Medieval English in a Multilingual Context

Sara M. Pons-Sanz is Reader in Language and Communication at Cardiff University, UK. She led the AHRC-funded network Medieval English (ca600-1500) in a Multilingual Context and co-led the AHRC-funded Gersum Project. She is the author of The Lexical Effects of Anglo-Scandinavian Linguistic Contact on Old English, and other books and articles on medieval English.  

Louise Sylvester is Professor of English Language at the University of Westminster, UK. She co-edited the Bilingual Thesaurus of Everyday Life in Medieval England and the multilingual database Lexis of Cloth and Clothing in Britain c700-1450. She has published widely on the effects of contact with French on the vocabulary of Middle English.

This edited book examines the multilingual culture of medieval England, exploring its impact on the development of English and its textual manifestations from a multi-disciplinary perspective. The book offers overviews of the state of the art of research and case studies on this subject in (sub)disciplines of linguistics including historical linguistics, onomastics, lexicology and lexicography, sociolinguistics, code-switching and language contact, and also includes contributions from literary and socio-cultural studies, material culture, and palaeography. The authors focus on the variety of languages in use in medieval Britain, including English, Old Norse, Norn, Dutch, Welsh, French, and Latin, making the argument that understanding the impact of medieval multilingualism on the development of English requires multidisiplinarity and the bringing together of different frameworks in linguistics and cultural studies toachieve more nuanced answers. This book will be of interest to academics and students of historical linguistics and medieval textual culture.

Offers overviews of the state of the art of research on the multilingual culture of medieval England

Chapter 1: Introduction Part I Research Contexts Chapter 2: Contact Theory and the History of English 
Chapter 3: From Original Sources to Linguistic Analysis: Tools and Datasets for the Investigation of Multilingualism in Medieval EnglishPart II Medieval Multilingualism and Lexical Change Chapter 4: Contact-Induced Lexical Effects in Medieval English 
Chapter 5: The West Germanic Heritage of Yorkshire English 
Chapter 6: Reframing the Interaction between Native Terms and Loanwords: Some Data from Occupational Domains in Middle English
Chapter 7: Cheapside in Wales: Multilingualism and Textiles in Medieval Welsh Poetry 
Chapter 8: Caxton's Linguistic and Literary Multilingualism: English, French and Dutch in the History of Jason Part III Medieval Multilingualism and Morphosyntactic Change 
Chapter 9: An Overview of Contact-Induced MorphosyntacticChanges in Early English 
Chapter 10: Traces of Language Contact in Nominal Morphology of Late Northumbrian and Northern Middle English 
Chapter 11: Origin and Spread of the Personal Pronoun They: La Estorie del Evangelie, a Case Study 
Chapter 12: Language Contact Effects on Verb Semantic Classes: Lability in Early English and Old French 
Chapter 13: Exploring Norn: A Historical Heritage Language of the British Isles  Part IV Textual Manifestations of Medieval Multilingualism
Chapter 14: Textual and Codicological Manifestations of Multilingual Culture in Medieval England 
Chapter 15: Adapting Winefride in Welsh, Latin and English 
Chapter 16: Let Each One Tell its Own Story: Language Mixing in Four Copies of Amore Langueo 
Chapter 17: The Materiality of the Manières de langage 
Chapter 18 Afterword