Scots developed concurrently from a variant of the Northumbrian dialect (prevalent in northern England and spoken in southeast Scotland).

Middle English also saw considerable adoption of Anglo-Norman vocabulary, especially in the areas of politics, law, the arts, and religion, as well as poetic and emotive diction.

Conventional English vocabulary remained primarily Germanic in its sources, with Old Norse influences becoming more apparent.

Communication between Vikings in the Danelaw and their Anglo-Saxon neighbours resulted in the erosion of inflection in both languages, this effect was characterized to be of a "substantive, pervasive, and of a democratic" manner.

Like close cousins, Old Norse and Old English resembled each other, and with some words and grammatical structures in common, speakers of each language roughly understood each other, but according to the historian Simeon Potler, the main difference lied on their inflectional endings, which led to much confusion within the mixed population that existed in the Danelaw, this endings tended gradually to become obscured and finally lost, "simplifying English grammar" in the process.

[15] While the Old Norse influence was strongest in the dialects under Danish control that composed the southern part of the Northern England (corresponding to the Scandinavian Kingdom of Jórvík), the East Midlands and the East of England, words in the spoken language emerged in the 10th and 11th centuries near the transition from Old to Middle English.

Examples of Norman/Germanic pairs in Modern English include pig and pork, calf and veal, wood and forest, and freedom and liberty.

Examples of the resulting doublet pairs include warden (from Norman) and guardian (from later French; both share a common ancestor loaned from Germanic).

[citation needed] Early Middle English (1150–1350)[19] has a largely Anglo-Saxon vocabulary (with many Norse borrowings in the northern parts of the country) but a greatly simplified inflectional system.

The loss of case endings was part of a general trend from inflections to fixed word order that also occurred in other Germanic languages (though more slowly and to a lesser extent), and, therefore, it cannot be attributed simply to the influence of French-speaking sections of the population: English did, after all, remain the vernacular.

It is also argued[20] that Norse immigrants to England had a great impact on the loss of inflectional endings in Middle English.

Important texts for the reconstruction of the evolution of Middle English out of Old English are the Peterborough Chronicle, which continued to be compiled up to 1154; the Ormulum, a biblical commentary probably composed in Lincolnshire in the second half of the 12th century, incorporating a unique phonetic spelling system; and the Ancrene Wisse and the Katherine Group, religious texts written for anchoresses, apparently in the West Midlands in the early 13th century.

This longer time frame would extend the corpus to include many Middle English Romances (especially those of the Auchinleck manuscript c. 1330).

Gradually, the wealthy and the government Anglicised again, although Norman (and subsequently French) remained the dominant language of literature and law until the 14th century, even after the loss of the majority of the continental possessions of the English monarchy.

In the aftermath of the Black Death of the 14th century, there was significant migration into London, of people to the counties of the southeast of England and from the east and central Midlands of England, and a new prestige London dialect began to develop as a result of this clash of the different dialects,[23] that was based chiefly on the speech of the East Midlands but also influenced by that of other regions.

The Ayenbite of Inwyt, a translation of a French confessional prose work, completed in 1340, is written in a Kentish dialect.

The Chancery Standard, which was adopted slowly, was used in England by bureaucrats for most official purposes, excluding those of the Church and legalities, which used Latin and Law French respectively.

[citation needed] Early Modern English emerged with the help of William Caxton's printing press, developed during the 1470s.

Some dialects still have forms such as eyen (for eyes), shoon (for shoes), hosen (for hose(s)), kine (for cows), and been (for bees).

[30] Single-syllable adjectives added -e when modifying a noun in the plural and when used after the definite article (þe), after a demonstrative (þis, þat), after a possessive pronoun (e.g., hir, our), or with a name or in a form of address.

The past-tense forms, without their personal endings, also served as past participles with past-participle prefixes derived from Old English: i-, y-, and sometimes bi-.

Strong verbs, by contrast, formed their past tense by changing their stem vowel (e.g., binden became bound, a process called apophony), as in Modern English.

Later in the Middle English period, however, and particularly with the development of the Chancery Standard in the 15th century, orthography became relatively standardised in a form based on the East Midlands-influenced speech of London.

Anachronistic usage of the scribal abbreviation (þe, "the") has led to the modern mispronunciation of thorn as ⟨y⟩ in this context; see ye olde.

Due to its similarity to the letter ⟨p⟩, it is mostly represented by ⟨w⟩ in modern editions of Old and Middle English texts even when the manuscript has wynn.

However, because of the significant difference in appearance between the old insular g and the Carolingian g (modern g), the former continued in use as a separate letter, known as yogh, written ⟨ȝ⟩.

In some words, however, notably from Old French, ⟨j⟩/⟨i⟩ was used for the affricate consonant /dʒ/, as in joie (modern "joy"), used in Wycliffe's Bible.

This passage explains the background to the Nativity (3494–501):[46] An epitaph from a monumental brass in an Oxfordshire parish church:[47][48] From the Wycliffe's Bible, (1384): The following is the very beginning of the General Prologue from The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer.

Translation in Modern English: (by J. Dow) Of those who wrote before we were born, books survive, So we are taught what was written by them when they were alive.

So it's good that we, in our times here on earth, write of new matters – Following the example of our forefathers – So that, in such a way, we may leave our knowledge to the world after we are dead and gone.