AN OVERVIEW OF THE HISTORY OF THE LINGUISTIC CHANGES OF ENGLISH.
Every language has a history, and, as in the rest of human culture, changes are constantly taking place in the
course of the learned transmission of a language from one generation to another. This is just part of the difference between
human culture and animal behaviour. Languages change in all their aspects, in their pronunciation, word forms, syntax,
and word meanings (semantic change). These changes are mostly very gradual in their operation, becoming noticeable
only cumulatively over the course of several generations. But, in some areas of vocabulary, particular words closely
related to rapid cultural change are subject to equally rapid and therefore noticeable changes within a generation or even
within a decade. In the 20th century the vocabulary of science and technology was an outstanding example. The same is
also true of those parts of vocabulary that are involved in fashionable slangs and jargons, whose raison d’être in
promoting group, particularly age-group, solidarity depends on their being always fresh and distinctive. Old slangs date,
as any novel or film more than 10 years old is apt to show.
In the structural aspects of spoken language, their pronunciation and grammar, and in vocabulary less closely
involved in rapid cultural movement, the processes of linguistic change are best observed by comparing written records of
a language over extended periods. This is most readily seen by English speakers through setting side by side present-day
English texts with 18th-century English, the English of the Authorized Version of the
Bible, Shakespearean English, Chaucer’s English, and the varieties of Old English (Anglo-Saxon) that survive in written
form. Noticeably, as one goes back in time, the effort required in understanding increases, and, while people do not
hesitate to speak of “Shakespearean English,” they are more doubtful about Chaucer, and for the most part Old English
texts are as unintelligible to a modern English speaker as, for example, texts in German. It is clear that the differences
involved include word meanings, grammar, and, so far as this can be reconstructed, pronunciation.
Similar evidence, together with what is known of the cultural history of the peoples concerned, makes clear the
continuous historical connections linking French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian with the spoken (“vulgar”)
Latin of the western Roman Empire. This group constitutes the Romance subfamily of languages and is an example of
how, as the result of linguistic change over a wide area, a group of distinct, though historically related, languages comes
into being.
In the transmission of a language from parent to child, slight deviations in all aspects of language use occur all the
time, and, as children’s communication contacts widen, they confront a growing range of slight differences in personal
language use, some of them correlating with social or regional differences within a community, these differences
themselves being the results of the transmission process. As a consequence, children’s language comes to differ slightly
from that of their parents’ generation. In urbanized communities an additional factor is involved: children have been
shown to be effectively influenced by the language habits of their peer groups once they have made contacts with them in
and out of school.
Such changes, though slight at the time, are progressively cumulative. Since ready intercommunication is a
primary purpose of language, as long as a community remains unitary, with strong central direction and a central cultural
focus, such changes will not go beyond the limits of intercomprehensibility. But in more-scattered communities and in
larger language areas, especially when cultural and administrative ties are weakened and broken, these cumulative
deviations in the course of generations give rise to wider regional differences. Such differences take the form of dialectal
differentiation as long as there is some degree of mutual comprehension but eventually result in the emergence of distinct
languages. This is what happened in the history of the colloquial Latin of the western Roman Empire, and it can be
assumed that a similar course of events gave rise to the separate Germanic languages (English, German, Dutch, Danish,
Norwegian, Swedish, and some others), though in this family the original unitary language is not known historically but
inferred as “Common Germanic” or “Proto-Germanic” and tentatively assigned to early in the 1st millennium BCE as the
period before separation began.
This is how language families have developed. Most but not all of the languages of Europe belong to the Indo-
European family, so-called because in addition it includes the classical Indian language Sanskrit and most of the modern
languages of northern India and Pakistan. It includes as subfamilies the two families just mentioned, Romance and
Germanic, and several others. It is assumed that the subfamilies, and from them the individual languages of the Indo-
European family, are ultimately derived from a unitary language spoken somewhere in eastern Europe or western Asia (its
exact location is still under debate), perhaps 5,000 years ago. This unitary language has itself been referred to as “Indo-
European,” “Proto-Indo-European,” the “common parent language,” or the “original language” (Ursprache) of the family.
But it must be emphasized that, whatever it may have been like, it was just one language among many and of no special
status in itself. It was certainly in no way the original language of humankind or anything like it. It had its own earlier
history, of which virtually nothing can be inferred, and it was, of course, very recent in relation to the time span of human
language itself. What is really special about such “parent” or “proto-” languages is that they represent the farthest point to
which available techniques and resources enable linguists to reconstruct the prehistory of attested and living languages.
Similarly constituted families of languages derived from inferred common sources have been established for other parts of
the world—for example, Altaic, covering Turkish and several languages of Central Asia, and Bantu, containing many of
the languages of central and southern Africa.
If enough material in the form of written records from past ages were available, it would be possible to group all
the world’s languages into historically related families. In addition, an answer could perhaps be posited to the question of
whether all languages are descended from a single original language or whether languages emerged independently among
several groups of early peoples (the rival theories of monogenesis and polygenesis, a controversy more confidently
disputed in the 19th century than today). In actual fact, written records, when they are available, go back only a fraction of
the time in which human language has been developed and used, and over much of the globe written records are
nonexistent. In addition, there are few linguistically relevant fossils comparable to the fossils of geological prehistory,
though a certain amount of information about the early development of the vocal tract can be deduced
from skeletal remains. This means that the history and prehistory of languages will not be able to go back more than to a
few thousand years BCE and will be much more-restricted in language areas in which few or no written records are
available, as in much of Africa and in South America. Many languages will remain not related with certainty to any
family.
Nevertheless, the methods of historical linguistics, involving the precise and systematic comparison of word
forms and word meanings, have produced remarkable results in establishing language families on the same basis as Indo-
European was established, in far less-favourable fields. But any attempt by these means to get back to “the origin of
language” or to reconstruct the original language of the human race, if indeed there was one, has so far been beyond the
reach of science. However, hypotheses based on large-scale comparative studies using statistical methods continue to be
proposed. For example, in 2011 a study of 504 languages by New Zealand biologist Quentin D. Atkinson suggested that
the number of phonemes a language contains may be an index of evolutionary diversity. In this sample, the languages of
southwest Africa had the largest phoneme inventories, and the number of phonemes declined the farther away from this
area humans settled, showing an interesting parallel with the reduction in human genetic diversity seen over increasing
distance from Africa already noted by biologists. The findings are suggestive, but they need to be tested against a much
larger sample of languages.
Tendencies against change
These historical processes take place without any direct volition on the part of speakers as regards the language itself.
Latin was learned as part of personal advancement, not for its own sake. Loans were incorporated almost without their
being noticed, along with the concomitant cultural changes and innovations. Deliberate action directly related to a
language does occur. The creation of pidgins involves some degree of linguistic consciousness on the part of their first
users. More deliberate, however, have been various attempts at preserving the purity of a language, at least for some uses,
or at arresting the processes of change. The care bestowed on the preservation of the Sanskrit used in religious ritual in
ancient India and efforts to free Modern Greek from much of its Turkish vocabulary have already been noticed. For a
period, under Nazi rule, efforts were made to replace some foreign words in the German language by words of native
origin, and there have been movements to replace later accretions in English by words derived from Old English forms. In
the long run, such attempts never succeed in preventing or reversing change; at best they preserve collaterally supposedly
purer forms and styles for certain purposes and in certain contexts.
With the picture painted above of the tendency for languages to fragment first into dialects and then into separate
languages, it might be thought that dialects are relatively late in appearance in the history of a language family. This
impression is reinforced by the fact that most nonstandard dialects are unrepresented as such in writing, and so
comparatively little is known about dialectal differences within most languages as one goes back in time. In this respect
the very detailed knowledge of the Ancient Greek dialect situation is quite untypical.
In fact, dialect divisions must have been a feature of linguistic communities as early as there is any knowledge of them.
Dialect splitting is fostered by isolation and loss of contact between groups within a speech community, and the sparse
populations of earlier days, often nomadic and spread over large areas relative to their numbers, will have encouraged this
process. It is simply the case that all but literate dialects have been lost in the past, and an artificial homogeneity is
attributed to most ancient languages and to the so-called reconstructed parent languages of families.
Present-day conditions tend toward the amalgamation of dialects and the disappearance of those spoken by relatively few
people. Urbanization, mass travel, universal education, broadcasting, ease of communication, and social mobility are
among the forces that foster rather large regional and social dialects, with special occupational types of language within
them, in place of the small, strictly localized dialects of earlier times. This is one reason for the urgency with which
dialect studies are being pursued in many Western industrialized countries, such as England and parts of the United States.
If work is not done soon, many dialects may perish unrecorded.
For the same reasons, dialect divisions that earlier would have widened into distinct languages are now unlikely to do so.
One may compare the emergence of the separate Romance languages from once unitary Latin with the splitting of South
American Spanish and Portuguese into different dialects of those two languages. Those dialectal divisions are not now
expected to widen beyond the range of intercomprehensibility. Those same conditions, together with the spread
of literacy, are leading to the extinction of languages spoken by relatively small communities. Such is the fate of most of
the North American Indian languages, and Irish, Welsh, Scots Gaelic, and Cornish may ultimately survive only as learned
second languages, preserved as cultural focuses for their communities. But in situations like that, both past and present,
the intervening period of extensive bilingualism and the concomitant use of two languages has its effect on the changes
taking place in the dominant language, which is influenced by the phonetic and grammatical composition of the speakers’
former language. The closing decades of the 20th century also saw a new enthusiasm for the preservation of minority
languages, illustrated by the formation of the European Bureau for Lesser-Used Languages in 1982 (although it ceased
functioning in 2010).
ENGLISH AS AN INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGE
English belongs to the Indo-European family of languages and is therefore related to most other languages spoken
in Europe and western Asia from Iceland to India. The parent tongue, called Proto-Indo-European, was spoken about
5,000 years ago by nomads believed to have roamed the southeast European plains. Germanic, one of the language groups
descended from this ancestral speech, is usually divided by scholars into three regional groups: East (Burgundian, Vandal,
and Gothic, all extinct), North (Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish), and West (German, Dutch [and
Flemish], Frisian, and English). Though closely related to English, German remains far more conservative than English in
its retention of a fairly elaborate system of inflections. Frisian, spoken by the inhabitants of the Dutch province
of Friesland and the islands off the west coast of Schleswig, is the language most nearly related to Modern English.
Icelandic, which has changed little over the last thousand years, is the living language most nearly resembling Old
English in grammatical structure.
Modern English is analytic (i.e., relatively uninflected), whereas Proto-Indo-European, the ancestral tongue of
most of the modern European languages (e.g., German, French, Russian, Greek), was synthetic, or inflected. During the
course of thousands of years, English words have been slowly simplified from the inflected variable forms found
in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Russian, and German, toward invariable forms, as in Chinese and Vietnamese. The German and
Chinese words for the noun man are exemplary. German has five forms: Mann, Mannes, Manne, Männer, Männern.
Chinese has one form: ren. English stands in between, with four forms: man, man’s, men, men’s. In English, only nouns,
pronouns (as in he, him, his), adjectives (as in big, bigger, biggest), and verbs are inflected. English is the only European
language to employ uninflected adjectives; e.g., the tall man, the tall woman, compared to Spanish el hombre alto and la
mujer alta. As for verbs, if the Modern English word ride is compared with the corresponding words in Old English and
Modern German, it will be found that English now has only 5 forms (ride, rides, rode, riding, ridden), whereas Old
English ridan had 13, and Modern German reiten has 16.
In addition to the simplicity of inflections, English has two other basic characteristics: flexibility of function and openness
of vocabulary.
MIDDLE ENGLISH
Middle English language, the vernacular spoken and written in England from about 1100 to about 1500, the
descendant of the Old English language and the ancestor of Modern English.
The history of Middle English is often divided into three periods: (1) Early Middle English, from about 1100 to
about 1250, during which the Old English system of writing was still in use; (2) the Central Middle English period from
about 1250 to about 1400, which was marked by the gradual formation of literary dialects, the use of an orthography
greatly influenced by the Anglo-Norman writing system, the loss of pronunciation of final unaccented -e, and the
borrowing of large numbers of Anglo-Norman words; the period was especially marked by the rise of the London dialect,
in the hands of such writers as John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer; and (3) Late Middle English, from about 1400 to about
1500, which was marked by the spread of the London literary dialect and the gradual cleavage between the Scottish
dialect and the other northern dialects. During this period the basic lines of inflection as they appear in Modern English
were first established. Among the chief characteristic differences between Old and Middle English were the substitution
of natural gender in Middle English for grammatical gender and the loss of the old system of declensions in the noun and
adjective and, largely, in the pronoun.
The dialects of Middle English are usually divided into three large groups: (1) Southern (subdivided into
Southeastern, or Kentish, and Southwestern), chiefly in the counties south of the River Thames; (2) Midland
(corresponding roughly to the Mercian dialect area of Old English times) in the area from the Thames to southern South
Yorkshire and northern Lancashire; and (3) Northern, in the Scottish Lowlands, Northumberland, Cumbria, Durham,
northern Lancashire, and most of Yorkshire.
Two very important linguistic developments characterize Middle English:
in grammar, English came to rely less on inflectional endings and more on word order to convey grammatical
information. (If we put this in more technical terms, it became less ‘synthetic’ and more ‘analytic’.)Change was
gradual, and has different outcomes in different regional varieties of Middle English, but the ultimate effects were
huge: the grammar of English c.1500 was radically different from that of Old English.Grammatical gender was
lost early in Middle English. The range of inflections, particularly in the noun, was reduced drastically (partly as a
result of reduction of vowels in unstressed final syllables), as was the number of distinct paradigms: in most early
Middle English texts most nouns have distinctive forms only for singular vs. plural, genitive, and occasional
traces of the old dative in forms with final –eoccurring after a preposition.In some other parts of the system some
distinctions were more persistent, but by late Middle English the range of endings and their use among London
writers shows relatively few differences from the sixteenth-century language of, for example, Shakespeare:
probably the most prominent morphological difference from Shakespeare’s language is that verb plurals and
infinitives still generally ended in –en (at least in writing).
in vocabulary, English became much more heterogeneous, showing many borrowings from French, Latin, and
Scandinavian. Large-scale borrowing of new words often had serious consequences for the meanings and the
stylistic register of those words which survived from Old English. Eventually, various new stylistic layers
emerged in the lexicon, which could be employed for a variety of different purposes.
