English as a creole

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>brent at bermls.oau.org writes:

>Native Norman French speakers in England appear to have died
>out by the early 14th century. It is unlikely that their influence
>would have lain dormant for the next 3 or 4 hundred years.

-- Correct.  Bartlett, in THE NEW OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLAND 1075-1225 shows
strong evidence that, apart from the Royal court itself, the aristocracy
became predominantly English-speaking within about 100 years of the Norman
conquest.

They continued to learn French, but as a secondary "learned" language.

"Knowledge of 'correct' French was thus, by the later part of the twelfth
century (if not before) a prestigious ability that the children of the
aristocracy had to work hard to acquire". (Bartlett, p. 490).

Incidentally, this isn't without relevance for the question of the spread of
Indo-European languages.

The Norman conquest of England presents a case where the entire aristocracy,
their retainers, and the higher parts of the eccesiastical hierarchy were
French-speaking, where contacts with France were close (politically and
socially), where French was available in written form, and where French had
immense social prestige as the language of government and 'high culture', yet
where English prevailed within four or five generations at the utmost.

This fact, and the nature of French loanwords in Middle English, suggest a
parallel with the influence of Indo-Aryan on the Mitannians in the second
millenium BCE Near East.