The transmission of French in medieval England

When a language loses its native speakers, according to linguistic orthodoxy, it withers and dies. The paradox of Anglo-Norman - the French used in England in the Middle Ages - is that as it lost native speakers, it actually grew in importance. A much–quoted passage from the early 14th century writer Higden even proposed the possibility that French would take over from English as the main language of the country. How was this paradoxical situation made possible? French was not a dead language transmitted in England in the way Latin was, by years of academic study, and most authorities consider that native speakers of French were very few in number within a few generations of the Norman Conquest. Yet without formal instruction, and largely without native speakers, Anglo-Norman appears to have survived for some 300 years as the dominant vernacular language in public affairs. It became a language of literary recreation very early on, in the 12th century, then became used to record of public administration and law in the 13th century, partly displacing Latin. Other written mode functions it acquired included scientific and technical treatises, recipes, sermons and commercial correspondence. Earlier writers on Anglo-Norman assumed that as time went on it became a kind of jargon used by lawyers and others, and bore increasingly little resemblance to the French of France. This has been challenged by work I have done showing that later Anglo-Norman followed the development of continental French syntax quite closely as regards the order of Subject and finite Verb, and object pronouns governed by an infinitive. I have also shown that the apparent disregard of noun gender in 14^th century Anglo-Norman is an illusion caused by the neutralisation of phonological differences between determiner words such as un and une, cel and celle. Where determiner words such as son and sa kept their distinct sound values, respect for French gender distinctions remained virtually 100% accurate for most of the 14^th century in the Anglo-Norman petitions to parliament, though in later Law French they collapsed. The conventional notion that Anglo-Norman was highly eccentric as compared with the French of France has often been entertained with little or no regard for dialect variability within a language area. There are numerous apparent idiosyncracies in Anglo-Norman grammar which are in fact paralleled in other medieval French dialects.

The long survival of Anglo-Norman seems to challenge the usual notion that a living language is transmitted by native speakers through a process of primary (pre-school-age) language acquisition. How was Anglo-Norman transmitted across about twelve generations or so? Evidence of formal instruction in the language only appears in the late 14th century, just before it goes into terminal decline. The 'support system' for Anglo-Norman must have been some semi-natural means of language learning existing in the community, no doubt among the higher social classes, probably as a type of child second language acquisition.