This study reassesses whether the contact influence of French on Middle English should continue to be conceptualised essentially as high-status prestige borrowing. French-origin items were found to constitute an average of 27% of the specific lexis of six occupational domains collected in the Bilingual Thesaurus of Mediaeval English Occupations (Sylvester, Marcus & Ingham 2017), such as trade, building and farming. Corresponding figures for Scandinavian and Dutch loans were far lower. For French to have permeated the lexis of these domains so extensively, speakers of French must have interacted significantly with English users in such occupations. Contact with French evidently exerted influence not only on the language of social elite pursuits, but also on that of the technology relating to everyday occupations.
Baugh, Albert and Thomas Cable. 2002. A History of the English Language. 5th edn. London: Routledge.
Berndt, Rolf. 1972. The Period of the Final Decline of French in Medieval England (14th and Early 15th Centuries). Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 20. 341–69.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1979. La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement. Paris: Editions de Minuit.
Brand, Paul. 2000. The languages of the law in later medieval England. In David Trotter (ed.), Multilingualism in later medieval England, 63–76. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer.
Burnley, David. 1992. The history of the English language: a source book. London: Longman.
Dekeyser, Xavier. 1986. Romance loans in Middle English: A re-assessment. In Dieter Kastovsky & Aleksander Szwedek (eds.), Linguistics across Historical and Geographical Boundaries, 253–66. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
.
Durkin, Philip. 2014. Borrowed words. OUP.
.
Fillmore, Charles. 1968. The Case For Case. In Emmon Bach and Robert Harms (eds.), Universals in Linguistic Theory, 1–88. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, NewYork.
HTOED: Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. OED Online. Oxford University Press.
Hüllen, Werner. 1999. English Dictionaries 800–1700: The Topical Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hunt, Tony. 1997. Anglo-Norman medecine. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer.
Hunt, Tony. 2008. Anglo-Norman and the loss of Normandy. In Florence Bourgne, Leo Carruthers & Arlette Sancery (eds.) Un espace colonial et ses avatars, 141–151. Paris: PUPS.
Ingham, Richard. 2006. The status of French in medieval England: Evidence from the use of object pronoun syntax. Vox Romanica 65. 1–22.
Ingham, Richard. 2012. The transmission of Anglo-Norman: language history and language acquisition. The Language Faculty and Beyond Research monograph series, no. 9. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Ingham, Richard. 2016. Middle English borrowing from French: nouns and verbs of inter-personal cognition in the Early South English Legendary. In Carolyn Collette & Thelma Fenster (eds.), French in Medieval England: Networks, Exchanges, Collaborations, Essays in Honour of Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, 128–139. Woodbridge: Boydell.
Jackendoff, Ray. 1972. Semantic interpretation in generative grammar. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Kowaleski, Maryanne. 2007. ‘Alien’ Encounters in the Maritime World of Medieval England. Medieval Encounters 13. 96–121.
.
Kastovsky, Dieter. 2006. Vocabulary. In David Denison and Richard Hogg (eds.), A History of the English Language, 199–270. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kay, Christian J.1984. The Historical Thesaurus of English. In Reinhard Hartmann (ed.), LEXeter ’83 Proceedings, 87–90. Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.
Kay, Christian, Irene Wotherspoon & Louise Sylvester. 2001. One Thesaurus Leads to Another: TOE, HTE, TME. In Christian Kay & Louise Sylvester (eds.), Lexis and Texts in Early English: Studies Presented to Jane Roberts, 173–185. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Lass, Roger. 1987. The Shape of English: Structure and History. London: Dent.
Leith, R. 1997. A social history of English. London: Routledge.
Lusignan, Serge. 2009. French Language in Contact with English: Social Context and Linguistic Change (mid-13th-14th Centuries). In Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (ed.), Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: The French of England, c. 1100 – c.1500, 19–30. York Medieval Press.
.
Matras, Yaron. 2009. Language Contact. Cambridge: CUP.
.
Norman Dictionary. In Stewart Gregory & David Trotter (eds.), De mot en mot: Essays in Honour of William Rothwell, 127–146. Cardiff: MHRA/ University of Wales Press.
Prins, Anton. 1941. On the Loss and Substitution of Words in Middle English, Neophilologus 26. 280–298 and 27. 49–59.
.
Rothwell, William. 1991. The Missing Link in English Etymology: Anglo-French. Medium Aevum 60. 173–96.
.
Rothwell, William. 1998. Arrivals and Departures: The Adoption of French Terminology into Middle English. English Studies 79. 144–65.
Rothwell, William. 2010. ‘Husbonderie’ and ‘Manaungerie’ in later medieval England: A tale of two Walters. In Richard Ingham (ed.), The Anglo-Norman Language and Its Contexts, 44–51. Woodbridge: Boydell.
Samuels, Michael. 1972. Linguistic evolution, with special reference to English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
.
Samuels, Michael. 1987. The status of the functional approach. In Willem Koopman, Fredrike van der Leek, Olga Fischer & Roger Eaton (eds.), Explanation and Linguistic Change, 239–250. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Serjeantson, Michael. 1935. A history of foreign words in English. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.
Short, Ian. 2009. L’Anglo-normand au siècle de Chaucer: un regain de statistiques. In Claire Kappler & Suzanne Thiolier-Méjean (eds.), Le plurilinguisme au Moyen Age: Orient/Occident, 67–77. Paris: Harmattan.
Thomason, Sarah. & Terence Kaufman. 1988. Language contact, creolisation, and genetic linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Trotter, David. 2003a. Not as Eccentric as It Looks: Anglo-French and French French. Forum for Modern Language Studies 39. 427–438.
Trotter, David. 2003b. Oceano vox: You Never Know Where a Ship Comes From. On Multi-lingualism and Language-mixing in Medieval Britain. In Kurt Braunmüller & Gisela Ferraresi (eds.), Aspects of Multilingualism in European Language History, 15–33. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Wilson, Richard. 1943. English and French in England 1100–1300. History 28. 37–60.
Cited by (4)
Cited by four other publications
Pons-Sanz, Sara M. & Louise Sylvester
2023. Introduction. In Medieval English in a Multilingual Context [New Approaches to English Historical Linguistics, ], ► pp. 1 ff.
Marcus, Imogen
2022. A Comparative Investigation of Anaphoric Reference Devices in Anglo-Norman and Middle English Personal Letters. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 57:1 ► pp. 225 ff.
Ingham, Richard P., Louise Sylvester & Imogen Marcus
2021. Lone other-language items in later medieval texts. Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 7:2 ► pp. 179 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 september 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.