A site about Middle English?

So many high school and college students study Chaucer, but no sites on the English of his period are directed at them. If you're a student or a non-scholar who's looking to learn some Middle English/Chaucerian English, you've found your spot. If you're here for sound files or because "my homework assignment is to memorize the intro to the Canterbury Tales", jump to Whan that Aprille... (Whan that April...).

What's on this site?

Introduction, or "What is Middle English?"

Middle English isn't a dialect of English, and it wasn't just a uniform way of speaking English. It's a period of the English language, including many dialects over the span of three or four centuries. In many ways, it represents a language in transition somewhere between Old English (Eald Englisc) and Modern English. Traditionally, historical linguists separate Middle English from Old English in 1066, after the Battle of Hastings and the Norman conquest of England by William the Conqueror. They also split it from modern English sometime after Chaucer, and about a century before Shakespeare.

So I'll leave you with a dry definition of Middle English: English and all dialects ("Englishes") spoken and written between 1100 and 1500 AD/CE. Geoffrey Chaucer arrived on the scene in the 1300s (the 14th century). He wrote the Canterbury tales in stages between 1387 and 1400. In the following century (the early 1400's), the Chancery Standard would come to oust many dialects of Middle English and form the basis of most dialects of Modern English.

More information and recommended resources

Who are you?

Nativlang.com offers language learning materials of all kinds, like this free site teaching basic Middle English pronunciation and grammar. Check out that homepage for introductions to specific languages along with free text & video courses covering basic linguistics.

Among other books, nativlang.com sells Native Grammar: How Languages Work, which is an introduction to the backbones of language, with challenging, hands-on exercises and activities.

Middle & Old English resources

I use an old (1933) edition of The Poetical Works of Chaucer, edited by Robinson and published by Houghton Mifflin. More to date, the Norton Critical and Riverside editions have the original text with commentary, whereas many popular versions are actually translations of Chaucer. Penguin Classics does offer a version with the original spelling, however.

Good Middle English course books are hard to find. A Book of Middle English teaches basic grammar & pronunciation, and has plenty of reading exercises from 1100-1400 AD. If you're somewhat of a linguist at heart, try An Introduction to Middle English.

Teach Yourself Old English is a great course for beginners looking to read even older material like Beowulf.

The Germanic Languages, edited by König and Van Der Auerwa, has a detailed article on Old and Middle English, as well as one on the modern language, with overviews on phonology, morphology, lexis, syntax and historical comparative info. If all that means nothing to you, best to move on.