The Effects of Multilingualism in Medieval England: The Impact of French on Middle English Military Terminology

Abstract

During the Middle English period (ca. 1100–1500), England was a multilingual society used to different languages and cultural influences (Short, 2007). Apart from the distinct English dialects, we can find the presence of speakers of French, the Celtic languages of Britain, and the influence of Latin asameans of instruction and religious language. English has been in contact with several languages through history and, among them, we must highlight the importance of French and Latin in regard to the incorporation of lexical borrowings and we must note that nearly 60% of the English vocabulary today has French or Latin origins (Bacz, 2012, p. 84). It is in this period that the English dialects underwent great changes and adaptations, which resulted in the standardization of the language with the introduction of the printing press by Caxton. French is one of the most important sources of new words in English, and the terminology dealing with warfare is one of the fields inwhich its influence is especially relevant in regards to borrowings. This chapter offers quantitative data regarding military terms that refer to defensive arms and offensive weapons used by soldiers in medieval England, including horse armament. Its aim is to illustrate the effects of the aforementioned multilingualism and language contact in the vocabulary of this particular field during the Middle English period. The results also reveal the importance of other languages as a source of new terms from a diachronic perspective. The main tool to carry out the research is the Middle English Weaponry Corpus (MEWC) (Poveda Balbuena, 2016, pp. 62–66), which offers a list of weaponry terms found in Middle English sources. These terms are divided into those with a native English origin and those that entered from other languages during the Old and Middle English periods, thus being present in Middle English texts. Apart from French, some of these languages are Old Norse, Latin, Italian, and the Celtic languages of Britain.