How did English survive the Norman conquest?
This article appeared in Silly Linguistics #97 - June 2026
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In 1066 the Normans successfully invaded England and though they didn't know it at the time, the course of the English language would be changed forever. King William didn't initially intend to change things radically. He just wanted to get what he said he was promised: the throne of England. Looking back now we know that William ultimately won, but at the time it wasn't so clear.
Many of the Anglo-Saxons didn't take the usurpation of the throne so kindly so they rose up in rebellion. William would put down a rebellion only for another to spring up. A region would rise up, and then be pacified at which point a Norman would be put in power. Bit by bit as rebellions rose and were put down, Normans replaced Anglo Saxons.
William had brought a lot of his followers with him and he rewarded their help by giving them land in England. William didn't initially intend to change the language of England but that's what ended up happening. William and his followers didn't know English, so they started using French in government. English was thrown out of the seats of power and forced to live in the fields, hills and villages of England.
Before the Christianisation of the Germanic settlers of Britain, English had been a purely oral language. Then when the Christian monks came, English started being written down. One particularly successful king, King Alfred, encouraged writing and literacy and many texts that we have now in pre-1066 English were composed during King Alfred's time. King Alfred was a king of the West Saxons. So most of the Old English (which is the name given for pre-1066 English) that survives today is in the West Saxon dialect of Old English.
When English was thrown out of power, it went back to being an oral language. I bring up King Alfred's efforts because he and people working with him standardised and solidified the language. It was massively influential and people kept writing in the kind of English used during the Alfredian period even when later the language had moved on. But now that English was no longer the language of government it had lost prestige and there were no institutions to enforce or even just encourage uniformity.
Language is like an organism. It grows, spreads and changes. Actually, change is the essence of language. It is always changing because society changes, and people change. As linguists have studied language change more and more people think that language change happens because each generation learns the language from their parents but they interpret it slightly differently each generation and those differences can slowly accumulate. Change is language's natural state and given the chance it will run off into some new area just like an eager dog that has just been let off a lead.
Without institutions to hold it back to some kind of standard, without it being in government which leads order and conformity, English became simply the language of the people. And this is language's natural state. So it did what languages always do in this situation, it changed.
By the 1300s, English had reached a form which would be recognisable to modern English speakers. What ways had the language changed since 1066? At this point in time, English had already lost a lot of the features that made it so similar to other Germanic languages.
Old English was an inflectional language. There was a whole mess of endings that tell you what role a word played in a sentence, and it even had grammatical gender. If you have ever learned German with its "der, die, das" or Italian or French, then you know that grammatical gender can get tricky. Well, English had it too, once upon a time
You didn't have "the man", "the woman", "the house". You had "se mann", "seo wif", "þæt hus". You had complex inflections. So instead of "the king's" you had "cyninges" where the concept of king and possession was included in one word. The modern English custom of added 's to the end of a word to show possession evolved out of the Old English pattern of using s in possession (called the genitive case in grammar books).
Old English had complex conjugation where first person ended on -e, second person on -st, third person -þ (pronounced like th in thatch and thicket) and plural on -aþ which are all similar to how German does conjugation (German changed the original Germanic -þ sound to -t, one example is "ihr lest" from the verb lesen).
People find the -th in old fashioned verbs like "hath" quite quaint but it was the usual and normal way of saying that word right up until the 1600s and is descended from a form with -þ in Old English. The -s form in modern English in for example has, reads, leads, needs developed in the north of England and slowly moved south of the years until by the 1600s it was butting heads with the older and more common -th. The German equivalent is -t (compare hath vs German hat).
Ok, so languages change, and English certainly changed a lot after the invasion of the Normans lead by King William, but why did English change so much. I mean, Iceland was settled a long time ago and was mostly an oral language for a long time but it has changed remarkably little to the point that Icelanders find it much much easier to read older version of their language than English speakers do trying to read pre-1066 English.
Why is this? Well, language change is still attracting a lot of academic attention but one intriguing theory is that it is contact with other groups that can accelerate change but also lead to simplification of grammar as people from outside try to learn the language and often shave off tricky or annoying bits of a language. Iceland was quite isolated so most of the people there were just Icelanders. So if you grew up there you would hear almost only other Icelanders so you spoke the way they did and picked up all the nuances.
Even before 1066, England was full of people from all over. You had the original Celtic groups, then you had Romans and Roman descent people, and starting later you had people from Scandinavia who came and settled in Britain. Old English and Old Norse (the language Scandinavians spoke) were both Germanic languages and had a shared ancestor. They weren't totally mutually intelligible but there was definitely enough commonality for some communication between the groups to be possible.
Compare Old English "ic eom" to Old Norse "ek em". Compare Old English "hus" with Old Norse "hus". Sometimes the words were either the same or very similar. So communication between the groups was definitely possible. Old English had already started borrowing words from Old Norse before 1066. Words from Old Norse that survive into modern English are words like get, give, gear, sky, skull, berserker and angry. And also funnily enough the word happy (coming from a word meaning fortunate).
Some linguists propose the idea that a kind of make shift language was used between Old English and Old Norse speakers that shaved off the hard parts of the language, like where the languages differed on endings (one might have -s and the other -r, because different sound shifts happened). Over time as Scandinavian descent people integrated and intermingled with the original Anglo-Saxon population, this kind of mixed language became more and more common. You might have an Anglo-Saxon mother and Norse father. You would speak Old Norse to your father and Old English to your mother. You were capable in both languages and this made mixing them easier.
And going back to a point about institutions, there was nothing holding back language change. So the actual speech of people could evolve in whatever way speech patterns do without interference from institutions or the state. English was living a vagabond life style where it could just live on the land, sleep under the stars and live without cares or worries or having to deal with questions about what is and is not correct English.
People just wanted to get on with life and it would be a waste of time to complain about how the English of the 1200s was a kind of bastardised version of what had gone before. If you didn't have access to documents showing you older versions of the language you wouldn't have even known English had once been very different.
So English was just living life, but what did the future hold? I mean, its happened often enough that a small local language would eventually just die out. When the Romans conquered Gaul, the local Gauls eventually switched to Latin and the original Gaulish language was sadly forgotten. Why didn't the same thing happen in England. Why speak this small language that developed among the Germanic tribes and not the prestigious French language from the continent?
In the 1100s, French was already a prestigious language. Clovis, the first king of the Franks ruled in the late 400s and early 500s. With the later rise of Charlemagne, the prestige of France was growing. So why didn't people just switch to French? Well, some did. And the rest often peppered their English with French words just to associate themselves with French which was the language of the nobles and government.
I can imagine a conversation such as this
"I did not.... expect this to happen"
(English peasant thinking) "What on earth does 'expect' mean"
In a famous story a merchant came asking for eggs but was rebuffed because the shopkeeper "spoke no French". The word "egg" (coming from Old Norse, compare modern Swedish ägg) was unknown to her. She used the word "eyren" (compare German Eier).
So people started adding more and more French to their English. Why didn't the trickle become a flood and eventually just wash the English language away, leaving it pretty much just French with English pronunciation? The answer is undoubtedly the hundred years war. The 1300s was a turning point for the English language.
To understand why we need to explore the structures of medieval feudalism. Before William was King William, he was Duke William of Normandy which was part of the Kingdom of France. Being a Duke meant that he was under the power of the king of France. Being a vassal of France, and taking land in England, the king of France must have been delighted. Now he could add England to the land France controls.
But now that William is a King, why should he have to listen to anyone else, if he was a king. Over the generations relations worsened. France didn't want to lose influence over the Normans so they gave them an ultimatum: come back to Normandy or lose your land.
Because the Norman nobility had married into French high society, there were family links all over. At one point when a French king died, it just so happened that a Norman was in line to the throne. The French didn't like the idea of someone who was living in England taking the throne, so they gave the throne to a Frenchman and not a Norman. The English nobility were incensed and so started the period known as the Hundred Years War.
Over the years, decades and centuries since 1066, English society had slowly started mixing. At the time of the Norman conquest of England, it was easy to tell Anglo-Saxons and Normans apart. Anglo-Saxons had long beards and Normans were clean shaven. Anglo-Saxons were Germanic tribesman, and Normans were cultured continentals.
But over time Normans started marrying Anglo-Saxon women. The children from these matches learned both French and English. Over time knowledge of both languages spread. The Anglo-Saxons learned French and the Normans learned English. It's certainly not an exaggeration to say that modern English is suffused with French.
Just over 50% of the words in modern English derive from French or directly from Latin. That is a staggering amount for a language that is not actually descended from Latin. Often a word is borrowed because the borrower has no native word for it. Did English really need to borrow the word "expect"? No, German has "erwarten" and Old English had a word from a Germanic source. English borrowed it because of prestige. People wanted to sound fancy.
This perception continues today.
"The large canine consumed some confectionery"
"large", "canine", "consume" and "confectionery" all come from French or Latin.
So given the fact that French words were pouring into English, what happened? How did English survive.
Well, by the time of the Hundred Years War a lot of the nobility now knew English. The Hundred Years War started in 1337. In 1362 the Statue of Pleading made English the language of parliament. Henry IV was the first king after 1066 who spoke English as a first language. The Hundred Years War inspired English nationality and patriotism. It made people remember their past and their heritage. Its almost like they went "Wait, why are we speaking the language of the people we are fighting? We have a perfectly good language at home"
So English came back to the halls of power after 200 years in the wilderness. It was battered and beaten up. Grammatical gender was gone, cases like genitive and accusative were gone, and about half of its vocabulary had been replaced by French. It was down but not out and like a battered boxer in one of those sports movies, the count went 1, 2 but just before the 3 count, English got up.
English had returned and with the rise of the British and later American empire, English was ready to take on the world.
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Source: How did English survive the Norman conquest?
