The Middle English Creole Hypothesis
Or how those bloody Normans screwed up our language
Are you an English-speaking monoglot like me? Feel faintly ashamed that you can only speak the one language? Well buckle up buttercup because I’ve got some bad news for you. That one, single language you speak?
It’s not even a proper language.
It’s all about the Middle English creole hypothesis. Now as the name suggests, this is a hypothesis rather than a universally accepted theory, but when I first encountered it, its logic was so compelling that I was immediately sold. And crushed, given that this was circa 2017 and I was already suffering an existential crisis of self-doubt due to Brexit. (In my day job, I was having three-day workshops every six weeks with a bunch of Europeans, and at the start of each workshop they would ask me, “So, what mad things has your country done now?” And I’d be like, “Our Prime Minister has compared the French President to a Nazi prison camp guard giving punishment beatings to inmates”.)
Anyhow, the hypothesis…
First we have to talk about what a creole, is, and contrary to what you might think, creole is not a particular language. It is instead a type of language (of which Haitian Creole, often simply called Creole, is the most famous, which is from where the confusion arises). But to understand what a creole is, we have to talk about pidgins.
A pidgin is a simple, makeshift, workmanlike language developed from bits and pieces of other languages to enable communication between people who don’t have a language in common. In medieval times, trade tongues such as Sabir developed around the Mediterranean (and are the inspiration behind D&D’s “common”). In later times, pidgins were developed by enslaved peoples taken from across West Africa to the West Indies.
A pidgin isn’t intended as a full, rich language. It serves a purpose, and that purpose isn’t poetry. But sometimes, children will grow up with a pidgin as their native tongue, and with the innate, hardwired language ability of children will then turn that pidgin into a full language, and that language is a creole.
A creole language, or simply creole, is a stable natural language that develops from the process of different languages simplifying and mixing into a new form (often a pidgin), and then that form expanding and elaborating into a full-fledged language with native speakers, all within a fairly brief period.
So Creoles occupy a middle point on the language spectrum, in between anciently-evolved languages like German or Japanese at one end, and fully artificial, invented languages like Esperanto or Klingon at the other.
But what, you might be asking, does this have to do with English?
Well, have you ever pondered on the fact that English has very few of the “twiddly bits” (cases, gender etc.) that other languages are rich in? I’ll give you an example.
In English, the word vegan is both an adjective and a noun. I am a vegan (noun). I eat vegan food (adjective). Swedish has adopted vegan (pronounced “veeGUN”) as a loan word, but because Swedish has twiddly bits, there the noun is “vegan” and the adjective is “vegansk” (except when it’s “veganstk”, for reasons I wasn’t quite able to pin down).
Other languages encode meaning into their structure. By contrast, English relies on context and word order. But why? How did it get this way? If English, German, and Dutch are cousins, why do they have the formal, structural complexity that English lacks?
Well let’s move onto the generally accepted story of English. English started out as Old English (a.k.a. Anglo-Saxon) which was a Germanic language with all the twiddly bits.
Then the Normans invaded. These were French-speaking Vikings, who thought of themselves as French. For more than two centuries there were only two official languages in England: French and Latin. English (Old English) was pretty much an oral, non-written, underground language spoken only by peasants.
But then, two hundred and fifty or so years in, the Normans found themselves at war with the French, and it suddenly suited them to identify not as French but as English (aided by the fact that the French mocked their Norman dialect of French). So they switched to speaking English.
Except that the language they were now speaking was not Old English, but Middle English. And this was a very different, much simpler language. After two and a half centuries as an underground language spoken only by illiterate peasants, English had lost its twiddly bits.
That’s the mainstream explanation.
But let’s just take a step back and think how incredibly classist that explanation is.
Essentially, it’s saying that the stupid, illiterate peasants forgot how to speak their own language. But this was a language that had been developed in the first place by illiterate, nomadic barbarians. And hell, languages like Welsh and Irish were illegal for lot longer than English and while many Welsh and Irish people sadly stopped speaking their languages, those that continued to use them didn’t forget how to speak them. It’s an incredibly snobby attitude, rooted in the prejudice that upper class people speak a more correct version of a language than lower class people.
The Middle English creole hypothesis has a simpler, more logical, less classist explanation, which is that two hundred and fifty years after 1066, the Saxon peasants were likely still speaking Old English, but their Norman lords had never actually bothered to learn the language. Instead, when they wanted to shout instructions at their serfs they spoke a mish-mash of French words, those English words they had learned, and either a bastardised French syntax or no real syntax at all.
In other words, the Norman lords were speaking a pidgin, and when they decided to start speaking “English” it wasn’t actual (Old) English that they started speaking, but their crude pidgin. And just as happened in Wales and Ireland, and had earlier happened when the Saxons invaded Celtic Britain, the language used by the ruling class (the French-English pidgin) replaced the language used by the subject class (Old English).
And so the pidgin became a Creole that we now term Middle English, and which gave rise to our modern English.
The language of Shakespeare.
The lingua franca of the twenty-first century.
Not a proper language.
I feel robbed.
Bloody Normans.
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