As early as the 5th c., Teutonic invaders from the continent settled in this country, and drove the original Celtic-speaking inhabitants to the n. and w. of the island; so that before the battle of Hastings (1066), the tongue of the conquerors had been spoken in England for at least 600 years. The final absorption, after numerous conflicts, by the kings of Wessex, or West Saxons, of the various states of the " Ileptarchy," in the 9th c., went far to make the ruling speech of the land identical with that of Berkshire and Hants, the recognized center of the predominant sept. The use, besides, of this south ern Anglo-Teuton speech as the chief instrument of literary communication, was per manently confirmed by the influence of king Alfred, a native of Berks. Further back than the time of this literary monarch, few existing remains of the language permit us to go; yet,'from the writings of Cmdmon, who was a North Anglian, and a few ecclesiasti cal MSS. of the kingdom of Northumbria, which extended from the Humber to the firth of Forth, it has been generally concluded that at least two dialects must have been used in the island—a northern and a southern one. The Anglian or northern dialect was, to some slight extent, marked by Scandinavian features; while the Saxon or southern dialect was more purely Low-Germanic, though the Anglian was also Low-German in all essentials. Some have accounted for the partial approximation of the Anglian dialect to Scandinavian by the fact that the Danes, at a later period, effected a settle ment in the n.e. of England; but on the other hand, it is argued that "certain pecu liarities of a Scandinavian character are to be found in the Anglian, even of a date anterior to the first Danish occupation of a part of England in the latter half of the 9th century." Nor would this be at all surprising if we admit that the Angles came from that corner of Slesvig still called " Angeln," or indeed from any region n. of the Elbe. Some philologers, again, insist on distributing the Anglo-Saxon language into more dialects than two; but it will be sufficient if the reader bear in mind the two which have been mentioned. It is important to notice here that neither the Anglian nor the Saxon borrowed almost anything from the language of the conquered Britons; in other words, English is very nearly free of any Celtic element. On the other hand, a consider able, but not large, number of Latin words found their way into the English vocabu lary before the Norman conquest, through the introduction of Latin Christianity, and the translation of Latin authors into English.
The period in the history of our English tongue incorrectly described as Semi-Saxon because the inflections that marked the earlier stage then began to give way, dates from a generation after the conquest until near the middle of the 13th century. Like every transition era, it was a period of confusion, both to those using the language, and to those desirous of tracing its history. The monks of the time, accustomed to the use of medieval Latin, had in a great measure forgotten the grammar of their native language; and when they attempted to write it, did so very badly. The Chronicle, which in its latest form comes down to 1154, and Layamon's Brat, written about 1190 or 1200, exhibit traces of the breaking up of the grammar. The inflections and genders of the substantives, the definite and indefinite declensions of adjectives, are for the most part disregarded; a marked partiality is showed for weak preterits and participles; there is a constant substitution of en, for on in the plurals of verbs; and the final e is often dis carded; besides a great uncertainty prevailing in the government of prepositions. As regards the vocabulary itself, although employed in literature a century and a half after the Norman conquest, it exhibits, as already noticed, but few traces of Norman-French (only 90 words in 57,000 verses); proving beyond question that the immediate effects of that great change were by no means so important on the English tongue as they were at one time believed to be.
When we come to the third period in the history of English, commonly called early English, we have escaped most of the perplexities which attach themselves to the pre vious stage of our language. The tendency of the language to substitute an analytical
for a synthetical structure is now seen vigorously at work, The " Anglo-Saxon" was tolerably rich in inflections, which are now largely got rid of. The various modifica tions of an idea are expressed by some relational word or words attached to the leading idea. During the second or semi-inflected period, the verbs suffered much less inflec tional change than the substantives and adjectives; this will be found to hold throughout the entire 250 years of the era of reconstruction. In the fine poem of The Owl and the Nightingale, the Anglo-Saxon vowels a, e, a, in final syllables, are all represented by e, and the final n of the infinitive is beginning to disappear. In the chronicle of Robert of Gloucester we encounter, besides, a great number of French words (Dr. Marsh found 4 per cent in 10 pages), which had gradually become familiar to the people, through the presence of their Norman masters, and through the efforts of the latter to speak English after it was found impossible to supplant it by Norman French. The presence of French is, besides, very noticeable in the poetry of Chaucer and Gower; but there is no ground for the statement that these writers corrupted the language by a large admix ture of novel French words. Dr. Morris is quite correct when he says (introduction to Chaucer's Prologue, etc., Clarendon press series), that Chaucer, " with few exceptions, employed only such terms as were in use in the spoken language, and stamped them with the impress of his genius, so that they became current coin of the literary realm." And Mr. Skeat remarks (introduction to Piers the Plowman, same series), that " Lang land does the very same thing, employing Norman-French words freely whenever he wishes to do so." As to Scotland, again, in the Anglian counties lying south of the Forth, and as far north of it as English had got a footing, the language also underwent such changes as we have noted In the more southern dialects. Barbour, a Scottish contemporary of Chaucer, wrote purer English than Chaucer did, only because he used less French. Regarding the north-eastern dialects of Scotland, indeed, some diversity of opinion exists. Sonic antiquaries are of opinion that the large infusion of Norse or Scandinavian elements in these dialects is to be accounted for by the fact of a Nor wegian kingdom having been maintained there more or less from the 9th to the 11th c. ; while others allege that the language of the n.e. of Scotland is in substance and gram mar as decidedly Anglian as that of Norfolk or Yorkshire.
- We may here notice the question which has often been asked: Which of the early dialects spoken in England is the origin of the form now used? We have seen that in the pre-Norman period two were employed for literary purposes, a northern or Anglian, and a southern or Saxon, the latter of which, through political causes, was perhaps considered the more classical of the two. In the period, however, succeeding the Nor man conquest, and more especially after 1250, we find not two, but three dialects; a northern, a midland, and a southern. The cause of this was probably the breaking up of the supremacy of Wessex after the battle of IIastings. Circumstances now gave promi nence to the midland counties, in which arose the great universities, the rich monasteries, and many other religious foundations. One of its subdivisions, the east midland, was the dialect in which Orm, Robert of Brunne, Wickliffe, Gower, and, above all, Chaucer wrote. It had then become the speech of the metropolis, and had probably forced its way south of the Thames into Kent and Surrey. This, therefore, may be considered the immediate parent of modern English, but inasmuch as the midland gathered into itself from its very position many of the peculiarities of the dialects spoken north and south of it, sir Frederick Madden's view (Layamon's Brut, 1851), that we must look for the real groundwork of modern English in a gradual coalescence of the various dialects, may still be considered substantially correct.