The 12th to 14th Century

Deeper changes occurred in the grammar. Bit by bit, the wealthy and the government anglicized again, although Norman (and subsequently French) remained the dominant language of literature and law for a few centuries, even after the loss of the majority of the continental possessions of the English monarchy. The new English language did not sound the same as the old: for as well as undergoing changes in vocabulary, the complex system of inflected endings which Old English had was gradually lost or simplified in the dialects of spoken Middle English. This change was gradually reflected in its increasingly diverse written forms too. The loss of case-endings was part of a general trend from inflections to fixed word order that also occurred in other Germanic languages, so cannot be attributed simply to the influence of French-speaking sections of the population. English remained, after all, the language of the vast majority.

It was also a literary language in England, the language of poets such as Chaucer and Langland, from the 12th to the 14th centuries, alongside Anglo-Norman and Latin. In the later 14th century, Chancery Standard (or London English) — a phenomenon produced by the increase of bureaucracy in London, and the concomitant increase in London literary output —introduced a greater conformity in English spelling. Although the fame of Middle English literature tends to derive principally from the later 14th century, with the works of Geoffrey Chaucer and of John Gower, a substantial body of literature survives from throughout the Middle English period. Early Middle English (1100-1300) has a largely Anglo-Saxon vocabulary (in the North, with many Norse borrowings). But it has a greatly simplified inflectional system. The grammatical relations that were expressed in Old English by the dative and accusative cases are replaced in Early Middle English with constructions with prepositions. This replacement is incomplete. We still today have the Old English genitive in many words (we now call it the "possessive": the form dog's for "of the dog"; but the apostrophe here doesn't mean that anything has been "left out." But most of the other case endings disappear in the Early ME period, including most of the dozens of forms of the word the. Grammatical genders also disappear from English during the Early ME period (apart from personal pronouns) further simplifying the language.