In the Reeve's Tale, by Geoffrey Chaucer, two Northern students have a run-in with a Midlands Miller. The two primary texts in which dialect appears are The Reeve's Tale and The Second Shepard's Play. The Northern Dialect has a heavy influence from Old Norse. The most famous Middle English writer, Geoffrey Chaucer wrote in the London dialect, which was a part of the Midlands dialect. The Northern dialect is often called Northumbrian dialect. Often the West Midlands and East Midlands dialects are put together and are called Midlands. There are five major dialects of Middle English. Middle English also has different stages, with earlier texts such as Brut, which has a heavy Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, to Geoffrey Chaucer, who helped to standardise English (do to the early printers such as William Caxton). However in the global world today, many words from many other languages have entered the English language. Modern English words have many different origins, but a majority come from Anglo-Saxon, Old Norman French, and a little Old Norse. The separation of Middle English and the Modern English stages is the Great Vowel Shift. Mostly likely there was a creole between the two in the stages before it was creolised, sometimes called Anglo-Norman. ![]() Before then, it was probably Anglo-Saxon spoken by the common folk and Norman French spoken by the Nobles and higher ups. ![]() ![]() It was likely the 12th century or so before the two languages fully mixed and became Middle English. For more of whether English is a creole, see Middle English as a Creole. Although that is the official marker, the language took many years to become creolised. The separation of Anglo-Saxon from Middle English is marked by The Battle of Hastings in 1066.
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