A history of the English Language

146.
Dialectal Diversity of Middle English.
One of the striking characteristics of Middle English is its great variety in the different 
parts of England. This variety was not confined to the forms of the spoken language, as it 
is to a great extent today, but appears equally in the written literature. In the absence of 
any recognized literary standard before the close of the period, writers naturally wrote in 
the dialect of that part of the country to which they belonged. And they did so not through 
any lack of awareness of the diversity that existed. Giraldus Cambrensis in the twelfth 
century remarked that the language of the southern parts of England, and particularly of 
Devonshire, was more ar- 
35 
C.L.Kingsford, 
Chronicles of London 
(Oxford, 1905), p. 15. 
36 
The fullest discussion of the Flemings in England and English relations with the Low Countries 
generally is J.F.Bense, 
Anglo-Dutch Relations from the Earliest Times to the Death of William the 
Third 
(London, 1925). J.A.Fleming, 
Flemish Influence in Britain
(2 vols., Glasgow, 1930), is rather 
discursive and concerned mostly with Scotland. The Low German influence on English has been 
treated by Wilhelm Heuser, “Festländische Einflüsse im Mittelenglischen,” 
Bonner Beiträge zur 
Anglistik,
12 (1902), 173–82; J.M.Toll, 
Niederländisches Lehngut im Mittelenglischen
(Halle, 
Germany, 1926); J.F.Bense, 
A Dictionary of the Low-Dutch Element in the English Vocabulary
(The Hague, 1939); H.Logeman, “Low-Dutch Elements in English,” 
Neophilologus,
16 (1930–
1931), 31–46, 103–16 (a commentary on Bense); T.de Vries, 
Holland’s Influence on English 
Language and Literature
(Chicago, 1916), a work of slighter value; and E.Ekwall, 
Shakspere’s 
Vocabulary
(Uppsala, Sweden, 1903), pp. 92 ff. 
Middle english 175

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chaic and seemed less agreeable than that of other parts with which he was familiar;
37
and 
at a slightly earlier date (c. 1125) William of Malmesbury had complained of the 
harshness of the speech of Yorkshire, saying that southerners could not understand it.
38
Such observations continue in subsequent censturies.
39
The author of the 
Cursor Mundi,
a 
northern poem of about 1300, notes that he found the story of the Assumption of Our 
Lady in Southern English and turned it into his own dialect for “northern people who can 
read no other English.”
40
Even Chaucer, by whose time a literary standard was in process 
of creation, sends off his 
Troilus and Criseyde
with the famous “Go, little book,” adding, 
And for ther is so gret diversite
In Englissh, and in writyng of oure tonge, 
So prey I god that non myswrite the,
Ne the mys-metre for defaute of tonge.