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Middle English (abbreviated to ME [1]) is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman Conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old English period.
Dialects can be defined as "sub-forms of languages which are, in general, mutually comprehensible." [1] English speakers from different countries and regions use a variety of different accents (systems of pronunciation) as well as various localized words and grammatical constructions.
The Middle English speech of the city of London in the late 14th century (essentially, the speech of Geoffrey Chaucer) is used as the standard Middle English dialect in teaching and when specifying "the" grammar or phonology of Middle English. It is this form that is described below, unless otherwise indicated.
Medieval dialect studies would now rely on the relative consistency of scribal translation into a scribe's own language, while developing techniques for discriminating source from scribe. Angus McIntosh , one of LALME's compilers, "observed that most copied Middle English texts were...in language that was dialectally homogeneous,", [ 6 ...
The core vocabulary is of Anglo-Saxon origin although many of the differences in the phonology, morphology and lexicon in the northern and southern dialects of Middle English have been traced to the linguistic influence in the North of the eighth- and ninth-century Viking invaders who first plundered, then conquered and settled in, large territories in Northumbria, Lincolnshire and East Anglia.
The English Dialect Dictionary Online (EDD Online), a database and software initiated by Manfred Markus at the University of Innsbruck, provided a computerised version of Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary. The work on the project has been going on since 2006. The third version is presently (summer 2023) available. [15]
Diagram of the changes in English vowels during the Great Vowel Shift. The Great Vowel Shift was a series of pronunciation changes in the vowels of the English language that took place primarily between the 1400s and 1600s [1] (the transition period from Middle English to Early Modern English), beginning in southern England and today having influenced effectively all dialects of English.
The West Saxon dialect, not the Anglian dialect, is the "standard" dialect described in typical reference works on Old English.) Moving forward in time, the two Middle English vowels /a/ and /aː/ correspond directly to the two vowels /a/ and /ɛː/, respectively, in the Early Modern English of c. 1600 AD (the time of Shakespeare). However ...