Modern English doesn’t come from “Old English”
And what it would look like if it did
The history of the English language, as it’s usually presented, is pretty straightforward:
First, there was Old English, which was spoken for hundreds of years, giving birth to lovely poetry like Beowulf, until those pesky Normans came along.
Then, with the help of French and Old Norse, Old English gradually developed into Middle English. Then, after a few hundred years of more lovely poetry like The Canterbury Tales, the vowels played a game of musical chairs, the printing press was introduced, and Middle English transformed into Modern English, just in time for Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, Hemingway, and, eventually, you and me.
In this story, one generation a thousand years ago spoke Old English, passed it down to their kids, who passed it down to theirs, and so on through the ages, the language changing a little bit with each generation.
That overall story is true, but there’s a wrinkle: that straight line of descent which it describes never existed. In fact, Modern English doesn’t descend from any single Old English dialect.
What we think of as Modern English was actually formed from a mixture of dialects in the Midlands and East Anglia, and in the great churn that was medieval and early modern London. The dialect of Old English you learn in textbooks, however, is a different dialect altogether, one conventionally called West Saxon.1
What’s more, we can prove this even without knowing anything about the history of England. Merely by comparing textbook (West Saxon) Old English with Modern English, we can prove that there’s no way for the one to have developed into the other.
We can make this conclusion because, left to their own devices, a language’s sounds change in perfectly regular ways, at least over the long run.2
In other words, absent dialect mixing, sound X will change into sound Y wherever it appears in a language. But if we take Old English words and apply sound changes to them to fast-forward time all the way to Modern English, there’s no way to derive all the word forms that Modern English actually has.
In other words, Modern English is full of irregular and inconsistent developments. But what else would we expect from the twists and turns that make up the history of England?
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The secret history of the English language
To understand why Modern English doesn’t map cleanly onto any one dialect of Old English, we need first to understand the nature of Old English dialects, and that requires a detour into history.
When the Anglo-Saxons migrated to the island of Great Britain over the course of the 5th century AD, they spoke not one single language, but a collection of related Germanic dialects.
As they settled the land which would become England, some of these old divisions may have disappeared. But others surely emerged as people spread out and came to speak more like their neighbours and less like those living farther away.
During the early centuries of Anglo-Saxon presence in England, rule was divided among different kingdoms, large and small.
This period, from the fifth to the eighth century, is known as the Heptarchy, from the Greek for ‘Rule of Seven’. Of the seven kingdoms, the most politically important were Northumbria, East Anglia, Mercia, and Wessex.
They were joined by the three smaller kingdoms of Sussex, Essex, and Kent, but by the end of the Heptarchy period, these smaller kingdoms had been absorbed by one or another of the big four: Northumbria, East Anglia, Mercia, and Wessex (a worn-down form of the Old English Westseaxe, which means ‘West Saxons’).
Over this period, the originally pagan Anglo-Saxons gradually converted to Christianity, and with Christianity came literacy,3 albeit only among a small slice of the population.
By the time that Old English started being written in earnest in the late 7th century, we can identify four main dialect groupings: West Saxon, Mercian, Northumbrian, and Kentish.
Three of these dialects were associated with powerful kingdoms, and the fourth, Kentish, was strongly associated with Canterbury, which was politically important as the centre of English Christianity.
The balance of power between the four remaining English kingdoms was thrown off by the arrival of the Vikings, Danish and Norwegian raiders, who began their attacks on England in the late 8th century.
By the mid-9th century, these raids had intensified into a full-scale invasion. Northumbria fell to the Danes in 867, and East Anglia fell just a few short years later in 869. Mercia lost much of its territory to this invasion as well and was reduced to a rump state by 877.
Only Wessex managed to resist, and, under the reign of Alfred the Great (r. 871–899), managed to turn the tide against the Danes. Through the military conquests of Alfred’s successors, Wessex gradually recovered territory which had previously fallen to the Danes, and incorporated the remnant of Mercia, creating, for the first time, a single monarchy ruling over all England in AD 927.
The ascendancy of Wessex in these later years of Anglo-Saxon England, coupled with the destruction that was visited on the other kingdoms, had implications for the English language: since political power was concentrated in Wessex, it was varieties of the West Saxon dialect which came to be used in writing.4
This writing, however, didn’t quite use a standard form of the language, with a single agreed-upon system of spelling, as we have in Modern English.
Rather, there was variation in how things were spelled (sometimes even on a single page!) and probably pronounced, but that variation existed within certain parameters.
So basically, if we squint a bit, we can talk about there having been a single, West Saxon form of the language, even though any given text might diverge from this idealized form a bit.
However, as I mentioned earlier, there were other dialects: we have some texts in Mercian, Northumbrian, and Kentish, although even within the texts that we assign to each of these dialects, there is some variation.
We know the phonetic features associated with each of these dialects, and none of them easily maps onto Modern English — trust me on this for now. We’ll explore the details soon.
Instead, Modern English must descend from a mixture of Old English dialects, some of which were never written down. The reason for this has to do with political power: the dialect that had the highest prestige in the late Anglo-Saxon period was West Saxon because the royal court was based in Wessex. But that court was toppled by the arrival of the Normans and replaced by a court based in London.
London is a special place from the point of view of Old English dialects, since it sits right on the border of three dialect zones: the West Saxon, the Mercian, and the Kentish. And, to top it off, London was like a magnet for migration in the later Middle Ages, especially after the Black Death. So the conditions were as ripe as they’d ever be for dialects to mix.
But the later Middle Ages were a period of great diversity in how English was spoken and written. In fact, the written language of the period 1100–1450, which we call Middle English, is the most diverse of all the periods in the history of English, lacking even the limited degree of standardization that we saw in the Old English period.
This period of flourishing diversity gradually came to an end with the introduction of the printing press and the more effective centralization of royal power in London. What we call Standard Modern English (1450–today) is the result of this centralization and emerging standardization. And it emerged out of the dialects spoken in and around London.
That’s not to say that Modern English lacks dialect diversity. Far from it. But the diversity in Modern English dialects is generally not written down, since there’s an acknowledged written standard, namely the form of English you’re reading now.5
Now that the history lesson is out of the way, let’s take a look at the big differences between Old English as we typically study it in the West Saxon dialect and the unwritten form of the language that gave rise to Modern English as we know it today.
The weirdness of West Saxon
Those of you who have read some Old English will no doubt have remarked that the experience is a peculiar combination of strangeness and familiarity. If not, you’re about to. Here’s a sample of Old English prose, written in the West Saxon dialect:
We gecygað þinne naman, þone þe soðlice heriað ealle gesceafta and ealle niwelnyssa fyr and hagol, snaw and ceald is, windas and stormas, þe þin word gefyllað.
‘We will show forth Thy name, Thee whom verily praise all creatures and all deeps, fire and hail, snow and cold ice, winds and storms, which fulfil Thy word.’
(Ælfric of Eynsham, Lives of Saints, The Forty Soldiers; tr. Skeat)
Even if you’ve never read any Old English before, you’ll recognize some familiar forms here: naman ‘name’, fyr ‘fire’, snaw ‘snow’, windas ‘winds’, stormas ‘storms’, and word ‘word.’
Their pronunciation may have changed over the years, but the words are easily recognizable from their written forms.
I’d like to draw your attention to two others, which may be slightly less recognizable in their written forms: ealle ‘all’ and especially ceald ‘cold’. But the spelling alone doesn’t show you the biggest difference: if you listen to the audio, you’ll hear that ceald is pronounced with a ch sound at the start.6
This is one of the major differences between the West Saxon dialect of Old English and the dialect(s) ancestral to Modern English. If Modern English descended from West Saxon, we’d pronounce all like the name Al, and we’d say cold as chald, with that same a vowel sound as in Al.
For these words, Modern English descends from a form more like the written Mercian dialect, where we see written forms like all and cald. The c in Mercian cald makes a k sound rather than a ch sound.
By the way, the Mercian dialect of Old English is the one Tolkien used for the speech of the men of Rohan in Lord of the Rings.
If we had to choose a single Old English dialect that most closely matches Modern English, it would have to be Mercian: this makes sense, as London was on the border of the Mercian dialect area in Old English times, and London had an influx of migration from East Anglia, a region whose dialect in Middle English (called the East Midlands dialect) inherited characteristics of Mercian Old English, including forms like all and cald. It also inherited lots of Scandinavian characteristics due to its time under Danish rule, but that’s another story.
Another feature of West Saxon that didn’t make it into Modern English is its verb conjugation. Most dialects of Old English had a form for the third person singular present tense of the verb (in other words, corresponding to the Modern English -s in he/she/it eats) that ended in a -th, or, in Old English spelling, a -ð (pronounced th).
We see a descendant of this form in the archaic -eth ending used, for example, in the King James Bible, for example, he eateth.
West Saxon had a form like -eth too, although, to complicate things further, in certain verbs, it collapsed into a -t form: so instead of a form like the Mercian he findeð, West Saxon would typically have he fint. And to complicate things still further, in many verbs, the vowel changed too.
One of these was the verb etan ‘to eat.’ In Mercian, you’d write he eteþ, but West Saxon had he itt ‘he eats’ instead. So if Modern English descended straightforwardly from West Saxon, we’d say he fint and he it rather than he finds and he eats.
But if Modern English descended straightforwardly from Mercian, we’d say he findeth and he eateth, which, yes, we did once say… but you’ll get strange looks, and perhaps directions to a renaissance fair, if you speak that way today. Instead, Modern English has forms ending in -s: he finds, he eats.
This form ending in -s comes from a dialect we haven’t discussed much of yet: Northumbrian. Already in the 9th century, you see verb forms ending in -s rather than -ð (i.e. -th) in Northumbrian texts.
This characteristic northern form crept slowly southwards. By the later Middle Ages, it was found in the northern Midlands, and by the Early Modern period (e.g. the age of Shakespeare), it had become part of southern speech as well.
Modern English betrays some influence of the Kentish dialect, too, although much less: one example of Kentish influence is the pronunciation of bury like berry.7 This reflects a peculiarly Kentish pronunciation of a specific Old English vowel spelled y,8 which didn’t last into Middle English, outside of the old West Saxon area.
But, where it changed, it changed into different vowels in different dialects. In Kentish, the pronunciation transformed into an e sound. But the word is still spelled bury, which is a more West Saxon spelling.
That probably gives you a sense of just how mixed Modern English is, even when we take into account the fact that it’s derived mainly from a Mercian base, rather than the West Saxon we normally associate with the term “Old English.”
But let’s imagine a counterfactual. Actually, let’s not just imagine it, let’s create it. What would Modern English look like if it had descended from West Saxon Old English?
Wessexish for beginners
Imagine an alternative past in which the Norman Conquest occurs in 1066 just as it does in our timeline, but instead of establishing his court in London, William the Conqueror establishes his court in the old capital of Winchester in the heart of the old kingdom of Wessex.
This means that Winchester becomes the big city that swells with migrants after the Black Death. Eventually, this leads to a Modern English based on a West Saxon standard. What would that look like?
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