A History of English Language

Middle english 177
the Middle English period and later, Kentish preserves individual features marking it off
as a distinct variety of Southern English. 41
The peculiarities that distinguish these dialects are of such a character that their
adequate enumeration would carry us beyond our present purpose. They are partly
matters of pronunciation, partly of vocabulary, partly of inflection. A few illustrations
will give some idea of the nature and extent of the differences. The feature most easily
recognized is the ending of the plural, present indicative, of verbs. In Old English this
form always ended in -th with some variation of the preceding vowel. In Middle English
this ending was preserved as -eth in the Southern dialect. In the Midland district,
however, it was replaced by -en, probably taken over from the corresponding forms of the
subjunctive or from preterite-present verbs and the verb to be, 42 while in the north it was
altered to -es, an ending that makes its appearance in Old English times. Thus we have
loves in the north, loven in the Midlands, and loveth in the south. Another fairly
distinctive form is the present participle before the spread of the ending -ing. In the north
we have lovande, in the Midlands lovende, and in the south lovinde. In later Middle
English the ending -ing appears in the Midlands and the south, thus obscuring the
dialectal distinction. Dialectal differences are more noticeable between Northern and
Southern; the Midland dialect often occupies an intermediate position, tending toward the
one or the other in those districts lying nearer to the adjacent dialects. Thus the
characteristic forms of the pronoun they in the south were hi, here (hire, hure), hem,
while in the north forms with th- (modern they, their, them) early became predominant. In
matters of pronunciation the Northern and Southern dialects sometimes presented notable
differences. Thus OE ā, which developed into an south of the Humber, was retained in
the north, giving us such characteristic forms as Southern stone and home, beside stane
and hame in Scotland today. Initial f and s were often voiced in the south to v and z. In
Southern Middle English we find vor, vrom, vox, vorzoþe instead of for, from, fox,
forsope (forsooth). This dialectal difference is preserved in Modern English fox and
vixen, where the former represents the Northern and Midland pro-
41
A pioneering attempt to define significant dialect features was “Middle English Dialect
Characteristics and Dialect Boundaries,” by Samuel Moore, Sanford B.Meech, and Harold
Whitehall, in Univ. of Michigan Pubns in Lang. and Lit., vol. 13 (1935). It was based primarily on
localized documents, which are not sufficiently numerous. The limitations of this study are pointed
out in A.Mclntosh, “A New Approach to Middle English Dialectology,” English Studies, 44 (1963),
1–11. See also M.L.Samuels, “Some Applications of Middle English Dialectology,” ibid., pp. 81–
94. The results of several decades of research by Mclntosh and Samuels are published in A
Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English by Angus Mclntosh, M.L.Samuels, and Michael
Benskin with the assistance of Margaret Laing and Keith Williamson (4 vols., Aberdeen, 1986).
42
W.F.Bryan, “The Midland Present Plural Indicative Ending -e(n),” MP, 18 (1921), 457–73.