Dialects

The situation described is further corroborated by the fact that both variants of medieval English, Old English and Middle English, occur in the form of dialects just as in other languages of that age. It is characteristic of the state of research that no one has succeeded in presenting reliable and detailed treatises on the dialectal features, even though an abundance of individual observations have been published especially in the past (Toon 1992: 409-451). On the one hand, this stems from the linguistic contours of these dialects, which were certainly never standardized anywhere at that time. But, in particular, today we see the reason for this in the fact that many manuscripts are copies, whereby the original and the copy probably often greatly differed from a dialectal perspective. The most complicated case is certainly that of an original text found in the region where two dialects border. The confusing situation can be demonstrated by the paradigm of Beowulf, handed down to us in a very typical mixed dialect like many other works of Old English poetry. The manuscript forming the basis (MS Cotton Vitellius A. XV) dates from the late 10th Century and was probably compiled in the region where late West Saxon was spoken. We can, however, conclude from what we know about Old English dialects that a number of linguistic forms found in Beowulf refer rather to an earlier place of origin of the text in Anglia or Mercia (Jack 1994: 1-7). Linguistic inconsistency and general openness can thus be found.

The situation in regard to Middle English presents itself in a similar way with its considerably larger wealth of manuscripts. The Linguistic Atlas (Mcintosh et ah 1986) certainly represents a very helpful instrument for the study of dialects of individual Middle English texts and their regional classification - at least for the period between 1350 and 1450. But even then it is evident that a localization of individual texts is extremely difficult. The reason for this is not only that dialectal features overlap in these manuscripts due to the special processes of their production, but also because simple, clear linguistic structures are lacking. "Variation in written Middle English is so extensive that it is reasonable to ask in what sense we are dealing with a single state or stage of language" (Milroy 1992: 157).