Middle English

Middle English is an older type of the English language that was spoken after the Norman invasion in 1066 until the middle/late 1400s. It came from Old English after William the Conqueror came to England with his French nobles and stopped English from being taught in schools for a few hundred years. Over this time, English borrowed several French words.

Middle English
Englisch, Inglis, English
A page from Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales
Region	England, some parts of Wales, south east Scotland and Scottish burghs, to some extent Ireland
Era	developed into Early Modern English, Scots, and Yola and Fingallian in Ireland by the 16th century
Language family	Indo-European Germanic West Germanic North Sea Germanic Anglo-Frisian Anglic Middle English
Early forms:	Old English Middle English
Language codes
ISO 639-2	enm
ISO 639-3	enm
ISO 639-6	meng

In the 1470s, the Chancery Standard, a type of English spoken in London, started to become more common. This was partly because William Caxton brought the printing press to England in the 1470s. The type of English that people spoke in England between then and 1650 is called Early Modern English. There were many different dialects of Middle English.

Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales in Middle English.

Middle English Media

• 

  The dialects of Middle English c. 1300

Related pages

• Middle English literature
• Geoffrey Chaucer
• The Canterbury Tales
• Mirie it is while sumer ilast, the earliest non-religious song in the English language, dating to ca. 1250 AD.

Sources

• Brunner, Karl (1962) Abriss der mittelenglischen Grammatik; 5. Auflage. Tübingen: M. Niemeyer (1st ed. Halle (Saale): M. Niemeyer, 1938)
• Brunner, Karl (1963) An Outline of Middle English Grammar; translated by Grahame Johnston. Oxford: Blackwell