ABSTRACT
This chapter looks in detail at the varieties of Middle English, the vernacular spoken and written in the British Isles from the eleventh through the late fifteenth centuries. Middle English emerged through the contact of Old English and Norman French. Early Middle English had a distinctive phonology and lexis. Later Middle English, especially in the fourteenth century, developed through lexical borrowings from central French and Latin. The chapter stresses the continuities between Old and Middle English: the ways in which certain Old English syntactic patterns survive throughout the Middle English period, and the ways in which a vernacular self-consciousness emerged among writers who understood the tensions between Old English and a Francophone vocabulary. Middle English dialects and dialectology are central to the study of this period, and the chapter explores the geographical boundaries and literary features of these dialects, while also calling attention to recent methods of study.
