Mercian dialect

Part of Mercia and all of Kent were successfully defended but were then integrated into the Kingdom of Wessex.

Because of the centralisation of power and the Viking invasions, there is little to no salvaged written evidence for the development of non-Wessex dialects after Alfred the Great's unification, until the Middle English period.

[5] In later Anglo-Saxon England, the dialect remained in use in speech but rarely in written documents.

Some time after the Norman conquest of England, Middle English dialects emerged and were later found in such works as the Ormulum and the writings of the Gawain poet.

[6] Modern Old English orthography adds additional diacritics above certain letters to show specific phonological features.

Sound approximations from various European languages have been given, but it is best to learn by the International Phonetic Alphabet transcriptions for more precise pronunciation.

Nouns have three genders: masculine, feminine, neuter; and four cases: nominative, accusative, dative and genitive.

The definite article is equally complex, with all genders changing in the singular in all cases, based on variations of 'ðe.'

Mercian vocabulary is largely inherited from Proto-Germanic, with Latin loanwords coming via the use of Latin as the language of the Early Church, and Norse loanwords that arrived as part of the Norse incursions and foundation of the Danelaw which covered much of the midlands and north of England.