period, there was a tendency for northern forms to permeate southwards. [3(p.150)]

Many dialect differences are obvious because the sound changes in Old and Middle English did not have the same impact in all areas. For instance, palatalization of the velar stops [k] and [g] is a southern phenomenon as is the voicing of initial fricatives in words such as vather and the change of long a to o. The fronting of the fricative [w] to [s], on the other hand, is typical of the North. Thus, more sound change seems to occur in non northern areas. Changes in the morphology are the opposite: the loss of endings starts in the North as does the replacement of third person pronouns and the marking on the non-finite forms, such as participles and infinitives. The East Midlands varieties pattern more with the North and the West Midlands ones more with the South. Not all changes predict geographical origin as well as others, so be careful to use as many of these together as you can. An atlas relevant to Middle English dialects, A Linguistic Atlas of Late Middle English (Lalme), covers texts from the 14th and 15th centuries. It provides maps of where hem and them are used, for instance [5 (p.1340]

Date: 2016-03-03; view: 1165