1. Medieval Heteroglossia
Middle English
Medieval Heteroglossia

2. Demise of Anglo-Saxon England
Accession of William the Conqueror, Christmas 1066
Beginning of two hundred years of French as the prestige dialect
Resulted in an imported aristocracy

3. Important Linguistic Consequences of French Hegemony
Borrowing of prestige and religious vocabulary
Imposition of feudalism on English countryside that limited movement, intensifying dialectal differences
Subjugation of Irish, Welsh, and Scots, limiting their possible impact on the history of English

4. What you need to know about Middle English:
Phonologically: voiced fricatives become phonemic; length remains phonemic in vowels; vowels of unstressed syllables universally reduced to [ə] or [ɨ].
Morphologically: steady loss of inflectional endings and reduction in cases.
Syntactically: word order becomes more rigid; Indefinite and definite articles begin to be used; periphrastic verb phrases begin to be used in place of grammatical mood.
Lexically: loanwords swamp the language from French, Latin, Norse.

5. Changes in Consonants Simplification of complex consonant clusters:
/h/ lost before liquids and nasals
‘hlāford’ becomes lōrd
‘hræfn’ becomes raven
‘hnesce’ becomes nesh ‘soft’ (still present in dialectal usage)
/w/ lost before rounded vowels
‘swa’ becomes so (swa pronounced with a low back rounded vowel)
‘hwæl’ becomes whale
May have been influenced by French phonotactics

6. Changes in Vowels Vowels in stressed syllables
Short vowels
/æ/ lowered and centralized to /a/
/y/ unrounded to /i/
Other short vowels left unchanged
Long vowels
/a:/ raised and rounded to /o:/ (had already happened in Northern dialects of Old English)
Old English diphthongs simplified

7. Changes in Quantity Old English long vowels were shortened when
followed by a double consonant, or
In the first syllable of a trisyllabic word
Short vowels were lengthened when
Followed by a consonant cluster beginning with a lateral or a nasal
In open syllables of disyllabic words

8. Morphological Changes
All unstressed syllables drifted to /ə/, thus
Morphological distinctions became increasingly difficult to maintain.
Strong/Weak distinctions in adjectival constructions were lost
Adaptation of Old Norse 3rd person plural pronouns to the English system.