SOUTHERN West Saxon is the forerunner of this dialect of Middle English. Note that the area covered in the Middle English period is greater than in the Old English period as inroads were made into Celtic-speaking Cornwall. This area becomes linguistically uninteresting in the Middle English period. It shares some features of both Kentish and West Midland dialects.
WEST MIDLAND This is the most conservative of the dialect areas in the Middle English period and is fairly well-documented in literary works. It is the western half of the Old English dialect area Mercia.
Characteristics. The retention of the Old English rounded vowels /y:/ and /ø:/ which in the East had been unrounded to
/i:/ and /e:/ respectively.
EAST MIDLAND This is the dialect out of which the later standard developed. To be precise the standard arose out of the London dialect of the late Middle English period. Note that the London dialect naturally developed into what is called Cockney today while the standard became less and less characteristic of a certain area and finally (after the 19th century) became the sociolect which is termed Received Pronunciation.
Characteristics. In general those of the late embryonic Middle English standard.
The universities of Oxford and Cambridge were founded in 1167 and 1209 respectively, and general literacy continued to increase over the succeeding centuries, although books were still copied by hand and therefore very expensive. Over time, the commercial and political influence of the East Midlands and London ensured that these dialects prevailed ,and the other regional varieties came to be stigmatized as lacking social prestige and indicating a lack of education.
The universities of Oxford and Cambridge were founded in 1167 and 1209 respectively, and general literacy continued to increase over the succeeding centuries, although books were still copied by hand and therefore very expensive. Over time, the commercial and political influence of the East Midlands and London ensured that these dialects prevailed ,and the other regional varieties came to be stigmatized as lacking social prestige and indicating a lack of education.
It was also during this period when English was the language mainly of the uneducated peasantry that many of the grammatical complexities and inflections of Old English gradually disappeared. By the 14th Century, noun genders had almost completely died out, and adjectives, which once had up to 11 different inflections, were reduced to just two (for singular and plural) and often in practice just one, as in modern English. The pronounced stress, which in Old English was usually on the lexical root of a word, generally shifted towards the beginning of words, which further encouraged the gradual loss of suffixes that had begun after the Viking invasions, and many vowels developed into the common English unstressed “schwa” (like the “e” in taken, or the “i” in pencil). As inflections disappeared, word order became more important and, by the time of Chaucer, the modern English subject-verb-object word order had gradually become the norm, and as had the use of prepositions instead of verb inflections.
