A fundamental change in the structure of English took place during the 11th and 12th centuries – one without precedent in the history of the language, and without parallel thereafter. Grammatical relationships in Old English had been expressed chiefly by the use of inflectional endings. In Middle English, they came to be expressed (as they are today) chiefly by word order. Why did this change take place? Few subjects in the history of English have attracted so much speculation.
The decay of inflection
About one fact there is no doubt. There are clear signs during the Old English period of the decay of the inflectional system. The surviving texts suggest that the change started in the north of the country, and slowly spread south. Several of the old endings are still present in the 12th-century text of the Peterborough Chronicle opposite, but they are not used with much consistency, and they no longer seem to play an important role in conveying meaning.
But why did the Old English inflectional endings decay? The most obvious explanation is that it became increasingly difficult to hear them, because of the way words had come to be stressed during the evolution of the Germanic languages. The ancestor language of Germanic, Indo-European, had a “free” system of accentuation, in which the stress within a word moved according to intricate rules. In Germanic, this system changed, and most words came to carry the main stress on their first syllable. This is the system found throughout Old English. As always, there were exceptions – the ge-prefix, for example, is never stressed.
Having the main stress at the beginning of a word can readily give rise to an auditory problem at the end. This is especially so when there are several endings which are phonetically very similar, such as -en, -on, and -an. In rapid conversational speech it would have been difficult to distinguish them. The situation is not far removed from that which still obtains in Modern English, where people often make such forms as -ible and -able (visible, washable) or Belgian and Belgium sound the same. This ‘neutralization’ of vowel qualities undoubtedly affected the Old English system.
The contact situation
However, auditory confusion cannot be the sole reason. Other Germanic languages had a strong initial stress, too, yet they retained their inflectional system (as is still seen in modern German). Why was the change so much greater in English? Some scholars cite the Viking settlement as the decisive factor. During the period of the Danelaw, they argue, the contact between English and Scandinavian would have led to the emergence of a pidgin-like variety of speech between the two countries, and perhaps even eventually to a kind of creole which was used as a lingua franca. As with pidgins everywhere, there would have been a loss of word endings, and greater reliance on word order. Gradually, this pattern would have spread until it affected the whole of the East Midlands area – from which Standard English was eventually to emerge. At the very least, they conclude, this situation would have accelerated the process of inflectional decay – and may even have started it.
Whether such arguments are valid depends on how far we believe that the speakers of Old English and Old Norse were unable to understand each other at the time, and this is largely a matter of speculation. Perhaps there existed a considerable degree of mutual intelligibility, given that the two languages had diverged only a few hundred years before. The roots of many words were the same, and in the Icelandic sagas it is said that the Vikings and the English could understand each other. Whatever the case, we can tell from the surviving Middle English texts that the Danelaw was a much more progressive area, linguistically speaking, than the rest of the country. Change which began here affected southern areas later. Some form of Viking influence cannot easily be dismissed.
As inflections decayed, so the reliance on word order became critical, resulting in a grammatical system which is very similar to that found today. There is no sign in the Peterborough Chronicles extract of the Old English tendency to put the object before the verb, for example. The Subject-Verb-Object order, already a noticeable feature of Old English, has become firmly established by the beginning of the Middle English period.
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