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question 2: History of Old and Middle English language and literature

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Did creolisation occur at any stage in the development of the English language? What are the limitations of the surviving evidence? (You may consider documentary evidence such as Bede's histories as well as place-name evidence and any other linguistic evidence). If you feel that these limitations preclude any definitive judgement, which cultural transitions might be seen to provide the most likely cases (e.g. the Viking incursions, Norman Conquest, and so on)? Finally can Modern English be considred to be---in any sense---a creolized language?

Until recently, many researchers have argued that Old English (OE) and Middle English (ME) are a result of creolisation that arose from contact with foreign languages (for example, Domingue (1977), Bailey-Maroldt (1977), Poussa (1982), and Milroy (1984)). Although differing in terms of the nature of this particular creolisation, they share the view that ME must be a creole because it exhibits a great deal of simplification (or regularisation) at all levels---phonology, morphology, and syntax---mainly involving 1) gross morphological simplification, 2) loss of some segmental phonological distinctions, and 3) a preference for a fixed SVO word order.

The creolisation hypothesis is not without criticism, however. Manfred Gorlach (1986) does not hold simplification to be the determining criteria, arguing that “unless simplification and language mixture are thought to be sufficient criteria for the definition of a creole…, then Middle English does not appear to be a creole” (331). Sarah Thomason and Terrance Kaufman (1988), on the other hand, posits that simplification is a result of internal, rather than external, motivations for language change.

In order to answer the question of whether creolisation occurs at any stage of English, we need to consider the following issues: 1) what happens linguistically and sociolinguistically during a typical creolisation process? 2) to what extent did OE and ME lend themselves to the typical creolisation process, and 3) what linguistic and sociolinguistic aspects can be used to support or deny the creolisation hypothesis? My present view is that no creolisation occurs in the history of the English language. If anything, it would be best described as creolisation-like simplification, as a result of internal linguistic change, rather than external change through language contact. My reasons will become apparent in the chronological discussion of the above-mentioned issues.

1. The Typical Creolisation Process

In order for there to be a creole, the following stages must be involved: languages in contact,

pidginisation, pidgin, creolisation, and creole. Diagrammatically,

languages in contact --> pidgin --> creole
via pidginisation via creolisation

Originally, the idea of pidginisation comes from the assumption that whenever adults and post-adolescents learn a new language, pidginisation takes place, and the following distinct---but related---processes are involved: reduction, admixture, and simplification. Reduction refers to the fact that in a pidginised version there is simply less of a language as compared to the form in which it is spoken by native speakers: smaller word stock, fewer syntactic structures, and narrower range of styles. Admixture, on the other hand, refers to interference or the transfer of features of pronunciation and grammatical and semantic structure from the native language to the new language---an obvious feature of second-language acquisition, and finally simplification involves regularization of irregularities, loss of redundancy, and transparent forms.

In those cases where there is contact between languages (one of which is a dominant language), pidginisation may also occur. A pidginised form of language may become important as a lingua franca---a means of communication between two or more groups because they have no language in common. The pidginised form of the original language may acquire stability, with widely shared norms of usage, and ultimately develops into a pidgin. A pidgin, then, is a stable language, without native speakers, which is the outcome of reduction, admixture, and simplification of some source languages. More often than not, a new pidginised language will end up shifting in the direction of the dominant language.

If passed on to subsequent generations who use it as their main or only language, the pidgin will expand to fulfill those linguistic functions it was not equal to in its earlier form. In this case, a creole comes into being. Thus, a creole is simply a pidgin which has acquired native speakers, but most crucially it is a pidgin which has undergone non-contact induced expansion, where the expansion process repairs the results of the reduction process that occur during pidginisation.

From the definition above, it can be concluded here that simplification in Old and Middle English, which many scholars use as the argument for English as a creole language, would be more accurately described as pidginisation that occurs during intense language contact. The real question then is not whether English is a creole but rather whether English undergoes pidginisation to start with. This paper will explore the creolisation hypothesis by looking for evidence of pidginisation. If there were no pidginisation, then we could rule out the creolisation hypothesis. But if there were pidginisation, then we could investigate the other steps that lead to the creolisation process.

The most plausible contact periods leading to pidginisation are Old English (during which the language of the Anglo-Saxons mixed with Celtic, with Latin, and with Scadinavians) and Middle English (during which Norman French was very influential). For these contacts, we have to look both at both linguistic and sociolinguistic grounds; the former deals with the level of contact: the more intense the contact, the more chances we have for pidginisation (and thus creolisation) to occur, because it will result in contact-induced changes at many levels of language, or even a typological change of language. The latter involves the basis of need for a reduced form of language with which to communicate on an ad hoc and instrumental basis, that is, how speakers in contact are socially related. The more need to communicate using a lingua franca, the more chance for pidginisation.

Here let me bring in a scale determining the level of language contact, which explains how much borrowing and influence the dominant language has on another language in contact. This scale is proposed by Thomason and Kaufman (1988) in Language Contact, Creolization and Genetic Linguistics:
1. Casual contact: lexical borrowing only.
Lexicon: Content words. For cultural and functional (rather than typological) reasons, non-basic vocabulary will be borrowed before basic vocabulary.
2. Slightly more intense contact: slight structural borrowing
Lexicon: Function words, conjunctions and various adverbial particles.
Structure: Minor phonological, syntactic and lexical semantic features. Phonological borrowing likely to be confined to the appearance of new phonemes with new phones, but only in loan words. Syntax restricted to new functions, and with no typological disruption.
3. More intense contact: slightly more structural borrowing.
Lexicon: Function words: adpositions. Derivational affixes may be abstracted from borrowed words and added to native vocabulary; inflections confined only to borrowed items. Personal and demonstrative pronoun, and low numerals likely to be borrowed.
Structural: Slightly less minor structural features than in stage 2. Phonological borrowing includes phonemicisation, even in native vocabulary, or previously allophonic alternations. Syntactic change of word order doesn’t occur, but a few aspects of such a change may be found.
4. Strong cultural pressure: moderate structural borrowing.
Structure: major features that cause relatively little typological change. Introduction of new distinctive features in contrastive sets present in native vocabulary; new syllable structure constraints. Extensive word order changes. Inflections attached to native words.
5. Very strong cultural pressure: heavy cultural borrowing
Structure: major structural features that cause significant typological disruption. Phonetic changes, loss of phonemic contrasts and morphophonemic rules. Changes in word structure rules, more extensive ordering changes in morphosyntax. (74-76)

With the scale above, it is possible to determine the intensity of the level of contact, and in turn the possibility of pidginisation, which requires at least the 4th degree on the scale, so that there are obvious structural changes and simplification in the direction of the dominant language.

Let us now turn to the linguistic and sociolinguistic situations in Britain and consider whether they are right for pidginisation to take place.

2. Linguistic and Sociolinguistic situations in the OE and ME periods

2.1 Old English Period

In this period, languages that come into contact include: Celtic, Latin, and Scandinavian (i.e Old

Norse).

2.1.1 Latin and Celtic

The first people in the history of English are the Celts. Native to the area, the Celts preserved their
own Celtic tongues, and did not adopt Latin in any significant numbers. If any Celts did learn Latin, they were most likely artisans and the few others who were forced into communication with the Romans.

Linday Allason-Jones (1989), quoted in David Graddol et al, puts it:

The majority of the native rural population [the Celts] will have continued to speak Celtic dialects as their first language, with enough dog-Latin to get by in trading and in any brushes they might have with officialdom…Contact with merchants and the army helped to spread the Latin language, while those who had had some education or close contacts with officials would have been fluent…Native Britons will have continued to speak Celtic at home. (English: History, Diversity and Change, 42)

Leith (1983) focuses on numerical strength, the extent of intermarriage, the degree of resistance encountered and the degree of centralization and military strength, along with the extent to which the invaders and invaded share an international written culture and religion. It is apparent that the Romans and the Celts did not share a religion (the latter being a barrier to the former). Furthermore it is known that the Romans were a highly centralized, culturally sophisticated and organized culture, possessing unprecedented military strength. The Celts, on the other hand, were dispersed by the Romans to the extreme areas of the country and lived in smaller clan structures. They were neither well organized administratively or militarily, nor did they have anything particularly culturally superior to the Romans.
Without doubt, all of the above are the reasons why the scant linguistic influence that there was in this period was largely in one direction, namely from the Romans to the Celts. Latin influence on English is mostly in the vocabulary area, suggesting the cultural sophistication of the Romans, for example, “street,” “wine,” “butter,” “pepper,” “cheese,” “silk,” “copper,” and “mile.” Other words involve religious terms such as “bishop,” “candle,” “creed,” “mass,” “monk,” and “priest.” Celtic words, on the other hand, are very few, involving place-names such as “Devon” “Thames”, “Avon” and “Dover.” Places names can be thought of as a symbol of superficial interaction, and in no way do they require any intimacy on the part of the contact groups.
In the case of Latin and Celtic, then, the contact situation yields prestige borrowing only in respect of word stock, and the lexical survivals from Latin suggest that Latin functions as language of military and administration and religion, reserved only for use in the towns and major settlements that the Romans themselves established. This contact situation, therefore, corresponds to stage 1 on Thomason’s and Kaufman’s scale, meaning that the contact is not intense enough to trigger any typological change and structural simplification. So, pidginisation was impossible at this stage of English.

2.1.2 Scandinavians

By contrast, the contact between OE and Old Norse (ON) was much more intimate. Significant numbers of Scandinavians came to settle in Britain at this time, most of them residing in the Danelaw area---i.e. in the North and East of England. The settlement is extensive in its scope and duration, lasting over 2 centuries.

The invaders settled as farmers and intermarried with the indigenous English, adopting their customs. These people seemed to assimilate, adapting themselves on the whole to the English way of life. Considering that the Norse were settlers in Britain, there was no need for the interim language used to communicate with the Anglo-Saxons. What was needed was a language that was equal to all communicative functions, not for ad hoc or instrumental purposes, like a pidgin, and this is not impossible to imagine now that OE and ON are mutually intelligible. As Matthew Townend (2002), who in the attempt to determine the degree of intelligibility between the two languages substituted cognate sounds and words in Scandinavian place names of Old English, convincingly argues:

Norse speakers recognised and understood the words they heard in the place-names used by their English neighbours. Only where no cognate word existed did they understandably encounter difficulties. Otherwise the substitutions show that they were able to make all the correct phonemic correspondences, covering the whole repertoire of major phonological divergences between Norse and English, and so there are few grounds for believing that other cognate words need have caused problems of intelligibility. (67-68)

With a high degree of mutual intelligibility, there is no need for dramatic reduction on communicative grounds that would otherwise trigger pidginisation.
Linguistically speaking, characters of Scandinavian linguistic impacts include basic, everyday words, such as “birth,” “egg,” “guess,” “root,” “scale,” “seat,”
“sister,” and “sky.” Syntactic borrowings are seen in pronouns, such as “they,” “them,” and “their,” prepositions in “till” and “for”, and in the verb “are.” Phonological changes involve the non-palatalised /sk/, as in “sky” and “skill.” Place names also survive, such as “Grimsby,” “Whitby,” “Derby,” “Althorpe,” “Linthorpe,” and “Langthwaite.”

Although the influence of the Scandinavian contact was extensive (corresponding roughly to stage 2 or even 3 on Thomason’s and Kaufman’s scale), it was not to the degree that there is a typological change in the structure of Old English. Thomason and Kaufman (1988) themselves argue “Norse influence on English was pervasive in the sense that its results are found in all parts of the language; but it was not deep, except in the lexicon…What Norse did was to add a few subtleties of meaning and a large number of new ways of saying old things, often by replacing an English item of similar but not identical sound” (302-303). Owing to all the reasons above, pidginisation did not occur during this stage of English.
2.2 Middle English Period

In this period, the only possible contact-induced creolisation comes from French. Considerable numbers of Normans and Frenchman came to England in the years after the conquest and settled side by side with the English. French was the language of the court and English of the people. There may have been a diglossic situation, with French as the high language and English as the low language. For two hundred years after the Norman Conquest, French remained the language of the upper class in England, and the members of the upper classes may have tried to acquire some knowledge of English in order to converse with laypeople. The language of the lower class remained English, and we can assume that a lowly Norman solider marrying an English girl would switch to English as his everyday language. Eventually through intermarriage and association with the ruling class, a lot of people of English extraction recognized the prestige of speaking French and began to use it. We can say then that facility with French was founded not on an ethic but on a class basis. Knowledge of French could be found amongst the middle class. For example, knights and tradesman, clerks, stewards, and bailiffs also spoke French, probably because various transactions and services are conducted in the language. However, it must be stressed that speakers of French amongst the non-nobility were undoubtedly in a small minority. Compared to the Scandinavian invaders, French was a prestige language, while Old Norse was not. As long as England remained in possession of lands on the continent and as long as the English nobility was united with its continental relations by tiers of property, kinship and business, there was a real need to continue using French among the governing class in England. Sir Walter Scott exhibits this fact in Ivanhoe:
At court, and in the castles of the great nobles, where the pomp and state of a court were emulated, Normal-French was the only language employed; in courts of law, the pleadings and judgements were delivered in the same tongue. In short, French was the language of honour, of chivalry, and even of justice, while the far more manly and expressive Anglo-Saxon was abandoned to the use of rustics and hinds, who knew no other. (quoted in Graddol et al, 120)

Middle English saw bitter rivalry between the English and the French, and by the last half of the fourteenth century English became the dominant language again, with the Statute of Pleading in 1362 decreeing that law-suits be in English. On the social grounds, then, pidginisation is very unlikely; two languages in contact are used on a class basis and in a different social context.

On the linguistic side, French loaned words are clear indicators of the higher social status of the language, including such words as “beef,” “mutton,” “pork,” “venison,” and “veal,” as opposed to the corresponding Anglo-Saxon terms such as “cow,” “sheep,” “pig,” “deer,” and “calf.” While “smith” and “baker” are Old Englishprofessions, “butcher,” “barber,” “carpenter,” “draper,” “grocer,” and “tailor” are all adopted from French. While the core family relationships like “mother,” “father,” “sister,” “brother,” and “daughter” are all English, non-core family relationships are from French, such as “uncle,” “aunt,” “cousin,” “nephew,” and “niece.” Moreover, although in ME new phonemes emerged such as /v/ and /z/, they are already allophones in OE, and English never adopts nasalized, round vowels /y/ from French. So, the contact with French corresponds only to stage 2 on the scale, thereby not sufficient for pidginisation to take place.

3. Creolisation Hypothesis Explained
If Celtic, Scandinavian, and French do not cause pidginisation, then how do we
explain the regularization (simplification) of linguistic forms in ME, so that ME looks like a creole (i.e. no or little morphology, simplified word order, no inflections on verbs, and so on). For example, all the nominal case endings are gone, except for the genitive cases, and so are grammatical genders. The dual person in the pronoun system is lost, and some strong verbs become weak, and the determiner system crumbles. Finally, ME shows a considerable degree of typological change in word order---to SVO.
I would argue here that Middle English does not really lose grammatical markers because of language contact, and certainly the regularisation we witness does not reach the extent displayed by a pidgin. All the simplified features can be ascribed to internal language change (natural change within the language). The change from a synthetic to an analytic language is certainly an internal change, in which the major stress on a word, which in Indo-European could fall on any syllable, came to be fixed on the stem. This means that attention was drawn away from the end of the word, ultimately leading to the obscuring, and eventual loss, of inflectional endings, causing English to become reliant on word order to signal the basic grammatical role of a noun phrase. Moreover, this typological change already began in the shift from Indo-European to Germanic, as Orrin Robinson (1992) puts it: “Development in all the Germanic languages tended to increase the number of verbs found in non-final position…the basic development can be characterized, then, as one from SOV to SVO…The different Germanic languages have carried out this development at different rates. English and the Scandinavian have gone the farthest…” (Old English and Its Closest Relatives, 165-166).
Other kinds of simplification/regularisation can also be discussed in terms of internal change, as
follows:

-in cases of nouns, although ME has lost much of the inflections for cases, cases are still in the system, indicated by word order, rather than by morphology. Besides the genitive case is still in use and clearly marked. In fact, in OE, almost all the nominal inflections are indistinctive, thus serving little or no functions. For example, in weak nouns, there were only five endings for altogether ten morphological categories, and in strong nouns, there are only six distinctive endings for ten grammatical categories. So, with inflectional endings becoming ornamental, they will naturally be dispensed with by native speakers.
-in cases of pronouns, although the dual person is lost, ME still retains gender and cases
-in cases of verbs, instead of getting rid of the tense and aspect systems as a creole does, ME increasingly expands the tense system, to include progressive and perfective aspects, and even the passive voice. My hypothesis above is confirmed by Cynthia Allen (1997), who argues that
syncretism [i.e. reductions] of forms was already well advanced in OE before contact with the Scandinavians or the French could have been a significant factor. This sort of syncretism is of the utmost importance in the loss of category distinction because when syncretism of form accumulates to the point where two categories are distinguished only by a few forms, the category distinction is difficult to maintain. For example, the nominative-accusative distinction was already imperiled by the late OE stage and likely to be lost even without foreign contact. Furthermore, the case-marking inflections were so syncretistic that it would only take a little bit in the way of phonological or analogical changes to alter the system drastically. (67)

Finally, considering such early texts written before Scandinavian settlement (i.e. texts dated before 900), such as the Leiden Riddle, we see the first signs of inflectional attrition by the loss of final nasals (i.e. final /n/), usually a characteristic attributed to Scandinavian influence. The fact that we see the loss of /n/ means that the reduction of forms was in progress even before the Scandinavian influence. So, we can say that language contact did not by any means lead to the loss of inflections, let alone pidginisation.
Summarising, in this paper I explore the creolisation hypothesis---more accurately the pidginisation hypothesis. I argue on the linguistic and sociolinguistic grounds that during the course of English, although in contact with many other languages, either through migration, invasion, colonization, or cultural or economic domination, there is no stage in which pidginisation is likely to occur. The ultimate typological change and other minor changes in English are natural internal language change.

Works Cited

Allen, Cynthia. “Middle English Case Loss and the ‘Creolization’ Hypothesis.” English
Language and Linguistics. 1(1) 63-89, 1997.

Gorlach, Manfred. Middle English--A Creole? Linguistics Across Historical and
Geographical Boundaries: In Honor of Jacek Fisiak on the Occasion of His Fiftieth Birthday, ed. Dieter Kastovsky and Aleksander Szwedek. Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter, 1986. 329-344.

Graddol David, Leith Dick, and Swann Joan. English: History, Diversity, and Change. New York,
Routledge, 1996.

Leith, Dick. A Social History of English. New York, Routledge, 1983.

Orrin, Robinson. Old English and Its Closest Relatives. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1992.

Thomason, Sara and Kaufman Terrence. Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics.
Berkley: University of California Press, 1988.

Townend, Matthew. Language and History in Viking Age England: Linguistic Relations between Speakers
of Old Norse and Old English. Belgium: Brepols, 2002.

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