When Kings Spoke French & Peasants Built English
The Norman Conquest and the Birth of Modern English
Power Decides What Gets Written
FOLLOWING 1066, written English nearly vanished—not because people stopped speaking it, but because it stopped mattering to those who wrote history. French and Latin monopolized authority. English lived orally, transmitted by memory, work, and family.
This imbalance shaped what survived in archives—and what did not.
Trilingual England in Practice
Medieval England functioned across three linguistic lanes. Latin handled theology and record-keeping. French structured governance. English carried daily life. Rarely did these lanes intersect formally, but informally they collided constantly.
Language mixing happened in kitchens, markets, nurseries, and border towns—long before scribes admitted it.
Crisis as Catalyst
Plague and famine shattered old administrative structures. With fewer French-educated elites available, English speakers stepped into roles once denied to them. English became unavoidable. When it returned to official life, it brought centuries of borrowed vocabulary with it.
The result was Middle English—resilient, hybrid, and adaptable.
Why English Sounds the Way It Does
Pronunciation, spelling, and rhythm were shaped by imitation of elite accents and later standardisation. French influence altered stress patterns, while Scandinavian contact preserved harder consonants in rural speech. English pronunciation became a map of social aspiration.
A Language Built to Absorb
English did not survive by resisting influence—it survived by absorbing it. The Norman Conquest drowned English in prestige languages. Instead of dying, it learned to swim.
