Standard English

In the twenty-first century, scholars consider all of the above and more, including the rate of standardisation across different text-types such as administrative documents;[22][23][24][25] the role of the individual in spreading standardisation;[26][27] the influence of multilingual and mixed-language writing; the influence of the Book of Common Prayer;[28] standardisation of the wordstock;[29] evolution of technical registers;[30] standardisation of morphemes;[31] standardisation of letter-graphs,[32][33] and the partial standardisation of Older Scots.[34]

After the unification of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms by Alfred the Great and his successors, the West Saxon variety of Old English began to influence writing practices in other parts of England.  The first variety of English to be called a “standard literary language”[35] was the West Saxon variety of Old English.  

However, Kornexl[36] defines the classification of Late West Saxon Standard as rather constituting a set of orthographic norms than a standardised dialect, as there was no such thing as standardisation of Old English in the modern sense: Old English did not standardise in terms of reduction of variation, reduction of regional variation, selection of word-stock, standardisation of morphology or syntax, or use of one dialect for all written purposes everywhere.  

The Norman Conquest of 1066 then caused people to stop writing in Old English.

Following the changes brought about by the Norman Conquest of 1066, England became a trilingual society.  Literate people wrote in Medieval Latin and Anglo-Norman French more than they wrote in monolingual English.  In addition, a widely-used system developed which mixed several languages together, typically with Medieval Latin as the grammatical basis, adding in nouns, noun-modifiers, compound-nouns, verb-stems and -ing forms from Anglo-Norman French and Middle English.  This mixing of Medievel Latin, Anglo-Norman French and Middle English in a grammatically regular system is known to modern scholars[37][38][39] as ‘mixed-language’, and it became the later fourteenth and fifteenth-century norm for accounts, inventories, testaments and personal journals.

The mixed-language system was abandoned over the fifteenth century, and at different times in different places it became replaced by monolingual supralocal English, although it was not always a straightforward exchange.  For example, Alcolado-Carnicero[40] surveyed the London Mercers’ Livery Company Wardens’ Accounts and found that they switched back and forth for over seventy years between 1390 and 1464 before finally committing to monolingual English.

Individual scribes spent whole careers in the mixed-language stage, with no knowledge that monolingual Engish would be the eventual outcome and that it was in fact a stage of transition.  For much of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, writing in mixed-language was the professional norm in money-related text types, providing a conduit for the borrowing of Anglo-Norman vocabulary into English.

From the 1370s monolingual Middle English was used increasingly, mainly for local communication.  Up until the later fifteenth century it was characterised by great regional and spelling variation.  After the middle of the fifteenth century, supralocal monolingual varieties of English began to evolve for numerous pragmatic functions.[41]

Supralocalisation is where “dialect features with a limited geographical distribution are replaced by features with a wider distribution”.[42]

Over the later fifteenth century, individuals began to restrict their spelling ratios, selecting fewer variants.[27]

However each scribe made individual selections so that the pool of possible variants per feature still remained wide at the turn of the sixteenth century.[25]

Thus, the early stage of standardisation can be identified by reduction of grammatical and orthographical variants and loss of geographically-marked variants in the writing of individuals.

The rise of written monolingual English was due to the abandonment of Anglo-Norman French in the last quarter of the fourteenth century and first quarter of the fifteenth, with subsequent absorption into supralocal varieties of English of much of its wordstock and many of its written conventions.  Some of these conventions were to last, such as minimal spelling variation, and some were not, such as digraph <lx> and trigraph <aun>.[43]

Anglo-Norman was the variety of French that was widely used by the educated classes in late medieval England. It was used, for example, as the teaching language in grammar schools. For example, the Benedictine monk Ranulph Higden, who wrote the widely copied historical chronicle Polychronicon, remarks against the practice of other nations, English children learn Latin grammar in French.  Ingham[44] analysed how Anglo-Norman syntax and morphology written in Britain began to differ from Anglo-Norman syntax and morphology written on the Continent from the 1370s onwards, until the language fell out of use in Britain in the 1430s.

Ingham shows that after the last quarter of the fourteenth century Anglo-Norman written in England displayed the kind of grammatical levelling which occurs as the result of language acquired in adulthood, and deduces that the use of Anglo-Norman in England as a spoken vehicle for teaching in childhood must have ceased around the end of the fourteenth century.  Schipor[23] found that of the 7,070 Hampshire administrative (episcopal, municipal, manorial) documents she looked at written 1399-1525, Anglo-Norman ceased to be used after 1425.

The pragmatic function for which Anglo-Norman had been used – largely administering money – became replaced by monolingual English or Latin.  Wright[43] suggests that the reason for the abandonment of Anglo-Norman towards the end of the fourteenth century and consequent absorption of many of its written features into written English lay in the socioeconomic improvement of the poorer, monolingually English-speaking classes over that century.

When monolingual English replaced Anglo-Norman French, it took over its pragmatic functions too.  Stenroos,[25] surveying the Middle English Local Documents corpus containing 2,017 texts from 766 different locations around England written 1399-1525, found that language choice was conditioned by the readership or audience: if the text was aimed at professionals, then the text was written in Latin; if it was aimed at non-professionals, then the text was written in Anglo-Norman until the mid fifteenth century and either Latin or English thereafter.  Stenroos details the sort of more oral, less predictable texts that were aimed at non-professionals as correspondence, ordinances, oaths, conditions of obligation and occasional leases and sales.

The supralocal varieties of English which replaced Anglo-Norman in the late fifteenth century were still regional, but less so than fourteenth-century Middle English had been, particularly with regard to morphemes, closed-class words and spelling sequences.  For example, Thengs[22] showed urban-hopping of less regionally-marked features in texts from Cheshire and Staffordshire (‘urban-hopping’ refers to texts copied in cities being more standardised than those copied in smaller towns and villages, which contained more local dialect features); Fernández Cuesta[45] found a lower frequency of regionally-marked spellings in wills from urban York versus those from rural Swaledale; and Bergstrøm[24] found that texts from Cambridgewere less regionally marked than those from the surrounding Midlands and East Anglian areas.

However these late fifteenth and sixteenth-century supralocal varieties of English were not yet standardised.  Medieval Latin, Anglo-Norman and mixed-language set a precedent model, as Latin and French had long been conventionalised on the page and their range of variation was limited.  Supralocal varieties of English took on this uniformity by reducing more regionally-marked features, and permitting only one or two minor variants.

Ekwall[16] hypothesised that Standard English developed from the language of upper-class East Midland merchants who influenced speakers in the City of London.

By ‘language’, Ekwall stipulated just certain <a> graphs and <e> letter-graphs in stressed syllables, present plural suffix -e(n, present participle suffix -ing, and pronoun they, which he thought could not be East Saxon and so must be from eastern Anglian territory.  He therefore examined locative surnames in order to discover whether people bearing names originating from settlements in the East Midlands (in which he included East Anglia) migrated to London between the Norman Conquest of 1066 and 1360.  By this method, he found that most Londoners who bore surnames from elsewhere indicated an origin in London’s hinterland, not from East Anglia or the East Midlands.  Nevertheless he hypothesised that East Midlands upper-class speakers did affect the speech of the upper classes in London.  He thought that upper-class speech would have been influential, although he also suggested influence from the Danelaw in general.  Thus his dataset was very limited, by ‘standard’ he meant a few spellings and morphemes rather than a dialect per se, his data did not support migration from the East Midlands, and he made unsupported assumptions about the influence of the speech of the upper classes (details in Wright[51]).

Samuels[17] criticised Ekwall’s East Midlands hypothesis.

He shifted Ekwall’s hypothesis from the East to the Central Midlands, he classified late medieval London and other texts into Types I-IV, and he introduced the label ‘Chancery Standard’ to describe writing from the King’s Office of Chancery, which he claimed was the precursor of Standard English.  Samuels did not question Ekwall’s original assumption that there must have been a migration from somewhere north of London to account for certain <a> graphs and <e> letter-graphs in stressed syllables, present plural suffix -e(n, present participle suffix -ing, and pronoun they in fifteenth century London texts, but his work for the Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English did not support the possibility of an East Anglian or East Midland migration, and he replaced it by hypothesising a migration of people from the Central Midlands, although without historical evidence.  Like Ekwall, Samuels was not dogmatic and presented his work as preliminary.

Samuels[17] classified fifteenth century manuscripts into four Types.

These divisions have subsequently proved problematical, partly because Samuels did not specify exactly which manuscripts fall into which class, and partly because other scholars do not see inherent cohesiveness within each Type.  Peikola[52] examining Type 1, (‘Central Midland Standard’) spelling ratios in the orthography of 68 hands who wrote manuscripts of the Later Version of the Wycliffite Bible, concluded: “it is difficult to sustain a ‘grand unifying theory’ about Central Midland Standard”.

Thaisen[53] analysing the orthography of texts forming Type 2 found no consistent similarities between different scribes’ spelling choices and no obvious overlap of selection signalling incipient standardisation, concluding “it is time to lay the types to rest.”

Horobin[54] examining spelling in Type 3 texts reported “such variation warns us against viewing these types of London English as discrete … we must view Samuels’ typology as a linguistic continuum rather than as a series of discrete linguistic varieties”.

Samuels’s Type IV, dating after 1435, was labelled by Samuels ‘Chancery Standard’ because it was supposedly the dialect in which letters from the King’s Office of Chancery supposedly emanated.

John H. Fisher and his collaborators[55][56] asserted that the orthography of a selection of documents including Signet Letters of Henry V, copies of petitions sent to the Court of Chancery, and indentures now kept in The National Archives, constituted what he called “Chancery English”.  This orthographical practice was supposedly created by the government of Henry V, and was supposedly the precursor of Standard English.  However, this assertion attracted strong objections, such as those made by Davis,[57] Haskett,[58] Watts,[59] and Takeda.[60]  Takeda points out that “the language of the documents displays much variation and it is not clear from the collection what exactly ‘Chancery English’ is, linguistically” (for a careful critique of Fisher’s assertions, see Takeda.[60]) For a critique of Fisher’s philological work, see Benskin,[61] who calls his scholarship "uninformed not only philologically but historically".

Dodd[62][63][64] has shown that most letters written by scribes from the Office of Chancery were in Medieval Latin, and that petitions to the Crown shifted from Anglo-Norman French before c.1425 to monolingual English around the middle of the century.  Scribes working for the Crown wrote in Latin, but scribes working for individuals petitioning the king  – it is likely that individuals engaged professionals to write on their behalf, but who these scribes were is not usually known – wrote in French before the first third of the fifteenth century, and after that date in English.  As with mixed-language writing, there followed decades of switching back and forth before the Crown committed to writing in monolingual English, so that the first English royal letter of 1417 did not signal a wholesale switchover.

Latin was still the dominant language in the second half of the fifteenth century.  As Stenroos[25] puts it, “the main change was the reduction in the use of French, and the long-term development was towards more Latin, not less. On the whole, the output of government documents in English continued to be small compared to Latin.”