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Podcast Transcript

The English language is….different. 

Unlike other languages, English has borrowed and used words from a wide variety of other languages. 

However, no other language has had quite the influence that French has had. 

In fact, French was the language spoken by the kings and queens of England for centuries, during which time the rulers of England couldn’t speak any English.

Learn more about the French influence on the English language and what English would look like without it on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

Let me start by saying that Modern English is technically a Germanic language.

However, the language spoken in English wasn’t always from the Germanic family of languages. 

The original language spoken by the people of England would have been a Celtic language in the same family as Welsh or Gaelic. Oddly enough, there is very little Celtic influence on modern English outside of place names in England.

After the Roman conquest of Britain, Latin became dominant.

After Rome collapsed, tribes such as the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes showed up and brought their Germanic languages with them. These people came from the lands that bordered the North Sea in what is today Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands. 

These Germanic peoples developed what we call Old English. Old English was a solidly Germanic language and it is very difficult for speakers of modern English to understand. You might be able to pick out some words, but there are some words we just don’t use anymore. 

Just to give you a brief example, this is the first line of the Lord’s Prayer in Old English. In Modern English, it would be “Our Father Who Art in Heaven.”

In Old English, it would read… Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum.

If you know what it is before you hear it, you can realize what it is, but if you hear it without knowing it, you might not figure it out.

In the 11th century, pretty much everyone in England spoke Old English. Members of the clergy and nobility might have also known Latin and perhaps French, but Old English was the common language.

That changed with the Norman invasion of 1066. William the Conquerer, the Duke of Normandy, crossed the English Channel, conquered England, declared himself king, and established many of his barrons as nobility in England. 

The Normans didn’t speak English; they spoke French. 

Actually, to be technical, they spoke a language known as Old Norman or Old Northern French. 

The Normans were the descendants of Vikings who came to the coast of France and settled. The word “norman” actually means “north man.”

When the Vikings arrived in what is today Normandy, they brought a Germanic language with them. However, they soon merged with the local population and adopted the Old French language, however, they brought some of their words with them.

So Old Norman is largely Old French with some Germanic vocabulary that the Vikings brought with them. For the rest of the episode, I’m just going to refer to it as French for the sake of brevity.

When the Normans conquered England, they didn’t really need to speak Old English. They were the rulers. The King and most nobles didn’t have to deal directly with the common folk.

As the rulers, much of the establishment had an incentive to speak the language of the rulers. Hence,  Norman French became the language of the English court, the legal system, the clergy, and the aristocracy.

For about 300 years, the ruling elite spoke Norman French, while the general population continued to speak Old English.

English, spoken by the common people, was relegated to a lower status.

The Normans who ruled England didn’t suddenly separate themselves from France. The king and all the Norman nobles he brought over had land holdings in France. They thought of themselves as French, aka Norman, not English. 

They were just as, if not more, concerned with their holdings in France rather than in England. Many of the Norman nobility lived or spent most of their time in France.

Over time, however, the two languages began to blend, and many Norman French words entered the English vocabulary. Even common people began using some French words because they often had no Old English counterpart or because the words provided more nuance. 

The words that began to leak into English weren’t random. They were words related to government, law, the military, the church, and culture. All of these are things the nobility and ruling class would have been involved with. 

So, for example, let’s look at words that deal with the law or the legal system. 

court, judge, jury, bailiff, attorney, council, prison, and treason all originated in French. 

In the world of diplomacy, many of the words we use come from French: attaché, envoy, embassy, diplomacy, communiqué, détente, entente, rapprochement, accord, treaty, alliance, passport, protocol.

Many military terms are also of French origin: army, artillery, battalion, bivouac, brigade, camouflage, cavalry, corps, espionage, grenadier, guard, infantry, logistics, marine, morale, musketeer, officer, pistol, platoon, reconnaissance, regiment, rendezvous, siege, soldier, squad, surrender, surveillance, terrain, and troop.

In the arts, it would be difficult to even talk about the subject without using words that came from French: art, music, dance, theatre, author, stage, paint, canvas, perform, harmony, melody, and rhythm all are derived from French. 

English is unique in that we have different words for types of meat than the animals they came from. This is a vestige of French. 

For example, beef is the food we eat, and it comes from French. Cow, the animal, comes from Old English. 

Likewise, pork, poultry, mutton, venison, and veal come from French, whereas pig, chicken, sheep, deer, and calf all come from Old English. 

In other cases, similar French and Old English words exist side by side, but they developed slightly different meanings. 

Liberty comes from French, but freedom is derived from Old English. 

Aid is from French, but help comes from Old English. 

Ask comes from Old English, whereas inquire comes from French. 

King and queen come from Old English, and royal, regal, and monarch come from French. 

Some of you might be wondering, French is a Romance language that is derived from Latin, so shouldn’t we say that these words come from Latin?

The answer to that is yes and no. While it is true French is derived from Latin, the words I’ve listed, and many others, come from French and changed over the years from their original Latin. 

That being said, there are an enormous number of words in English that come directly from Latin and didn’t come from the Norman Conquest. Some words were leftover from the Roman Occupation of Britain. Some were words that just were picked up by proto-german speakers, some came from the church, and some were more recent additions that came into use during the Renaissance. 

Current estimates are that about 29% of all words in English came from Old Norman, and another 29% came directly from Latin.  Only about 26% were derived from Germanic sources. The remainder come from Greek or other languages.

While there are more French-derived words than words that come from Old English, the top 100 most commonly used words in English are all derived from Old English.  This includes words like this, and, that, for, have, not, etc. 

The British monarchs clearly no longer speak French as their first language, so when exactly did they cease speaking French and adopt English, and why?

The short answer is the Hundred Years’ War. 

The Hundred Years’ War lasted from 1337 to 1453 and was fought between England and France. It was largely due to English claims to the French crown and French territory. 

However, the process of fighting the French fueled a sense of English national identity, leading the English nobility to distance themselves from French culture and language. 

This adoption of an English identity amongst the elite led to more adoption of speaking English instead of French. 

The tipping point took place during the reign of Henry IV. Henry began his reign as king in 1399, over three hundred years after the Battle of Hastings and the Norman Conquest, and ruled until 1413. 

Henry IV was the first king of England who spoke English as his native language. 

Henry IV was a usurper who wasn’t raised in court. He overthrew his predecessor, Richard II, who was also known as Richard of Bordeaux, as that was the place in France where he was born. 

Henry took his oath when he became king in English.

While there were more French words that found their way into English, much of it had been set by this time. 

At this point, I hope you can appreciate just how much French has permeated the English language. If it weren’t for French and the Norman invasion of England almost 1000 years ago, we would be speaking a language very different than the one we know today.

But that then raises an interesting question: What exactly would modern English look like if we removed all of the influence from French and other languages? 

This is the question a group of linguists asked in the 19th century as part of a movement of English linguistic nationalism. 

What they did was create a version of English that was dubbed….Anglish spelled A-n-g-l-i-s-h.

Anglish is a form of English that aims to minimize or eliminate words of foreign origin, particularly those borrowed from Latin, French, and Greek, and instead uses native Germanic words or constructs. It is essentially a purist or “native English” version of the language, focusing on words rooted in Old English. 

Anglish is more of a thought experiment or cultural movement than a widely-used dialect, intended to imagine how English might have evolved had it not been so heavily influenced by foreign languages, especially after the Norman Conquest of 1066.

So, what does Anglish sound like? Unlike Old English, Anglish is much more comprehensible, even if the words are a bit odd. 

Take, for example, the word “government.” Government comes from the French word gouverner. In Anglish, you would use the word folkdom or kingship.

The word Literature, which comes from the Latin word litteratura, becomes bookcraft.

Astronomy, which comes from the Greek word astronomia, becomes starlore.

Telephone, which was created from the Greek words tele and phone, would become far-speaker.

And Philosophy, which is from the Greek word philosophia, becomes wisdomlore.

Kingship, bookcraft, starlore, wisdomlore, and far-speaker are all words that you can probably understand, but you wouldn’t necessarily know their meaning if they were given without any context. 

So, what would this sound like in an actual document? 

Here is a sample of what the preamble to the United States Constitution would become.

For those of you outside this United States, here is what it reads in English. 

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” 

Now, here it is in Anglish. 

“We the Folk of the Foroned Riches, to make a more flawless oneship, build rightness, bring frith and stillness to our land, shield one another, uphold the overall welfare, and hold fast the Blessings of Freedom to ourselves and our offspring, do foresay and lay down this lawbook for the foroned riches of Americksland.”

The interesting thing about Anglish is that the grammar and much of the vocabulary is exactly the same as modern English. It is just a matter of learning the vocabulary for certain words, including antiquated words or definitions from Old English, which have been resurrected. 

There is a small but lively community of people who develop Anglish, and I’d say they are on par in terms of size with people who speak Klingon or Elvish. 

One of the reasons why English has become so popular internationally is obviously British colonislams. However, there is something unique about the language itself. It is a mix of Germanic languages with a very heavy Romance language vocabulary.  

The language that we know today as English is all due William the Conquerer and the linguistic influences he and his Normans made after his conquest of England.