The Middle English creole hypothesis is a proposal that Middle English 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 and Middle English, and English's status as one of the least structurally elaborated of the Germanic languages, have led some historical linguists to argue that the language underwent creolisation at around the 11th century, shortly after the Norman conquest of England. 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, including some basic words such as the words for uncle, niece, danger, trouble, cause; the frequent loss of Old English verb and adjective affixes 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 using the verb have (as in "she has eaten"), the use of of to express the genitive (as in French le livre de Jean), and constructions such as "it is me", "it is him" (compare modern French c'est moi, c'est lui); and English's complete loss of case and gender 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:
Loss of inflection is but the tip of the iceberg in terms of Germanic features that English has shed, complemented by many other losses unconnected with analyticity. Overall, a comparison with its [Germanic] sisters reveals English to be significantly less overspecified semantically and less complexified syntactically. ... I argue that a contact-based, external explanation provides a principled account for the relevant facts.
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 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 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 cognates 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 and English, however evidence supporting the influence of the Celtic languages on English is hampered by a lack of written sources.
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