Influence of French on English

However, a literary standard had emerged that was based around the West Saxon dialect spoken in the area centred on Winchester, the capital of Wessex.

A condition of Harold's release was that he promised to become William's vassal and prepare the way for Norman rule of England.

On 14 October, exhausted by previous clashes with Scandinavians in the north and the long journey to Hastings, the English army quickly lost the battle and became disorganised after Harold was killed.

Anglo-Saxon dialects were supplanted by Norman in the royal court and aristocratic circles, the justice system, and the Church.

Noble English families, most of them of Norman origin, taught their children French or sent them to study in France.

Edward III of England and Philip VI of France disputed the French throne, and the Hundred Years' War ensued.

[12] After this period, the scale of the lexical borrowing decreased sharply, though French loan words have continued to enter English even into the modern era.

The gradual decline of the English singular pronouns thou and thee and their replacement with ye and later you have been linked to the parallel French use of vous in formal settings.

The -s ending was common in English prior to the Norman Conquest, since -as was the standard suffix form for plurals of strong masculine nouns in the nominative and accusative cases.

[7] Attempts have also been made to connect the increased use of gerunds towards the end of the Middle English period to the French gérondif form.

[14] They are fairly rare in English, but constructions that place the adjective after the noun (attorney general) are derived from French.

[16] However, the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary draws a distinction between /ɒ̃/ (there rendered as /ɔ̃ː/), and the unrounded /ɑ̃ː/ of banc, for a total of four nasal vowels.

Innovations that then arose include the following:[18] Several letters derived from Germanic runes or Irish script that had been common in Old English, such as ƿ and ð, largely fell out of use, possibly because the Normans were unfamiliar with them.

The effects of the Norman conquest had an indirect influence on the development of the standardized English that began to emerge towards the end of the 15th century.

The takeover of the elite class by the Normans, as well as their decision to move the capital of England from Winchester to London, ended the dominance of the Late West Saxon literary language.