Meanwhile, there were also Scandinavians who settled in northern 

France, and they came to an

agreement with the king of France. They acknowledged the French king, but they had a duke from among
their people in this region, called Normandy. They would, from then on, be known as Normans. (The
adjective is Norman, as in ‘Norman army’.) Like the Scandinavians in Britain, the Normans were also
highly adaptable, and very quickly adopted French culture and civilisation, and, it would appear, willingly
gave up their native language and spoke French as their mother tongue, although their dialect, Norman
French, was distinct from Parisian (Central) French.
There was already a certain amount of contact between the Normans and the English at the turn of the
millennium. It was through the contact between the English king Edward that the duke of Normandy,
William, believed that he was to succeed the English throne. When Edward died, an English earl, Harold,
was elected king instead. Furious as this decision, William sailed across to an unprepared English army.
After Harold was killed in battle, the English army became disorganised and soon retreated. On
Christmas day in 1066, William (‘the Conqueror’) was crowned king.

This was how the relationship between English and French was expressed by Robert of Gloucester (in
his Chronicle, written about 1300 – the translation is on the right, but you should be able to make out
quite a bit of his English already).
 
þus com lo engelond. in to normandies hond.
& þe normans ne couþe speke þo. bote hor owe speche.
& speke french as hii dude at om. & hor children dude also teche.
so þat heiemen of þis lond. þat of hor blod come.
holdeþ alle þulk speche. þat hii of hom nome.
vor bote a man conne frenss. me telþ of him lute.
ac lowe men holdeþ to engliss.  & to hor owe speche  ute.
ich wene þer ne beþ in al þe world. contreyes none.
þat ne holdeþ to hor owe speche. bote engelond one.
ac wel me wot uor to conne. boþe wel it is.
vor þe more þat a mon can. þe more wurþe he is.

Thus came – lo! – England into Norman’s hands,

And the Normans could not speak anything except their own speech,
And spoke French as they did at home, and their children did also teach,
So that high men of this land that of their blood come
Hold to all that speech that they took of them;
For unless a man knows French, men think little of him.
But low men hold to English and to their own speech yet.
I suppose there be none in all the countries of the world
That do not hold to their own speech, save for England alone,
But yet it is well for a man to know both,
For the more a man knows the more he is worth.

Later, Ranulph Higden expressed similar views (he wrote in Polychronicon in Latin, and this is
John Trevisa’s translation in the 1380s – the modern version is on the right):

This apeyring of þe burþ tonge ys bycause of twey þinges – on ys for chyldern in scole a
enes þe vsage and manere of al oþer nacions buþ compelled for to leue here oune longage and for to
construe here lessons and here þinges a frenynsch,
and habbeþ suþthe þe normans come furst into engelond.
Also gentil men children buþ ytau t for to speke freynsch fram tyme þat a buþ yrokked in
here cradel and conneþ speke and playe wiþ a child hys brouch.
And oplondysch men wol lykne hamsylf to gentil men and fondeþ wiþ gret bysynes for
to sepke freynsch for to be more ytold of .
þys manere was moche y-used tofore þe furste moreyn and ys sethe somdel y-chaunged … now, þe 
er of oure Lord a þousond þre hondred foure score and fyve,
in al the gramerscoles of Engelond childern leueþ Frensch, and construeþ and lurneþ an Englysch …
            Also gentil men habbeþ now moche yleft for
to teche here childern frensch. Hyt semeþ a gret wondur hou  englysch, þat ys þe burþ-
tonge of englyschmen and here oune longage and tonge ys so dyvers of soun in þis ylond,
and þe longage of normandy ys comlyng of anoþer lond and haþ a maner soun among al men þat spekeþ 
hyt ary t in engleond.

The impairing of the native tongue is because of two things – one is that children in school, against the
usage and custom of other nations, are compelled to drop their own language and to construe their
lessons and their tasks in French, and have done so since the Normans first came to England.
Also, gentlemen’s children are taught to speak French from the time that they are rocked in their
cradles and can talk and play with a child’s brooch; and country men want to liken themselves to
gentlemen, and try with great effort to speak French, so as to be more thought of.
This fashion was much followed before the first plague [1348] and is since somewhat changed … Now,
the year of our Lord one thousand, three hundred, four score and five, in all the grammar schools of
England, children leave French, and construe and learn in English.
 Also gentlemen have now to a great extent stopped teaching their children French. It seems a great
wonder how English, that is the native tongue of Englishmen and their own language and tongue, is so
diverse in pronunciation in this island, and the language of Normandy is a newcomer from another land
and has one pronunciation among all men that speak it correctly in England.

We have elsewhere discussed the evolution of English from being a synthetic language to a

more analytic language.
 
(a) Bourcier’s quotation suggests that this might be phonological in nature. The English language has a
very strong tendency to emphasise the distinction between stressed and unstressed syllables, resulting in
unstressed syllables having their vowel sound reduced to a ‘neutral’ schwa /@/ or to /I/. Inflexions are
generally not stressed, and given that English almost ceased to be written altogether in the early ME
period, English had become only a spoken language. The different inflexions could not be heard anymore
through the generalised use of the neutral vowel (‘levelled inflexions’ – meaning that all case inflexions
began to sound more or less alike). This resulted in the inflexions being unable to make the traditional OE
case distinctions, so that these distinctions had to be made by other means – the use of prepositions and
the reliance of word order.
 
(b) The other reason given is the language-contact situation between English and Norse speakers. They
lived side by side and intermarried and forgot their enmity when they were subjugated by the Normans.
That their languages were cognate meant that the stems of lexical items (ie the lexical items without
inflexions) were often very similar, but the inflexions for English and Norse were different, so that it
would be easier to forget inflexions altogether when they communicated.
 
(c) The fact the English in the period was only a spoken language, with no written standard to provide a
centripetal force, meant that there would be less opposition to change; there was hardly anything to hold
back innovation. The fact that English was a low-prestige language at this time also meant that there was
hardly any concern about ‘correctness’.

More about Middle English

In the eleventh century, there were various Norman conquests going in the region of Britain, and this
brought a huge difference in the development of the English language. The duke of Normandy, William,
the conqueror, conquered Britain in 1066 and, with this conquest, many newer impressions got fixed into
the English language. The most significant and important one was the French language impression which
got mixed with the English language being spoken at that time. This is the reason for the modern English
of today can be seen having its roots in French language.

More about Modern English

Right from the fifteenth century, English language took a great shift. This flux could be seen in the
context of vowel pronunciation. The vowel pronunciation became shorter and thus, it took the form which
is now reigning in most of the countries in this modern era. With that vowel shift, started the classical
renaissance period, the Romantic Movement, and after that period, came the industrial revolution in
Britain which added more towards the final evolution of English language. The changes which came into
the English language after the industrial revolution gave it the name of the late modern English language
which tends to have a more varied vocabulary as compared to the early version of modern English.
Hence, through this journey, English has become what is being spoken as native and official language in
most of the countries around the whole world. In Anglo-Saxon, words tended to have inflectional endings
that depicted their persona in the sentence. The word order in Anglo-Saxon sentence was not as essential
to ascertain what the sentence implied as it is now. In Middle English, several of these endings were
dropped off, and the role a word represented in the sentence was ascertained by word order, like it is
nowadays. There are differences naturally, but as a whole, a Middle English phrase structure is similar to
a Modern English sentence. Old English also had grammatical factors that other two have forgotten.