Beyond Anglo-Norman: the lexical influence of Old French dialects on Middle English

Norman and Parisian French dialects. But what about other Old French dialects? Such exclusive focus on these dialectal titans restricts the view we have on the linguistic landscape in England and France during the 12th and 13th centuries, and moving beyond them to more peripheral Old French dialects helps to more fully detail the cultural and linguistic relationships between England and France. 

 

The focus of this project, undertaken during the final year of my undergraduate degree, was on lexical borrowings between the Old French of Champagne and Picardy and Middle English, identified through spelling variations, and what these borrowings reveal about cultural links between English and France. The methodology consisted of using the Middle English Dictionary (MED) to search for open-class words known to be of Old French origin and examining the variant forms given in each entry to identify possible orthographic features found in Champenois and Picard. These relevant forms formed a basis for searching the Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (LAEME) to establish the frequency of these forms, thus indicating the strength of the potential borrowing of an Old French word or feature. An examination of the context of texts in which a high concentration of dialectal forms were found was used to determine the cultural background that facilitated such transmission. 

 

The different source materials for the MED and LAEME resulted in a marked culling of forms to those found in both datasets, but the variant spellings given for those that remained proved ample. The analysis of the texts containing these variant spellings produced fewer results than expected; The majority of the manuscripts featured few words of note, with the exception of Arundel 57, which provided a glimpse into OF usage that was decidedly more varied than solely AN or CF. This lack of final data, in combination with the wide distribution of the lexical items across manuscripts about which not much is known, made it impossible to focus on a particular lexical source and examine the reasons behind lexical transmission. The possibility to undertake such research remains, with further extended examination required. 

This individual article from the Proceedings is published here.