Old English Kingdoms and Dialects

The Germanic tribes founded seven separate kingdoms, which during four centuries struggled with one another for supremacy. They were Kent, Sussex, Essex, Wessex, Mercia, East Anglia and Northumbria, which consisted of two parts, Bernicia and Deira. In this prolonged struggle it was sometimes Kent, or Northumbria and sometimes Mercia that would take the upper hand (pre-written history) and Wessex (the period of written records) (Note 12). In 828 the struggle came to an end with the decisive victory of Wessex. Ecgbert, king of Wessex, subdued Mercia and Northumbria. Since then kings of Wessex became kings of England, and the capital of Wessex, Winchester, became the capital of England.

The Germanic tribes spoke closely related tribal dialects belonging to the West Germanic subgroup. Their common origin and their separation from other related tongues as well as their joint evolution in Britain transformed them eventually into a single tongue, English. Yet, at the early stages of their development in Britain the dialects remained disunited. On the one hand, the OE dialects acquired certain common features which distinguished them from continental Germanic tongues; on the other hand, they displayed growing regional divergence. The feudal system was setting in, and the dialects were entering a new phase; tribal dialectal division was superceded by geographical division, in other words, tribal dialects were transformed into local or regional dialects.

There were four main dialects spoken at that time in Britain: Kentish, the dialect developed from the tongue spoken by the Jutes and Frisians; West Saxon, the main dialect of the Saxon group, spoken in the rest of England south of the Thames and the Bristol Channel, excluding Cornwall and Wales, where Celtic tongues were spoken. Other Saxon dialects have not survived in written form and are not known to modern scholars; Mercian, spoken by the Angles between the Humber and the Thames; Northumbrian, another Anglian dialect, from the Humber north to the river Forth (hence the name – North-Humbrian).

The boundaries between the dialects were uncertain and probably movable. The dialects passed into one another imperceptibly and dialectal forms were freely borrowed from one dialect into another. Throughout this period the dialects enjoyed relative equality; none of them was the dominant form of speech, each being the main type used over a limited area.

Date: 2015-01-12; view: 1805