What was the big change in the English language thtahappened in the middle ages?

Question

I'm having the hardest time trying to figure it out and just can't.

Any help here. :)

Answer 1

The Great Vowel Shift. Oddly enough, over several hundred years, there was a major change in how English was pronounced (and therefore, how it was written and read). Here's a more detailed explanation:

http://alpha.furman.edu/~mmenzer/gvs/wha...

Answer 2

Well the average rate of illiteracy decreased, so probably that more people spoke proper english.

Answer 3

There were two.  First, in 1066, England was conquered by the French-speaking Normans, who made French the official language of the country.  English continued to be spoken by the common people and even to be written a little, but when it re-emerged as a literary language about 150 years later, it had changed a great deal--the grammar had simplified, and words of French origin had replaced many native English ones.  As a result, a speaker of today's English can read Middle English (post-Conquest English) with relatively little difficulty and in any case can recognize it as English, whereas one has to study Old English, aka Anglo-Saxon, like a foreign language to be able to read much of it.

The second big change came near the end of the Middle Ages--during the 1400s.   Up until then, the vowels of English had been pronounced very much as they still are in most European languages: ah, ay, ee, o, oo.  During the fifteenth century, the pronunciation of the LONG vowels in English changed to pretty much their present sounds.  (Curiously, the short vowels remained basically the same.). This change is one reason, along with the dearth of English literature in that century and the fact that the event that marks the end of the Middle Ages in English happened in 1485, why the end of Middle English and the birth of Modern English is dated around the end of the 1400s.