The Middle English creole hypothesis is a proposal that

Middle English Middle English (abbreviated to ME) 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 pe ...

was a creole, which is usually defined as a language that develops during contact between two groups speaking different languages and that loses much of the grammatical elaboration of its source languages in the process. The vast differences between

Old English Old English ( or , or ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the Early Middle Ages. It developed from the languages brought to Great Britain by Anglo-S ...

and

, and English's status as one of the least structurally elaborated of the

Germanic languages The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European languages, Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania, and Southern Africa. The most widely spoke ...

, have led some historical linguists to argue that the language underwent creolisation at around the 11th century, shortly after the

Norman conquest of England The Norman Conquest (or the Conquest) was the 11th-century invasion and occupation of England by an army made up of thousands of Normans, Norman, French people, French, Flemish people, Flemish, and Bretons, Breton troops, all led by the Du ...

. Other linguists suggest that creolisation began earlier, during the Scandinavian incursions of the 9th and 10th centuries. Much of the debate over the Middle English creole hypothesis revolves around how terms like ''creole'' or ''creolisation'' should be defined. While there does not exist a consensus that Middle English should be classified as a creole, there does exist a consensus that Old English underwent fairly radical grammatical simplification in the process of evolving into Middle English, and that this evolution was due in large part to contact with speakers from other language groups.

Middle English as an Anglo-Norman creole

This hypothesis was first proposed by C.-J. Bailey and K. Maroldt in 1977, followed by Nicole Domingue and Patricia Poussa. These authors argued that Middle English was a creole that developed when the Anglo-Norman-speaking invaders learned Old English imperfectly and expanded their reduced English into a full language. Evidence cited in support of the hypothesis was the heavy admixture of Norman words into the English

lexicon A lexicon (plural: lexicons, rarely lexica) is the vocabulary of a language or branch of knowledge (such as nautical or medical). In linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes. The word ''lexicon'' derives from Greek word () ...

, including some basic words such as the words for uncle, niece, danger, trouble, cause; the frequent loss of Old English verb and adjective

affix In linguistics, an affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form. The main two categories are Morphological derivation, derivational and inflectional affixes. Derivational affixes, such as ''un-'', ''-ation' ...

es in favor of loans from Norman (e.g. ''enclosid'', ''inpacient'', ''disheritance''); a number of grammatical changes that appear to have been modeled after Norman, such as expression of the

perfect aspect The perfect tense or aspect ( abbreviated or ) is a verb form that indicates that an action or circumstance occurred earlier than the time under consideration, often focusing attention on the resulting state rather than on the occurrence itself. ...

using the verb ''have'' (as in "she has eaten"), the use of ''of'' to express the

genitive In grammar, the genitive case ( abbreviated ) is the grammatical case that marks a word, usually a noun, as modifying another word, also usually a noun—thus indicating an attributive relationship of one noun to the other noun. A genitive can ...

(as in French ), and constructions such as "it is me", "it is him" (compare modern French , ); and English's complete loss of case and

gender Gender is the range of social, psychological, cultural, and behavioral aspects of being a man (or boy), woman (or girl), or third gender. Although gender often corresponds to sex, a transgender person may identify with a gender other tha ...

markers on nouns.

Defining ''creole'' and ''creolisation''

Linguists' conception of what constitutes a creole has changed substantially in the years since Bailey & Maroldt's original proposal, and the question of whether Middle English is a French creole depends to some extent on how one defines the term ''creole''. Broadly speaking, two definitions of creole and creolisation are current in the linguistic literature: Middle English comes reasonably close to satisfying the three criteria that define McWhorter's creole prototype. For instance, by the end of the twelfth century, grammatical gender was all but lost in northern English dialects, and two centuries later it had disappeared even in the south. However Middle English did not lose all of Old English's noncompositional derivational morphology; for instance, Old English ''understandan'' → Middle English ''understanden'' → English ''understand''. Nevertheless, Middle English is highly simplified compared with Old English, suggesting, according to McWhorter, a contact-based explanation, though not necessarily contact with French:

Scandinavian influence

While they emphasised the influence of French, both Bailey & Maroldt and Poussa also discussed the possibility that it was contact between Old English speakers and the invading

Vikings Vikings were seafaring people originally from Scandinavia (present-day Denmark, Norway, and Sweden), who from the late 8th to the late 11th centuries raided, pirated, traded, and settled throughout parts of Europe.Roesdahl, pp. 9� ...

during the ninth and tenth centuries, that was responsible for much of the loss of Germanic inheritance, followed only later by a Norman French influence. According to this scenario, Middle English would be more appropriately described as an

Old Norse Old Norse, also referred to as Old Nordic or Old Scandinavian, was a stage of development of North Germanic languages, North Germanic dialects before their final divergence into separate Nordic languages. Old Norse was spoken by inhabitants ...

creole rather than a Norman French creole. A number of arguments have been advanced in support of the hypothesis that Scandinavian contact profoundly influenced the course of English's evolution prior to the Norman invasion: *Unlike the French elites, Scandinavians settled among the general population and often married Anglo-Saxon women. *Lexical borrowing from Old Norse, while not as extensive as later borrowings from Norman French, included many ''domestic'' content words (happy, knife, skirt, window, neck) as well as commonly-used words such as they, their, them, though, both, same, against. *Loss of grammatical gender in English appears to have occurred first in the north and east, the regions of greatest Scandinavian settlement. *The rapid loss of Old English verbal prefixes is attributed to the fact that Old Norse had already lost most of the Germanic prefixes, and so lacked

cognate In historical linguistics, cognates or lexical cognates are sets of words that have been inherited in direct descent from an etymological ancestor in a common parent language. Because language change can have radical effects on both the s ...

s for English prefixed verbs. McWhorter, in summarizing the evidence for Scandinavian influence, writes that "the evidence strongly suggests that extensive second-language acquisition by Scandinavians from the eighth century onwards simplified English grammar to a considerable extent". More specifically, the claim is that the inflectional and other losses in English resulted from Old Norse speakers' incomplete acquisition of English. Creolisation of English might have occurred due to interaction between

Common Brittonic Common Brittonic (; ; ), also known as British, Common Brythonic, or Proto-Brittonic, is a Celtic language historically spoken in Britain and Brittany from which evolved the later and modern Brittonic languages. It is a form of Insular Cel ...

and English, however evidence supporting the influence of the

Celtic languages The Celtic languages ( ) are a branch of the Indo-European language family, descended from the hypothetical Proto-Celtic language. The term "Celtic" was first used to describe this language group by Edward Lhuyd in 1707, following Paul-Yve ...

on English is hampered by a lack of written sources.

Middle English as a semi-creole

A number of linguists, e.g. John Holm, have argued that creolisation occurs along a cline, that is, that a language can be creolised to various degrees. Even if Middle English does not fully satisfy the criteria that would make it a creole, it has been argued that it might still be characterisable as a ''semi-creole''. A semi-creole is defined as a language that harbors symptoms of a break in transmission due to large-scale adult acquisition, without those symptoms being extreme enough to put it in the creole class. Such languages are often thought of as dialects of the lexifier language rather than as different languages. Recognized examples of semi-creoles include

Afrikaans Afrikaans is a West Germanic languages, West Germanic language spoken in South Africa, Namibia and to a lesser extent Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe and also Argentina where there is a group in Sarmiento, Chubut, Sarmiento that speaks the Pat ...

( Dutch as morphologically streamlined by contact with

Khoisan Khoisan ( ) or () is an Hypernymy and hyponymy, umbrella term for the various Indigenous peoples of Africa, indigenous peoples of Southern Africa who traditionally speak non-Bantu languages, combining the Khoekhoen and the San people, Sān peo ...

), Reunionnais French,

Lingala Lingala (or Ngala, Lingala: ) is a Bantu languages, Bantu language spoken in the northwest of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the northern half of the Republic of the Congo, in their capitals, Kinshasa and Brazzaville, and to a lesser de ...

, and Shaba Swahili. McWhorter argues that English is even more extreme than Afrikaans in having shed much of its Germanic content, and therefore that the case for describing English as a semi-creole is even stronger than for Afrikaans.

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