Throughout the middle ages it was common for native English speakers to be fluent in French as a second language. Scholars such as Kibbee and Legge attempt to infer from written texts whether the writer is a native English or native Anglo-Norman speaker. This method is not completely unreliable, but in the end it may only indicate the mother tongue of the scribe and not necessarily the speaker. In fact, a large gulf must be bridged between the spoken language, and the only medium of historical records that remain to answer this question: written records.
Some work has also been done by Cecily Clark and D. Postles on the analysis of surnames and nicknames found in taxation rolls and other records. However, this is more of an indication of how much Anglo-Norman has mixed into the English culture and it cannot be relied upon for discerning a mother-tongue. In the 13 th and early 14 th centuries there was an escalation of French literature and prestige.
French became swank and was a distinct marker of ambition and class. However, the parallel growth industry of teaching French French textbooks and teaching manuals tells us that most French speakers were not, in fact, native. Middle and upper class students who wanted to join the prestigious ranks of politicians, lawyers, judges, and diplomats would learn continental French to help secure their futures. Therefore, although bilingualism became popular among the elite, it was not until well after Anglo-Norman had ceased to be spoken as a mother-tongue.
A statute written in saying that all governmental and legal affairs must be conducted in English tells us a couple of things. Firstly, that the language of the government was not the language of the people, and ergo, that French, even as a second language, had fallen out of fashion and remained the language of only a few.
Secondly, since this statute and, subsequently, many more was written in French, obviously French remained the language of the law. However, 14 th century Oxford students in legal and business studies were required to take a supplementary French course which Kibbee takes to mean that even lawyers were not native speakers of Law French or even knew French as a second language.
In fact, French was officially the language of English courts until , which proves that officiality does not always reflect practice. From the Conquest of to the early 13 th century, Anglo-Norman was the mother-tongue of the upper class. Many historical events, both major and minor, affected French as a mother-tongue in England, from royal marriages and the Hundred Years War to the geographical groupings of Norman immigrants and descendants. After a relatively short time, however, Anglo-Norman was totally replaced by Middle English, a language that easily reveals its close and prolonged exposure to Anglo-Norman.
Dahood, Roger. While effectively questioning the value of drawing conclusions from this source on many fronts, Dahood ends the article with a valid hypothesis for dating the switch from Anglo-Norman to English in the upper class of England.
Kibbee, Douglas A. Kibbee also organizes each section in a reader-friendly way so that it is easy to get specific information from a particular period at once, or compare the same elements from period to period. The French and Norman-French chansons circulated as freely in England as in France, and it was therefore not until the period of decadence that English versions were made.
The outsides of the principal doorways and their pointed arches are magnificently enriched with carving and coloured inlay, a curious combination of three styles - Norman-French , Byzantine and Arab. All rights reserved. Home Dictionary Meanings Norman-french Norman-french meaning. Filters 0. His possession of the throne had been a matter of conquest and was attended by all the consequences of the conquest of one people by another. A new nobility was introduced. Many of the English higher class had been killed at Hastings, and others were considered as traitors.
In only one of the 12 earls in England was an Englishman. For several generations after the conquest the important positions and the great estates were almost held by Normans or men of foreign blood. Norman prelates occupied important positions in the church. The number of Normans who settled in England was sufficiently predominant to continue to use their own language.
It was natural at first, because they knew no English. For years after the Norman conquest, French remained the language of ordinary intercourse among the upper classes in England. Intermarriage and association with the ruling class numerous people of English extraction thought it was and advantage to learn the new language. Before long the distinction between those who spoke French and those who spoke English was not ethnic but social. The language of the masses remained English.
The most important factor in the continued use of French but the English upper class until the beginning of the 13 th century was the close connection that existed through all these years between England and the continent.
English kings spend often a great part of the time in Normandy. The Conqueror and his sons were in France for about half of their respective reigns. The English nobility was also as much a nobility of England as an Anglo French aristocracy.
Nearly all the English landowners had possessions on the continent. There is no reason to think that the preference that the governing class in England showed for French was anything more than a natural result of circumstances. The idea that the newcomers were actively hostile to the English language is without foundation. It is true that English was now an uncultivated tongue, the language of a socially inferior class, and that a bishop like Wulfstan might be subjected to Norman disdain in part, at least, because of his ignorance of that social matter.
According to the chronicler Ordelic Vitalis, William the Conqueror made an effort at the age of 43 to learn English, His sons may have known some English, although their approach to the language may be characterised by mere indifference. A lot of French literature was produced for royal and noble patronage. In the years following the Norman conquest the sting of defeat and the hardships were forgotten.
People accepted the new order as something accomplished; they accepted it as a fact and adjusted themselves to it. The fusion of Normans and English was rapid.
The appearance of manuals from about for the teaching of French is significant. In the 14 th century poets and writers often preface their works with an explanation of the language employed and incidentally indulge from time to time in valuable observations of a more general linguistic nature.
In the 15 th century, letters public and private, the acts and records of towns, guilds, and the central government, were in French. English survived for a considerable time in some monasteries. A knowledge of English was not uncommon at the end of the 12 th century among those who habitually used French, among churchmen and men of education it was even to be expected, and among those whose activities brought them into contact with both upper and lower classes the ability to speak both languages was quite general.
Among the knightly class French seems to have been cultivated even when the mother tongue was English. Recent insights from sociolinguistics into the structures of pidgin and creole language have led some linguists to ask whether Middle English was a creole.
A pidgin is a simplified language used for communication between speakers of different languages, typically during the past five centuries for trading purposes between speakers of a European language such as Portuguese, French or English and speakers of an African or Asian language. If the simplified language is then learned as a first language by a new generation of speakers and its structures and vocabulary are expanded to serve the needs of its community of speakers, it is known as a creole.
The linguistic situation in England during the 12 and 13 centuries had certain external parallels with that in the present-day Caribbean or the South Pacific, where languages are regularly in contact, and pidgins and creoles develop.
He thought that the English-speaking majority didn? Influence of French on inflections and on syntactical structures cannot be proved. But appears unlikely from what we know about bilingualism in Middle English times. In the period preceding the loss of Normandy in there were some who spoke only French and many more who spoke only English. At the end of the 13 th century there was a reaction against foreigners and the growth of national feeling.
Bishop Grosseteste said: These aliens are not merely foreigners, they are the worst enemies of England. The do not understand the English tongue, neglect the cure of souls and impoverish the kingdom. The 13 th century must be viewed as a period of shifting emphasis upon the two languages spoken in England. The upper classes continued for the most part to speak French, but the reasons for doing so were not the same.
French became a cultivated tongue supported by social custom and by business and administrative convention.
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