The influence of French on English pertains mainly to its lexicon but also to its syntax, grammar, orthography, and pronunciation. Most of the French vocabulary in English entered the language after the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, when Old French, specifically the Old Norman dialect, became the language of the new Anglo-Norman court, the government, and the elites. That period lasted for several centuries until the course of the Hundred Years' War (1337–1453). However, English has continued to be influenced by French. According to Laura Lawless, more than a third of current English vocabulary is of French origin,^[1] whereas according to linguist Henriette Walter, words of French origin represent more than two-thirds of the English vocabulary.^[2]

Background

Norman claim on England and consequences

Main article: Norman Conquest

See also: Anglo-Norman language and Norman language

Royal arms of the United Kingdom: Honi soit qui mal y pense and Dieu et mon droit

During Harold Godwinson's visit to Normandy (c. 1064) he was captured by Count Guy of Ponthieu and handed over to William (who used Harold to subdue Conan, count of Brittany). A condition of Harold's release was that he promised to become William's vassal and prepare the way for Norman rule of England. Thus, William felt wronged when Harold was crowned Harold II of England in January 1066. William II of Normandy landed at Hastings, Sussex on 29 September 1066. He deployed his men in the nearby area while he waited for King Harold Godwinson's troops. On 14 October, exhausted by previous clashes with Scandinavians in the north and the long journey to Hastings, the English army lost the battle quickly and became disorganised after Harold was killed. After the defeat of the English, William claimed the throne as King of England on 25 December 1066. He was crowned William I of England and came to be known as William the Conqueror (Guillaume le Conquérant in French). William's followers became a new Norman ruling class and imposed their language on the upper echelons of society. Anglo-Saxon dialects were supplanted by Norman in the royal court and aristocratic circles, the justice system, and the Church. Influential Norman settlers used their native language in daily life, but more modest rural and urban areas of society continued to speak varieties of Anglo-Saxon (or proto-English).

The Norman Conquest marked the beginning of a long period of interaction between England and France. Noble English families, most of them of Norman origin, taught their children French or sent them to study in France. The early Norman kings spent more time in Normandy than in England.^[4] Royal marriages also encouraged the expansion of the French language in England. From Henry II Plantagenet and Eleanor of Aquitaine in the early 12th century to Henry VI and Margaret of Anjou in the 15th century, many English kings married French princesses, which kept French as the language of the English court for several centuries and strengthened its use in England overall.^[5]

Lexical

Official Warwickshire arms, in Old French

The most notable influence of French on English has been its extensive contribution to the English lexicon. It has been estimated that about a third of the words in English are French in origin;^[8] linguist Henriette Walter claims that this total may be as high as two thirds.^[2] Linguist Anthony Lacoudre has estimated that over 40,000 English words come directly from French and may be understood without orthographical change by French speakers.^[9]

Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable note that "although this influx of French words was brought about by the victory of the Conqueror and by the political and social consequences of that victory, it was neither sudden nor immediately apparent. Rather it began slowly and continued with varying tempo for a long time. Indeed, it can hardly be said to have ever stopped."^[10] Baugh and Cable define several categories of early French borrowings:^[11]

• Government and social class (revenue, authority, realm, duke, count, marquis, servant, peasant)
• Church (religion, sermon, prayer, abbey, saint, faith, pray, convent, cloister)
• Law (justice, crime, jury, pardon, indict, arrest, felon, evidence)
• War (army, navy, battle, garrison, captain, sergeant, combat, defense)
• Fashion (gown, robe, frock, collar, satin, crystal, diamond, coat, embroidery)
• Food (feast, taste, mackerel, salmon, bacon, fry, mince, plate, goblet)
• Learning and medicine (paper, preface, study, logic, surgeon, anatomy, stomach, remedy, poison)

In many cases a French word might have existed alongside a Germanic word that meant the same thing, with the two words eventually taking on different senses. Exemplifying this are the "food pairs" in which the English word refers to a living animal on a farm, while the French word signifies the meat of the animal after it has been made into a meal (cow and beef, swine and pork, sheep and mutton).^[12] Other times, the same French word was borrowed twice, once from the Norman dialect and then again from the Parisian dialect, with different meanings arising. Such doublets include Norman catch vs Parisian chase, Norman warranty vs Parisian guarantee and Norman warden vs Parisian guardian.

The period from 1250 to 1400 was the most prolific for borrowed words from French. Forty percent of all the French words in English appear for the first time between these two dates.^[13] After this period, the scale of the lexical borrowing decreased sharply, though French loan words have continued to enter English even into the modern era.

Morphological and syntactical

The gradual decline of the English singular pronouns thou and thee and their replacement with ye and later you have been linked to the parallel French use of vous in formal settings.^[14] The ubiquity of -s to mark plurals in English has also been attributed to French influence, but the -s ending was common in English even prior to the Norman Conquest since -as was the standard suffix form for plurals of strong masculine nouns in the nominative and accusative cases. It is possible that the dominance of that form over other endings such as -en was strengthened by the similarity of the French plural construction.^[7]

Other suggestions include the impersonal one ("one does what one wants") and possessive phrases such as "the guitar of David", rather than "David's guitar", but similar forms are found in other Germanic languages, which casts doubt on the proposed French derivations.^[7] Attempts have also been made to connect the increased use of gerunds towards the end of the Middle English period to the French gérondif form.^[15]

They are fairly rare in English, but constructions that place the adjective after the noun (attorney general) are derived from French.^[14]

English has adopted several prefix and suffix morphemes from French, including pre-, -ous, -ity, -tion, -ture, -ment, -ive and -able. They now stand alongside native English forms such as over-, -ish, -ly, -ness, -ship, -some, -less and -ful.

Phonological

The influence of French on English pronunciation is generally held to have been fairly minor, but a few examples have been cited:^[16]

• The use of non-word-initial stress patterns in some loan words of French origin
• The phonemisation of the voiced fricatives /z/ and /v/ (in Old English, they were allophones of their voiceless counterparts, /s/ and /f/, a pattern that can still be seen in some dialects of West Country English)
• The use of the diphthongs /ui/ and /oi/
• The development of the sequence /juː/, from Norman /yː/ merging with native diphthongs /iw/, /ew/, and /ɛw/.

John Wells has argued that, as educated British speakers often attempt to pronounce French names in a French way, there is a case for including /ɒ̃/ (as in bon), and /æ̃/ and /ɜ̃:/ (as in vingt-et-un), as marginal members of the RP vowel system.^[17] He also argues against including other French vowels on the grounds that not many British speakers succeed in distinguishing the vowels in bon and banc, or in rue and roue.^[17] However, the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary draws a distinction between /ɒ̃/ (there rendered as /ɔ̃ː/) and the unrounded /ɑ̃ː/ of banc for a total of four nasal vowels.^[18]

Orthographic

In the centuries following the Norman conquest, English was written mainly by Norman scribes. Thus, French spelling conventions had a great effect on the developing English orthography. Innovations that then arose include the following:^[19]

• "qu-" instead of "cw-" (queen)
• "gh" instead of "h" (night)
• "ch" or "cch" instead of "c" (church)
• "ou" instead of "u" (house)
• "sh" or "sch" instead of "sc" (ship)
• "dg" instead of "cg" or "gg" (bridge)
• "o" instead of "u" (love, son; the "u" that was originally in such words was considered difficult to distinguish from the surrounding letters)
• doubling of vowels to represent long vowel sounds (see)
• doubling of consonants after short vowels (sitting)
• more use of "k", "z" and "j"

Several letters derived from Germanic runes or Irish script that had been common in Old English, such as ƿ and ð, largely fell out of use, possibly because the Normans were unfamiliar with them. þ, the final remaining runic letter in English, survived in a severely-altered form until the 17th century.

Miscellaneous

The effects of the Norman conquest had an indirect influence on the development of the standardized English that began to emerge towards the end of the 15th century. The takeover of the elite class by the Normans, as well as their decision to move the capital of England from Winchester to London, ended the dominance of the Late West Saxon literary language.^[7] London's growing influence led to the English spoken nearby, which was largely derived from the Mercian dialect of Old English, to become the standard written form, rather than that of West Saxon areas such as Hampshire, Wiltshire and Somerset.

The Normans had a strong influence on English personal names.^[20] Old English names such as Alfred, Wulfstan, Aelfric, Harold, Godwin and Athelstan largely fell out of fashion and were replaced by the likes of Hebrew, Greek, or Christian names such as John, Peter and Simon as well as Normanized Germanic names like William, Richard, Henry, Robert, Roger and Hugh.

Examples of English words of French origin

Though the following list is in no way exhaustive, it illustrates some of the more common English words of French origin. Examples of French-to-English lexical contributions are classified by field and in chronological order. The periods during which these words were used in the English language are specified to the extent that this is possible.

Bibliography

• Chirol Laure, Les « mots français » et le mythe de la France en anglais contemporain, Paris, Klincksieck (coll. « Études linguistiques », 17), 1973, 215 p.
• Duchet Jean-Louis, « Éléments pour une histoire de l'accentuation lexicale en anglais », Études Anglaises : Grande-Bretagne, États-Unis, vol. 47, 1994, pp. 161–170.
• Kristol Andres Max, « Le début du rayonnement parisien et l'unité du français au Moyen âge : le témoignage des manuels d'enseignement du français écrits en Angleterre entre le XIIIe et le début du XVe siècle », Revue de Linguistique Romane, vol. 53, (1989), pp. 335–367.
• Lusignan Serge, La langue des rois au Moyen Âge. Le français en France et en Angleterre, Paris, PUF (coll. « Le nœud gordien »), 2004, 296 p.
• Mossé Fernand, Esquisse d'une histoire de la langue anglaise, 1^ère édition, Lyon, IAC, 1947, 268 p.
• Rothwell William, « À quelle époque a-t-on cessé de parler français en Angleterre ? », Mélanges de philologie romane offerts à Charles Camproux, 1978, pp. 1075–1089.
• Walter Henriette, Honni soit qui mal y pense : l'incroyable histoire d'amour entre le français et l'anglais, Paris, Robert Laffont, 2001, 364 p.

See also

• Francophonie
• Geographical distribution of French speakers
• Glossary of French words and expressions in English
• History of England
• History of France
• Organisation internationale de la Francophonie

References

Sources

• Roach, Peter (2011), Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary (18th ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 9780521152532

• Wells, John C. (2008), Longman Pronunciation Dictionary (3rd ed.), Longman, ISBN 978-1-4058-8118-0