HOTEL 4.2 — Old English and Middle English Dialects | History of the English Language

Old English had four dialects, and the one taught in every course — West Saxon — is not the ancestor of the English we speak. This video explains why. We set out the four dialect areas and then show that the map is not a map of speech but of where the surviving manuscripts happen to come from. Two phonological diagnostics let you place a text on sight, demonstrated on Cædmon’s Hymn in its Northumbrian and West Saxon versions. Then the three languages of England after 1066 — and why French, though dominant, was never actually made official. Finally the dialects of Middle English, how a text of unknown origin is located, and two medieval witnesses who found dialect difference worth writing about. Part two of three. Lecture 4 of the course History of the English Language.