Department of Linguistics and Languages
CLE 3101: The History and Varieties of
English
Classroom discussions
Introduction
The rise of English can be studied from a number of perspectives:
✓ as a topic in Historical Linguistics, highlighting the history of one language within the Germanic
family and its continual fission into regional and social dialects;
✓ as a macro-sociolinguistic topic ‘language spread’ detailing the ways in which English and other
languages associated with colonization have changed the linguistic ecology of the world;
✓ as a topic in the field of Language Contact, examining the structural similarities and differences
amongst the new varieties of English that are stabilizing or have stabilized;
✓ as a topic in political and ideological studies -- ‘linguistic imperialism’ -- that focuses on how
relations of dominance are entrenched by, and in, language and how such dominance often comes
to be viewed as part of the natural order;
✓ as a topic in Applied Linguistics concerned with the role of English in modernization, government
and -- above all -- education; and
✓ as a topic in cultural and literary studies concerned with the impact of English upon different
cultures and literatures, and the constructions of new identities via bilingualism
The History of English
The Indo-European family
A more common term is Indo-Germanic, which is the most usual designation among German philologists,
but it is open to the objection of giving undue emphasis to the Germanic languages. The term now most
widely employed is Indo-European, suggesting more clearly the geographical extent of the family. The
parent tongue from which the Indo-European languages have sprung had already become divided and
scattered before the dawn of history. When we meet with the various peoples by whom these languages are
spoken they have lost all knowledge of their former association. Consequently, we have no written record
1
of the common Indo-European language. By a comparison of its descendants, however, it is possible to form
a fair idea of it and to make plausible reconstructions of its lexicon and inflections. The surviving languages
show various degrees of similarity to one another, the similarity bearing a more or less direct relationship
to their geographical distribution. They accordingly fall into eleven principal groups: Indian, Iranian,
Armenian, Hellenic, Albanian, Italic, Balto-Slavic, Germanic, Celtic, Hittite, and Tocharian. These are the
branches of the Indo-European family tree:
2
3
The English language/Anglo Saxon
English language, also called Anglo-Saxon, language spoken and written in England before 1100; it is the
ancestor of Middle English and Modern English. Scholars place Old English in the Anglo-Frisian group
of West Germanic languages.
Four dialects of the Old English language are known: Northumbrian in northern England and southeastern
Scotland; Mercian in central England; Kentish in southeastern England; and West Saxon in southern and
southwestern England. Mercian and Northumbrian are often classed together as the Anglian dialects. Most
extant Old English writings are in the West Saxon dialect; the first great period of literary activity occurred
during the reign of King Alfred the Great in the 9th century
4
5
Highlights of the history and Sociology of English
Among highlights in the history of the English language, the following stand out most clearly:
1. the settlement in Britain of Jutes, Saxons, and Angles in the 5th and 6th centuries;
2. the arrival of St. Augustine in 597 and the subsequent conversion of England to Latin Christianity;
3. the Viking invasions of the 9th century;
4. the Norman Conquest of 1066;
5. the Statute of Pleading in 1362 (this required that court proceedings be conducted in English);
6. the setting up of William Caxton’s printing press at Westminster in 1476;
7. the full flowering of the Renaissance in the 16th century;
8. the publishing of the King James Bible in 1611;
9. the completion of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of 1755; and
10. the expansion to North America and South Africa in the 17th century and to India, Australia,
and New Zealand in the 18th.
6
Methodology
From old English to modern English
How and why has English changed over time?
externally – where, why and by whom the language was used; the political and social factors causing change
– and
internally – the pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary and written appearance of the language; the
motivations for change arising from the structure of the language itself. The conventional division of the
history of English into three main periods: Old, Middle and Modern English
Before English (Externally )
The English language, and indeed most European languages, traces it original roots back to a Neolithic (late
Stone Age) people known as the Indo-Europeans or Proto-Indo-Europeans, who lived in Eastern Europe
and Central Asia from some time after 5000 BC (different hypotheses suggest various different dates
anywhere between the 7th and the 3rd millennium BC). We do not know exactly what the original Indo-
European language was like, as no writings exist from that time.
our knowledge of it is necessarily based on conjecture, hypothesis and reconstruction. Using the
“comparative method”, though, modern linguists have been able to partially reconstruct the original
language from common elements in its daughter languages.
indo-European is just one of the language families, or proto-languages, from which the world's modern
languages are descended, and there are many other families including Sino-Tibetan, North Caucasian, Afro-
Asiatic, Altaic, Niger-Congo, Dravidian, Uralic, Amerindian, etc. However, it is by far the largest family,
accounting for the languages of almost half of the modern world’s population, including those of most of
Europe, North and South America, Australasia, the Iranian plateau and much of South Asia. Within Europe,
only Basque, Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, Turkish, and a few of the smaller Russian languages are not
descended from the Indo-European family.
7
Spread of Indo-European Languages
Sometime between 3500 BC and 2500 BC, the Indo-Europeans began to fan out across Europe and Asia, in
search of new pastures and hunting grounds, and their languages developed - and diverged - in isolation. By
around 1000 BC, the original Indo-European language had split into a dozen or more major language groups
or families, the main groups being:
Hellenic
Italic
Indo-Iranian
Celtic
Germanic
Armenian
Balto-Slavic
Albanian
The common ancestry of these diverse languages can sometimes be seen quite clearly in the existence of
cognates (similar words in different languages), and the recognition of this common ancestry of Indo-
European languages is usually attributed to the amateur linguist Sir William Jones in 1786. Examples are:
father in English, Vater in German, pater in Latin and Greek, fadir in Old Norse and pitr in ancient Vedic
Sanskrit.
brother in English, broeer in Dutch, Brüder in German, braithair in Gaelic, bróðr in Old Norse
and bhratar in Sanskrit.
three in English, tres in Latin, tris in Greek, drei in German, drie in Dutch, trí in Sanskrit.
is in English, is in Dutch, est in Latin, esti in Greek, ist in Gothic, asti in Sanskrit.
me in English, mich or mir in German, mij in Dutch, mik or mis in Gothic, me in Latin, eme in
Greek, mam in Sanskrit.
mouse in English, Maus in German, muis in Dutch, mus in Latin, mus in Sanskrit.
8
The Germanic family of languages
The branch of Indo-European we are most interested in is Germanic (although the Hellenic-Greek branch
and Italic-Latin branch, which gave rise to the Romance languages, also became important later). The
Germanic, or Proto-Germanic, language group can be traced back to the region between the Elbe river in
modern Germany and southern Sweden some 3,000 years ago.
The early Germanic languages themselves borrowed some words from the aboriginal (non-Indo-European)
tribes which preceded them, particularly words for the natural environment (e.g.
sea, land, strand, seal, herring); for technologies connected with sea travel (e.g. ship, keel, sail, oar); for new
social practices (e.g. wife, bride, groom); and for farming or animal husbandry practices (e.g. oats,
mare, ram, lamb, sheep, kid, bitch, hound, dung).
Celtics
Despite their dominance in Britain at an early formative stage of its development, the Celts have actually
had very little impact on the English language, leaving only a few little-used words such as brock (an old
word for a badger), and a handful of geographical terms like coombe (a word for a valley) and
crag and tor (both words for a rocky peak)
9
The Celtic language survives today only in the Gaelic languages of Scotland and Ireland, the Welsh of
Wales, and the Breton language of Brittany.
The earliest inhabitants of Britain about which anything is known are the Celts (the name from the
Greek keltoi meaning "barbarian"), also known as Britons, who probably started to move into the area
sometime after 800 BC. By around 300 BC, the Celts had become the most widespread branch of Indo-
Europeans in Iron Age Europe, inhabiting much of modern-day Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Austria, the
Balkans, Eastern Europe and also Britain.
The Germanic group itself also split over time as the people migrated into other parts of continental Europe:
North Germanic, which evolved into Old Norse and then into the various Scandinavian languages, Swedish,
Danish, Norwegian and Icelandic (but not Finnish or Estonian, which are Uralic and not Indo-European
languages);
East Germanic, spoken by peoples who migrated back to eastern and southeastern Europe, and whose three
component language branches, Burgundian, Vandalic and Gothic (a language spoken throughout much of eastern,
central and western Europe early in the first millennium AD), all died out over time; and
West Germanic, the ancestor of Old High German, Old Saxon, Old Frisian, Old Low Franconian and others
which in turn gave rise to modern German, Dutch, Flemish, Low German, Frisian, Yiddish and, ultimately,
English. Thus, we can say that English belongs to the West Germanic branch of the Indo-European family of
languages.
Little or nothing is known about the original hunter-gatherer inhabitants of the British Isles before they were
cut off from the rest of Europe by the English Channel (around 5000-6000 BC). Indeed, little is know of the
so-called Beaker People and others who moved into the British Isles from Europe around 2500 BC, and
were probably responsible for monuments like Stonehenge around this time.
The earliest inhabitants of Britain about which anything is known are the Celts (the name from the
Greek keltoi meaning "barbarian"), also known as Britons, who probably started to move into the area
sometime after 800 BC. By around 300 BC, the Celts had become the most widespread branch of Indo-
Europeans in Iron Age Europe, inhabiting much of modern-day Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Austria, the
Balkans, Eastern Europe and also Britain.
10
The Romans
The Romans first entered Britain in 55 BC under Julius Caesar, although they did not begin a permanent
occupation until 43 AD, when Emperor Claudius sent a much better prepared force to subjugate the fierce
British Celts.
Although this first invasion had a profound effect on the culture, religion, geography, architecture and social
behaviour of Britain, the linguistic legacy of the Romans’ time in Britain was, like that of the Celts,
surprisingly limited. This legacy takes the form of less than 200 “loanwords” coined by Roman merchants
and soldiers, such
as win (wine), butere (butter), caese (cheese), piper (pepper), candel (candle), cetel (kettle), disc (dish), cy
cene (kitchen), ancor (anchor), belt (belt), sacc (sack), catte (cat), plante (plant), rosa (rose), cest (chest), p
und (pound), munt (mountain), straet (street), wic (village), mil (mile), port (harbour), weall (wall), etc.
However, Latin would, at a later time (see the sections on The Coming of Christianity and Literacy and The
English Renaissance), come to have a substantial influence on the language.
The Romans, under attack at home from Visigoths, Ostrogoths and Vandals, abandoned Britain to the Celts
in 410 AD, completing their withdrawal by 436 AD. Within a remarkably short time after this withdrawal,
the Roman influence on Britain, in language as in many other walks of life, was all but lost, as Britain settled
into the so-called Dark Ages
11
The invasion of Germanic tribes
According to Bede, Jutes were one of the three most powerful Germanic nations, along with the Angles and
the Saxons The Jutes, Angles, and Saxons lived in Jutland, Schleswig, and Holstein, respectively, before
settling in Britain.
According to the Venerable Bede, the first historian of the English people, the first Jutes, Hengist and Horsa,
landed at Ebbsfleet in the Isle of Thanet in 449; and the Jutes later settled in Kent, southern Hampshire, and
the Isle of Wight. The Jutes invaded and settled in southern Britain in the late 4th century during
the Migration Period, as part of a larger wave of Germanic settlement into Britain. The Jutes are also
speculated to have spread to Savonia, Finland.
.The Saxons occupied the rest of England south of the Thames, as well as modern Middlesex and Essex.
The Angles eventually took the remainder of England as far north as the Firth of Forth, including the future
Edinburgh and the Scottish Lowlands.
12
The Germanic tribes settled in seven smaller kingdoms, known as the Heptarchy: the Saxons in Essex,
Wessex and Sussex; the Angles in East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria; and the Jutes in Kent. Evidence
of the extent of their settlement can be found in the number of place names throughout England ending with
the Anglo-Saxon “-ing” meaning people of (e.g. Worthing, Reading, Hastings), “-ton” meaning enclosure
or village (e.g. Taunton, Burton, Luton), “-ford” meaning a river crossing (e.g. Ashford, Bradford, Watford)
“-ham” meaning farm (e.g. Nottingham, Birmingham, Grantham) and “-stead” meaning a site (e.g.
Hampstead).
In both Latin and Common Germanic the Angles’ name was Angli, later mutated in Old English
to Engle (nominative) and Engla (genitive).
Engla land designated the home of all three tribes collectively, and both King Alfred (known as Alfred the
Great) and Abbot Aelfric, author and grammarian, subsequently referred to their speech as Englisc.
Nevertheless, all the evidence indicates that Jutes, Angles, and Saxons retained their distinctive dialects.
The River Humber was an important boundary, and the Anglian-speaking region developed two speech
groups: to the north of the river, Northumbrian, and, to the south, Southumbrian, usually referred to as
Mercian.
There were thus four dialects: Northumbrian, Mercian, West Saxon, and Kentish.
In the 8th century, the Northumbrian speech group led in literature and culture, but that leadership was
destroyed by the Viking invaders, who sacked Lindisfarne, an island near the Northumbrian mainland, in
793. They landed in strength in 865.
The first raiders were Danes, but they were later joined by Norwegians from Ireland and the Western
Isles who settled in modern Cumberland, Westmorland, northwest Yorkshire, Lancashire, north Cheshire,
and the Isle of Man.
In the 9th century, as a result of the Norwegian invasions, cultural leadership passed from Northumbria to
Wessex. During King Alfred’s reign, in the last three decades of the 9th century, Winchester became the
chief centre of learning. There the Parker Chronicle (a manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle) was
written; there the Latin works of the priest and historian Paulus Orosius, St. Augustine, St. Gregory, and the
Venerable Bede were translated; and there the native poetry of Northumbria and Mercia was transcribed
into the West Saxon dialect. This resulted in West Saxon’s becoming “standard Old English.” About a
century later, when Aelfric wrote his lucid and mature prose at Winchester, Cerne Abbas, and Eynsham, the
hegemony of Wessex was strengthened.
13
The coming of Christianity and literacy
Although many of the Romano-Celts in the north of England had already been Christianized, St. Augustine
and his 40 missionaries from Rome brought Christianity to the pagan Anglo-Saxons of the rest of England
in 597 AD. After the conversion of the influential King Ethelbert of Kent, it spread rapidly through the land,
carrying literacy and European culture in it wake. Augustine was made Archbishop of Canterbury in
601 AD and several great monasteries and centres of learning were established particularly in Northumbria
(e.g. Jarrow, Lindisfarne).
The first known written English sentence, which reads "This she-wolf is a reward to my kinsman", is an
Anglo-Saxon runic inscription on a gold medallion found in Suffolk, and has been dated to about 450- 480
AD. The early Christian missionaries introduced the more rounded Roman alphabet (much as we use today),
which was easier to read and more suited for writing on vellum or parchment.
14
The Latin language the missionaries brought was still only used by the educated ruling classes and Church
functionaries, and Latin was only a minor influence on the English language at this time, being largely
restricted to the naming of Church dignitaries and ceremonies i.e.,
(priest, vicar, altar, mass, church, bishop, pope, nun, angel, verse, baptism, monk, eucharist, candle, templ
e and presbyter came into the language this way).
other more domestic words:
fork, spade, chest, spider, school, tower, plant, rose, lily, circle, paper, sock, mat, cook, etc) also came into
English from Latin during this time, albeit substantially altered and adapted for the Anglo-Saxon ear and
tongue.
More ecclesiastical Latin loanwords continued to be introduced, even as late as the 11th Century, including
chorus, cleric, creed, cross, demon, disciple, hymn, paradise, prior, sabbath, etc.
The Anglo-Saxon (The Old English Language)
About 400 Anglo-Saxon texts survive from this era, including many beautiful poems, telling tales of wild
battles and heroic journeys. The oldest surviving text of Old English literature is “Cædmon's Hymn”, which
was composed between 658 and 680, and the longest was the ongoing “Anglo-Saxon Chronicle”. But by far
the best known is the long epic poem “Beowulf”.
Beowulf” may have been written any time between the 8th and the early 11th Century by an unknown author
or authors, or, most likely, it was written in the 8th Century and then revised in the 10th or 11th Century.
It was probably originally written in Northumbria, although the single manuscript that has come down to us
(which dates from around 1000) contains a bewildering mix of Northumbrian, West Saxon and Anglian
dialects.
1. Many of the most basic and common words in use in English today have their roots in Old English,
including words
like water, earth, house, food, drink, sleep, sing, night, strong, the, a, be, of, he, she, you, no, not, etc.
Interestingly, many of our common swear words are also of Anglo-Saxon origin (including
tits, fart, shit, turd, arse and, probably, piss), and most of the others were of early medieval provenance
2. During the 6th Century, for reasons which are still unclear, the Anglo-Saxon consonant cluster "sk"
changed to "sh", so that skield became shield. This change affected all "sk" words in the language at that
time, whether recent borrowings from Latin (e.g. disk became dish) or ancient aboriginal borrowings
15
(e.g. skip became ship). Any modern English words which make use of the "sk" cluster came into the
language after the 6th Century (i.e. after the sound change had ceased to operate), mainly, as we will see
below, from Scandinavia.
3. Then, around the 7th Century, a vowel shift took place in Old English pronunciation (analogous to the
Great Vowel Shift during the Early Modern period) in which vowels began to be pronounced more to the
front of the mouth. The main sound affected was "i", hence its common description as "i-mutation" or "i-
umlaut" (umlaut is a German term meaning sound alteration). As part of this process, the plurals of several
nouns also started to be represented by changed vowel pronunciations rather than changes in inflection.
These changes were sometimes, but not always, reflected in revised spellings, resulting in inconsistent
modern words pairings such as foot/feet, goose/geese, man/men, mouse/mice, as well as
blood/bleed, foul/filth, broad/breadth, long/length, old/elder, whole/hale/heal/health, etc.
Internal structure of Old English
In standard Old English, adjectives, nouns, pronouns, and verbs were fully inflected i.e.,
1. Nouns were inflected for four cases (nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative) in singular and plural.
2. Five nouns of first kinship—faeder, mōdor, brōthor, sweostor, and dohtor (“father,” “mother,” “brother,”
“sister,” and “daughter,” respectively)—had their own set of inflections.
3. Personal, possessive, demonstrative, interrogative, indefinite, and relative pronouns had full inflections
4. There were two demonstratives: sē, sēo, thaet, meaning “that,” and thes, thēos, this, meaning “this,”.
5. There were no articles, the definite article being expressed by use of the demonstrative for “that” or not
expressed at all. Thus, “the good man” was sē gōda mon or plain gōd mon.
6. The function of the indefinite article was performed by the numeral ān “one” in ān mon “a man,” by the
adjective-pronoun sum in sum mon “a (certain) man,” or not expressed, as in thū eart gōd mon “you are a
good man.”
7. Verbs had two tenses only (present-future and past), three moods (indicative, subjunctive, and
imperative), two numbers (singular and plural), and three persons (1st, 2nd, and 3rd).
8. There were two classes of verb stems. (A verb stem is that part of a verb to which inflectional changes—
changes indicating tense, mood, number, etc.—are added.) One type of verb stem, called vocalic because
an internal vowel shows variations, is exemplified by the verb for “sing”: singan, singth, sang, sungon,
gesungen.
16
9. Some verbs of great frequency (antecedents of the modern words be, shall, will, do, go, can, may, and so
on) had their own peculiar patterns of inflections.
10. Grammatical gender persisted throughout the Old English period. Just as Germans now say der Fuss,
die Hand, and das Auge (masculine, feminine, and neuter terms for “the foot,” “the hand,” and “the eye”),
so, for these same structures, Aelfric said sē fōt, sēo hond, and thaet ēaġe, also masculine, feminine, and
neuter. The three words for “woman,” wīfmon, cwene, and wīf, were masculine, feminine, and neuter,
respectively.
11. Because of the greater use of inflections in Old English, word order was freer than today. The sequence
of subject, verb, and complement was normal,
The Vikings
It is estimated that about 85% of the 30,000 or so Anglo-Saxon words gradually died out under the cultural
onslaught of the Vikings and the Normans who would come after them
By the late 8th Century, the Vikings (or Norsemen) began to make sporadic raids on the east cost of Britain.
They came from Denmark, Norway and Sweden, although it was the Danes who came with the greatest
force. Notorious for their ferocity, ruthlessness and callousness, the Vikings pillaged and plundered the
towns and monasteries of northern England - in 793, they sacked and looted the wealthy monastery at
Lindisfarne in Northumbria - before turning their attentions further south. By about 850, the raiders had
started to over-winter in southern England and, in 865, there followed a full-scale invasion and on-going
battles for the possession of the country.
Viking expansion was finally checked by Alfred the Great and, in 878, a treaty between the Anglo-Saxons
and the Vikings established the Danelaw, splitting the country along a line roughly from London to Chester,
giving the Norsemen control over the north and east and the Anglo-Saxons the south and west. Although
the Danelaw lasted less than a century, its influence can be seen today in the number of place names of
Norse origin in northern England (over 1,500), including many place names ending in “-by”, “-gate”, “-
stoke”, “-kirk”, “-thorpe”, “-thwaite”, “-toft” and other suffixes
(e.g. Whitby, Grimsby, Ormskirk, Scunthorpe, Stoke Newington, Huthwaite, Lowestoft, etc), as well as the
“-son” ending on family names (e.g. Johnson, Harrison, Gibson, Stevenson, etc) as opposed to the Anglo-
Saxon equivalent “-ing” (e.g. Manning, Harding, etc).
17
The word viking actually means “a pirate raid” in Old Norse. Accents and pronunciations in northern
England even today are heavily influenced by Old Norse, to the extent that they are largely intelligible in
Iceland.
Over time, Old Norse was gradually merged into the English language, and many Scandinavian terms were
introduced. In actual fact, only around 150 Norse words appear in Old English manuscripts of the period,
but many more became assimilated into the language and gradually began to appear in texts over the next
few centuries. In all, up to 1,000 Norse words were permanently added to the English lexicon, among them,
some of the most common and fundamental in the language,
18
including skull, skin, leg, neck, freckle, sister, husband, fellow, wing, bull, score, seat, root, bloom, bag, g
ap, knife, dirt, kid, link, gate, sky, egg, cake, skirt, band, bank, birth, scrap, skill, thrift, window, gasp, gap,
law, anger, trust, silver, clasp, call, crawl, dazzle, scream, screech, race, lift, get, give, are, take, mistake, r
id, seem, want, thrust, hit, guess, kick, kill, rake, raise, smile, hug, call, cast, clip, die, flat, meek, rotten, ti
ght, odd, rugged, ugly, ill, sly, wrong, loose, happy, awkward, weak, worse, low, both, same, together, aga
in, until, etc.
Old Norse often provided direct alternatives or synonyms for Anglo-Saxon words, both of which have been
carried on (e.g. Anglo-Saxon craft and
Norse skill, wish and want, dike and ditch, sick and ill, whole and hale, raise and rear, wrath and anger, hi
de and skin, etc). Unusually for language development, English also adopted some Norse grammatical
forms, such as the pronouns they, them and their, although these words did not enter the dialects of London
and southern England until as late as the 15th Century. Under the influence of the Danes, Anglo-Saxon word
endings and inflections started to fall away during the time of the Danelaw, and prepositions
like to, with, by, etc became more important to make meanings clear, although many inflections continued
into Middle English, particularly in the south and west (the areas furthest from Viking influence).
The Varieties of English
19
References
Baugh, C.A., and Cable, T. (2002). A History of the English language. London: Routledge.
Craig, C. (Ed.) (2002). Dictionary of the Social Sciences. New York: OUP.
Crystal, D. (1997). Cambridge Encyclopedia of English Language. Cambridge: CUP.
Crystal, D. (2003). English as Global Language. Cambridge: CUP.
Hogg, R., and Denison, D. (2006). A History of the English Language. Cambridge: CUP.
Kirkpatrick, A. (Ed.) (2010). The Routledge Handbook of Work Englishes. New York: Routledge.
Saxena, M., and Omoniyi, T. (2010). Contending with Globalization in World Englishes. Bristol:
Multilingual Matters.
Yule, G. (2006). The study of Language. Cambridge: CUP.
Course assessment
CAT = 30%
Exam = 70%
Contact information
Dr. Robert Joseph Ochieng, PhD (Des.)
Email: [email protected]
20
