Middle English

Abstract

Middle English is the English of the period from approximately 1100 to approximately 1450. This is a period of sweeping changes in all areas of the language, including the social uses of the language. At the beginning of the period, English is the language of a conquered people. By the end of it, English has re-established itself as a language of literature and the language used in law courts and parliament. During this time, it has transformed from a language with a moderate amount of nominal and verbal inflection and fairly free word order to one in which word order is the primary method of signalling grammatical relations. Structurally, this is a period of substantial phonological, morphological, syntactic and lexical change, with the vocabulary profoundly reshaped by borrowing. Show more