How French conquered English

It is said that somewhere between one-third and two-thirds of all the words in the English language are actually of French origin. Most of the French vocabulary in English entered the language after the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, when William the Conqueror trounced King Harold at the Battle of Hastings. William’s followers became a new French ruling class (called Norman because they hailed from a part of France called Normandy) and, like colonizers everywhere, imposed their language on the society they now ruled.

French was, of course, spoken by the new elite. While the upper echelons of society spoke Norman French, the local plebeians spoke the Anglo-Saxon dialects that had prevailed earlier. But the Norman language (strictly speaking, Old French, specifically the Old Norman dialect) supplanted Anglo-Saxon English in the royal court and the government, among the upper crust, the judiciary, and the Church. Since the Norman settlers used their native language in their daily lives, it seeped into the quotidian English of the locals, forming a hybrid that took on the syntactical structure of English and used words from both sources. English itself became “Frenchified”, while the French spoken in England took on English influences.

The political separation of England and France in the early 13th century, marked by increasing hostility (culminating in the Hundred Years’ War between the two), inevitably led to the decline of French as the preferred language in England. In 1349, English became the language of instruction at the University of Oxford, which had previously taught its courses in French or Latin. King Henry IV (1367-1413) was the first English king whose principal language was English, and his successor Henry V (1387-1422) became the first to use English in official documents. English, as we would know it, came into its own just over six hundred years ago.

Today, few are even aware of the French origins of many words taken for granted as English. These include words reflecting the feudal practices of the Normans (ranging from chivalry, homage and vassal to liege, suzerain and even villain) to words connected to warfare (armour, dungeon, rampart). Royalty and governance naturally required words from the French overlords; thus came baron, count, dame, duke, and marquis, “heir apparent” and Prince Regent. So too, “minister” and “parliament” and even the word “government” itself, all came from French, as did “sovereignty”, and the ABCs: “administration”, “bureaucracy” and “constitution”. Justice, judge, jury and even court were gifts of the French as well.

wknd@khaleejtimes.com