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AUTHOR "John H. McWhorter"

TITLE "What happened to English?"

SUBJECT "Diachronica 19:2"

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What happened to English?*

John H. McWhorter
University of California, Berkeley

1. Introduction

Since linguistic investigations as early as Paul (1880), it has been well known
that in the evolution of grammars, simplification and complexification play
complementary roles. I will argue that in the emergence of Modern English,
simplification dominated complexification to a greater extent than in any other
Germanic language. Specifically I will claim that at a certain point in English’s
history, simplification dominated in a fashion suggesting a sociohistorical factor
hindering the full transmission of the grammar across generations.
This paper will not revive the hypothesis of Bailey & Maroldt (1977)
(followed by Domingue 1977) that Middle English was a creole that developed
when Norman French invaders learned English imperfectly and expanded their
reduced English into a full language. This hypothesis was motivated partly by
the heavy admixture from other languages in English’s lexicon and derivational
apparatus. But lexical mixture itself does not equate with creolization. Languag-
es can borrow massive amounts of lexicon and even morphology without
evidencing any traits that would suggest the label creole to any linguist, such as
many languages of Australia (Heath 1981), and “mixed” or “intertwined”
languages like Michif (Bakker 1997) and Media Lengua (Muysken 1997).

*"Irmengard Rauch, Anthony Grant, Stéphane Goyette, Gary Holland, James Matisoff,
Peter Tiersma, Jarich Hoekstra, Werner Abraham, Sally Thomason, Östen Dahl, Mikael
Parkvall, Bettina Tragl, and my once-and-future mentor Elizabeth Traugott have helped me
in innumerable crucial ways in venturing this paper; especial thanks are due to Andrew
Garrett, Peter Trudgill, and Martin Haspelmath. Sincere thanks to all of them, none of whom
are responsible, of course, for remaining flaws.
Diachronica 19:2 (2002), 217–272.
issn 0176–4225 / e-issn 1569–9714!© John Benjamins Publishing Company
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218 John H. McWhorter

Bailey & Maroldt and their followers also based their argument on English’s
notorious paucity of inflection in comparison to other Germanic languages.
However, Thomason & Kaufman (1988: 263–342) refute this thesis. The
inflectional loss had proceeded considerably before the Norman Invasion, and
even in dialects not in contact with French. In addition, today’s Mainland
Scandinavian languages, unaffected by any contact as heavy as that caused by
the Norman invasion in England, are little more inflected than English.
Moreover, during the Norman rule, French speakers were but a numerically
small elite, whose rendition of English can hardly have had impact on a vast
majority of monolingual English speakers. These and other arguments will be
taken as conclusive in this paper.
Thomason & Kaufman’s argument, however, entails that English’s heavy
inflectional loss was due simply to its being less “conservative” than its sisters,
implying that no external factor distinguished English’s development. Mean-
while, to the extent that English manifests other features we might treat as less
marked than their equivalents in its sister languages, the generative historical
linguistics tradition tends to ascribe these to “chain-style” effects of inflectional
loss that modern syntactic theory would predict. Examples include the rich
literature on the loss of OV and V2 word order, and other features such as
obligatory postposing of particles to the verb (e.g. Platzack 1986, Van
Kemenade & Vincent 1997, Fischer, Van Kemenade, Koopman & Van der
Wurff 2000). The common consensus among specialists on the history of
English is that features suggesting a break in transmission or unusual simplifica-
tion in the English timeline are mere trompe l’œils, having in fact emerged by
ordinary processes of change.
However, the focus on certain abstract syntactic features that the generative
enterprise conditions has perhaps narrowed our purview, in a fashion neglect-
ing other aspects of grammar that suggest a larger story. I will propose that loss
of inflection is but the tip of the iceberg in terms of Germanic features that
English has shed, complemented by many other losses unconnected with
analyticity. Overall, a comparison with its sisters reveals English to be signifi-
cantly less overspecified semantically and less complexified syntactically. Some
scholars, such as Lass (1987: 317–332) or Hawkins (1985), recognize that
English departs considerably from the Germanic template, but leave aside the
question as to why, with the implication that the issue was a matter of chance.
However, I will argue that a contact-based, external explanation provides a
principled account for the relevant facts.
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What happened to English? 219

2. The nature of overspecification and complexification

2.1 Overspecification
Any given language gives overt manifestation to particular underlying semantic
or syntactic distinctions which are left unmarked in many other languages. The
fact that many or most languages operate without marking the distinctions in
question entails that to mark the feature at all is ornamental, rather than
necessary, to human language. As such, in a given area, one language can be
considered overspecified in comparison to another.
For example, the Northern Californian American Indian language Karok
has grammaticalized different verbal suffixes for various containment mediums:
pa:θ-kírih “throw into fire”, pa:θ-kúrih “throw into water”, pa:θ-rúprih “throw
in through a solid” (Bright 1957: 98, 102). (These morphemes are not perceiv-
able reflexes of the words for fire, water, or solid respectively.) Most of the
world’s grammars do not happen to have grammaticalized such fine-grained
overt expressions of containment mediums, and it would be impossible to argue
that Universal Grammar specifies such. On the contrary, as useful as these
suffixes are in Karok grammar, their emergence was due to a chance elaboration
within a particular semantic area, not communicative necessity. Thus, in the
area of marking of containment mediums, Karok is overspecified in comparison
to English, just as in its grammaticalized marking of definiteness and indefinite-
ness of NPs, English is overspecified in comparison to Karok.
Along these lines, my comparison of English with its sisters suggests that
overall, English manifests less of this kind of overspecification than its sisters.
Hawkins (1985: 6) makes a similar observation regarding English and German:
“Where the surface structures (morphology and syntax) of English and German
contrast … English surface structures exhibit less correspondence with their
semantic representations than do those of German”, and later (28) “German
speakers are forced to make certain semantic distinctions which can regularly be
left unspecified in English”.
Throughout the paper, my delineations of overspecification refer to my
characterization above, as usefully elucidated by Hawkins’ conception.

2.2 Complexification
Complexity in syntax is certainly a difficult concept, upon which there is only
fitful agreement among linguists working in various paradigms. For the
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220 John H. McWhorter

purposes of this thesis, however, we will stipulate that within a given area of
grammar, a language’s syntax is more complex than another’s where it requires
the operation of more rules. Thus for example, a morphosyntax involving two
kinds of alignment rather than one (i.e. ergative/absolutive and nominative/
accusative) can be considered more complex than a strictly nominative/
accusative one (cf. the approach of Henry 1995, Henry & Tangney 1999). This
conception is admittedly preliminary, but I feel that it will serve adequately to
frame, elucidate, and support the particular thesis I wish to present.
Importantly, this conception of complexity addresses grammars solely as
systems viewed from the outside, as products of millennia of drift and its
attendant elaborations upon the rootstuff of the human linguistic capacity.
Complexity under this metric is not indexed with relative difficulty of produc-
tion or processing; this metric takes as a given that all languages are acquired
with ease by native learners. Our assumption is that human cognition is
capable of effortlessly processing great degrees of overspecification and
complexification in language (cf. Trudgill 1999). While there is no reason to
suppose that differentials in ease of production or processing do not exist,
these issues are ultimately of little import to the thesis explored here, a dia-
chronic and comparative one.

3. Examples

3.1 Inherent reflexivity marking

Germanic languages overtly mark what is often called “inherent reflexivity”.
These differ from literal reflexives in that while these refer to an event involving
two participants of which both happen, contrary to general expectation, to be
the same entity (He shot himself), inherent reflexives entail a perception of one
participant, performing upon itself an action whose reflexivity is the expected
case rather than an anomaly (He bathed) (Haiman 1983, Kemmer 1993).
Inherent reflexives are the product of the grammaticalization and bleaching
of the reflexive element in conjunction with verbs connoting inherently
reflexive actions, such that in many languages, inherent reflexivity is marked in
motion verbs (German sich beeilen “to hurry”), psych-verbs (sich erinnern “to
remember”), and verbs of social behavior (sich benehmen “to behave”); this is
a cross-linguistic developmental tendency (cf. Kemmer 1993, Peitsara 1997).
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Inherent reflexivity marking is common in all of the Germanic languages

but English, and was also present in early Germanic languages such as Gothic
(ni idreigo mik “I do not repent” [Dal 1966: 155]) and Old Norse (where it was
already grammaticalized to the point of morphologization; cf. 5.3), suggesting
that it was a Proto-Germanic feature. In this and similar tables, for reasons of
space, Mainland Scandinavian” is represented by Swedish, the feature having
also been identified in Danish and Norwegian:1
German sich rasieren “to shave”, sich beeilen “to hurry”, sich erinnern
“to remember”
Dutch zich scheren “to shave”, zich bewegen “to move”, zich herinneren
“to remember” (203–204)
Frisian hy skeart him “he shaves”, ik skamje my “I am embarrassed”, ik stel my
foar “I imagine” (66, 147)
Afrikaans hy bevind hom “he is situated (at)”, hy roer hom “he gets going”,
hy herinner hom “he remembers” (288–291)
Scandinavian raka sig “to shave”, röra sig “to move” känna sig “to feel” (105–106)
Icelandic koma “to come” / komast “to get to, reach”, snúa sér “to turn
around”, skammast sín “to be ashamed” (105, 143)
Faroese raka sær “to shave”, snúgva sær “to turn”, ætla sær “to intend” (117–118)
Yiddish bukn zikh “to bow”, shlaykhn zikh “to sneak”, shemen zikh “to
be ashamed”(89–90)
Table 1.!Inherent reflexives in Germanic

Note that a pronominal form restricted to reflexive use (e.g. a cognate of

German sich) is not necessary to inherent reflexive marking. The absence of a
reflex of sich is not local to English, but was already the case in Ingvaeonic, such
that Frisian also lacks a sich reflex; Afrikaans does as well. But in all Germanic
languages but English, inherent reflexivity is marked in the first and second
persons with the corresponding accusative or oblique pronoun (German ich
rasiere mich, du rasierst dich “I shave, you shave”), except Yiddish which uses its
zikh in all persons. And in the third person, those without a sich reflex mark
reflexivity with an accusative or oblique third person pronoun, e.g. Frisian hy
skeart him “he shaves”.

1."Page numbers refer to the following sources: Dutch: Donaldson 1997; Swedish: Holmes
& Hinchliffe 1997; Danish: Thomas 1911; Norwegian: Strandskogen & Strandskogen 1986;
Afrikaans: Ponelis 1993; Frisian: Tiersma 1985; Icelandic: Kress 1982; Faroese: Lockwood
1955; Yiddish: Lockwood 1995. Throughout the paper, where not cited, the source of the
data is these (e.g. in cases of negative evidence such as the absence of a feature in a grammar,
which is often impossible to refer to by page).
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222 John H. McWhorter

In Old English, inherent reflexivity was marked with either the dative or the
accusative pronoun in all persons:
(1) þa beseah he hine to anum his manna and cwæð
then look.past he him.dat to one.dat his man.pl.gen and say.past
“Then he looked at one of his men and said”
(Visser 1963: 146)2

Even at this early date its use was optional (Ø where the reflexive pronoun
would occur):
(2) se sylfa Drihten wolde Ø of heofenum on eorðan beseon
he self Lord want.past from heaven.dat on earth.acc see.inf
“The Lord himself wanted to look upon the earth from heaven”
(Visser 1963: 146)

Throughout the Middle English period, however, inherent reflexivity was

marked increasingly less (Mustanoja 1960: 431), likely preferred as a metrical
device (Fischer 1992: 239). As early as Old English, texts suggest only vague
semantic distinction between a given verb’s usage with and without the reflexive
pronoun (Mitchell 1985: 114, Visser 1963: 322, Rissanen 1999: 256).
By the Early Modern English period, Peitsara (1997: 303) finds inherent
reflexive marking in only a third of potential cases from 1500 to 1570, and in
less than a sixth from 1570 to 1640. By the latter period, Peitsara finds the
marking only in a limited number of verbs, including ones of motion, posture,
self-care and equipment; of psych-verbs only fear retains it (optionally) and
among social ones, commend. Eventually, inherent reflexive marking with
simple pronouns is eliminated completely, except for in scattered frozen
archaisms (Now I lay me down to sleep).
As inherent reflexive marking declines in Middle English, self, which begins
in Old English expressing emphatic reflexivity (among other uses: cf. Mitchell
1985: 115, Faltz 1985: 18–19, 35), increases in frequency; by the fifteenth century
its use had bleached semantically into compatibility with verbs that previously
took just a simple pronoun (Peitsara 1997: 320–323). Thus where Wycliffe in
the fourteenth century has Adam and his wijf hidden hem fro the face of the Lord
God (Old Testament, Genesis 3:8), Tyndale in the sixteenth has And Adam hyd

2."Abbreviations used throughout: dat dative, pl plural, imp imperative, obj object, part
partitive, def definite determiner, acc accusative, 1sg first-person singular, 3sg third-person
singular, prep preposition, nom nominative, gen genitive, neg negator, inf infinitive.
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What happened to English? 223

hymselfe and his wyfe also from the face of the LORde God (Five Books of Moses,
Genesis 3:8). However, instead of extending to the full range of verbs that the
bare-pronoun reflexive strategy once covered, self-pronouns settle into the
modern pattern, largely marking only literal reflexivity. Today, reflexivity is
usually marked where operation upon the self is emphasized for clarity (bathe
oneself) or stylistic purpose (they hid themselves). With some verbs, the reflexive
usage has conventionalized into a particular meaning (to behave versus to
behave oneself), while in only a limited number of verbs is the marking obliga-
tory (pride oneself, perjure oneself).
The result of this process was that as Peitsara neatly puts it, English became
unique among Germanic languages in “an individual tendency to treat overt
reflexivity as redundant, unless marked for practical or stylistic reasons”
(1997: 337). This cannot be attributed simply to the fact that inherent reflexivity
marking was already optional in Old English, given that such an account begs
the question as to why English did not instead choose to conventionalize the
initially optional usage rather than eliminate it. For example, the feature was
also at first variable in German (Curme 1952: 155–156), but was eventually
obligatorified; Curme (331) notes “German is usually tenacious of reflexive
form even after its meaning has changed”.
Obviously this was also the case in the other Germanic languages. In
Mainland Scandinavian, the grammaticalization went so far as that the reflexive
pronoun has eroded into a mere suffix on many verbs, creating deponents such
as minna-s “to remember”; Icelandic and Faroese’s -st suffix is similar (and is
also found in Nynorsk and other western Norwegian dialects; Peter Trudgill,
February 2002 p.c.). Cornips (2002) documents the development of reflexive
zich into a middle marker over the past hundred years in the Limburg dialect of
Dutch (Dit bed slaapt zich goed “This bed sleeps well”). The English situation
must also be seen within the context of a similar generalization of inherent
reflexive marking across Europe as a whole. Haspelmath (1998: 276) for
example, describes the development of anticausative marking with the reflexive
pronoun as a pan-European Sprachbund feature. Our question, then, is why
English took so anomalous a path as to eliminate the feature after having
partially conventionalized it.
Along those lines, the grammaticalization of inherent reflexives is obviously
connected to the marking not only of shades of reflexivity, but to distinctions of
valence (transitivity) and mood (passive and middle voice). These distinctions are
commonly related cross-linguistically (e.g. Lyons 1968:373–375), and the Scandi-
navian -s-marked verbs, for example, also encode passivity (bakas “to be baked”).
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224 John H. McWhorter

In this light, the disappearance in English of inherent reflexive marking can be

seen as one symptom of the general drift towards “transitivization” that Visser
(1963: 127–135) describes, where the overt distinction between transitive and
intransitive use of verbs erodes. Under this analysis, the eclipse of inherent
reflexive marking was part of a general process which also included the disap-
pearance of the ge- prefix that once distinguished transitive verbs (ærnan “to
run”, geærnan “to reach, attain by running”).
But the question we must ask is why similar processes did not converge
upon the same result elsewhere in Germanic. If there is a tendency for a
grammar to fill in “open spaces” in syntax as well as phonetic inventories as
Visser surmises (1963: 135), then we might ask why English did not submit its
pronouns to “exaptational” usage, in Lass’s (1990) conception borrowed from
evolutionary biology, recruiting reflexive pronouns as valence and mood
markers as dozens of other languages were concurrently doing across Europe?
Instead, English became a grammar markedly less overspecified than its
sisters in this area, leaving inherent reflexivity, transitivity, and causativity to
context to an extent unique in its subfamily, and unusual in the Indo-European
family as a whole.

3.2 External Possessor Constructions

When a possessed object falls into a semantic class roughly definable as inalien-
able, Germanic languages typically encode the possessor as an argument distinct
from the possessed NP itself, as in German’s Die Mutter wäscht dem Kind die
Haare “the mother washes the child’s hair”. While this construction is some-
times termed the “sympathetic dative”, I follow Vergnaud & Zubizarreta (1992)
and König & Haspelmath (1997) in referring to this as the external possessor
construction, as the term captures the larger generalization that the “external”
constituent can be marked with cases other than the dative. The external
possessive generally refers to animate possessors, and applies to body parts,
relatives, clothing, habitations, and sometimes even emotional conditions: the
motivating factor is membership in the “personal sphere” (König & Haspel-
math 1997: 530–533).
This feature is found in all of the Germanic languages except English and
Afrikaans; in Mainland Scandinavian and Icelandic the marking is locative rather
than dative, while Yiddish has the dative for pronouns and the benefactive for
nouns. Because Proto-Germanic surveys are notoriously sparse in their coverage
of syntax, I have no data on this construction in Gothic or Old Saxon, and a mere
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What happened to English? 225

hint in Old Norse, in the form of skera tungu ór höfdi manni “cut the tongue out
of man’s head” in Cleasby & Vigfusson’s (1957) Old Icelandic dictionary, where
the dative marking in manni suggests the presence of the construction.3 Howev-
er, the uniform presence of the construction across modern Germanic indicates
that it is an original Germanic trait (although König & Haspelmath 1997 and
Haspelmath 1999 treat it as an areal feature, such that contact may have played
a role in its distribution within Germanic as well).
German:
(3) Die Mutter wäscht dem Kind die Haare.
the mother wash.3sg the.dat child the.pl hair.pl
“The mother washes the child’s hair.”
Dutch:
(4) Men heeft hem zijn arm gebroken.
imp have.3sg 3sg.obj his arm break.part
“They broke his arm” (König & Haspelmath 1997: 554)4
Frisian:
(5) Ik stompte my de holle.
I bump.past me.dat the head
“I bumped my head.” (Jarich Hoekstra, July 2001 p.c.)
Scandinavian:
(6) Någon bröt armen på honom.
someone break.past arm.def prep 3sg.obj
“Someone broke his arm.” (König & Haspelmath 1997: 559)
Icelandic:
(7) Han nuddaði á henni fætur-na.
he massage.past on her.dat leg.pl.def:acc
“He massaged her legs.” (König & Haspelmath 1997: 559)
Faroese:
(8) Eg hoyrdi røddina á honum.
I hear.past voice on 3sg.dat
“I heard his voice.” (Lockwood 1955: 105)

3."The author thanks one of the external referees for this datum.
4."The construction is recessive in standard Dutch; speakers tend to feel Men heeft zijn arm
gebroken as “better”.
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226 John H. McWhorter

Yiddish:
(9) a. Di mame hot em gevasht di hor.
the mother have.3sg 3sg.dat wash.part the hair
“The mother washed his hair.”
b. Di mame hot gevasht di hor farn kind.
the mother have.3sg wash.part the hair for.the child
“The mother washed the child’s hair.” (Jim Matisoff, p.c.)

Old English had external possessor marking, as in:

(10) þa cnitton hi rapas … hire to handum and fotum
then tie.past they rope.pl her.dat to hand.dat.pl and foot.dat.pl
“then they tied ropes … to her hands and feet”
(Mitchell 1985: 125)

However, the construction, already optional in Old English (Mitchell 1985:126),

decreases in frequency throughout the Old English period (Mitchell 1985:126–
127, Ahlgren 1946). Visser (1963:633) notes it as “common” but not obligatory in
Middle English, but almost completely obsolete by the Modern English period.
Modern English retains but sparse remnants of the earlier construction, as in She
looked him in the eyes (König & Haspelmath 1997: 554, 560).
Ahlgren (1946: 201–202) suggests that English may have lost the external
possessor construction due to the collapse of the dative and the accusative in
English case-marking. This early explanation has its echo in the emphasis in
modern treatments on tracing historical developments in English to loss of
overt case distinctions. But this surely cannot serve as an explanation for the
loss of external possessor marking when Dutch and Scandinavian have experi-
enced the same collapse of dative and accusative in pronouns and yet retain the
feature. It is also germane that even a language that does retain the dative/
accusative contrast robustly, Icelandic, has nevertheless shed dative-marked
external possessives in favor of marking them with the locative. Obviously
collapse of case marking was not a causal factor in English (cf. Haspelmath
1999: 125). Nor can Ahlgren’s suggestion (1946: 210–216) that Latin was a
deciding factor stand, when French and other Romance languages retain dative
external possessor marking (il m’a frappé la main “he hit my hand”) despite
Latin playing as influential a role as a language of scholarship in their lifespans
as it did in that of English.
Thus the question that arises is why it is ungrammatical in English to say
“They broke him his arm”, when Dutch has Men heeft hem zijn arm gebroken, or
why English does not have “Someone broke the arm on him” as the Scandinavian
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languages do. Proposing a pathway of semantic evolution of prepositions upon

which external possessives fall at a highly evolved point, Haspelmath (1999:
130–131) suggests that English does not use the preposition to in the function
because it has yet to abstractualize to this extent. This is well-taken in explain-
ing why *They broke the leg to him is ungrammatical, but does not account for
why English does not instead encode external possession with oblique pronouns
without a preposition, as Dutch does, or with locative prepositions as in
Scandinavian. Under any internally-based account, it is indeed “difficult to find
a proper explanation”, as Visser (1963: 633) puts it, of the absence of external
possessor constructions in English; like so many, Visser is left to simply describe
the change.
König & Haspelmath (1997: 583) do note that the general tendency
throughout Europe is for dative external possessives to recede, with only Baltic,
Slavic, and Albanian preserving them as robustly as in early documents. Yet our
question regarding English must be why it has lost the feature so quickly and
thoroughly. Today in Europe, Welsh and Breton are the only other languages
that lack the construction (and Turkish if we count it as a European language),
with even Finnish and Hungarian having picked up reflections of it, presumably
through Sprachbund effects (1997: 587–588).
Indeed, the loss of this construction in English must be viewed against
concurrent cross-linguistic tendencies that are the very source of constructions
such as these. Germane here is what Icelandic linguists term “dative sickness”,
whereby over time, the marking of experiencers as dative rather than accusative
is increasing rather than decreasing, as in:
(11) a. Mig brestur kjark.
1sg.acc lack.3sg courage.acc
b. Mér brestur kjarkur.
1sg.dat lack.3sg courage.nom
“I lack courage.”
(Smith 1992: 291)

Smith identifies dative sickness as symptomatic of a general diachronic tenden-

cy for case marking to decrease in what he terms “abstractness”; under his
definition, abstractness decreases as the linking of grammatical relations
(general) to semantic roles (specific) becomes more explicit (viz. Hawkins’
observation in 2.1).
Thus the pan-European tendency to dilute external possessor marking co-
exists with a countervailing possibility that a grammar may also drift into
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228 John H. McWhorter

increasing the overt marking of particular semantic roles applicable to a given

general grammatical relation. English shunned the latter pathway, so decisively
that external possessor marking vanished completely.
Finally, it is relevant that the only other Germanic language lacking
external possessive constructions is Afrikaans, whose structure is now agreed
upon to have been decisively impacted by extensive acquisition of Dutch as a
second language.
English, then, is unique among its European sisters in having chosen not to
mark an inalienable, “personal” shade of experiencerhood, and quite unusual
in this even among European languages as a whole.

3.3 Grammatical gender marking on the article

The mechanics of the loss of grammatical gender in English have been well
covered (e.g. Thomason & Kaufman 1988, Lass 1992: 103–116). By the end of
the twelfth century, grammatical gender was already all but lost in northern
dialects; two centuries later, it had all but disappeared even in the south (cf.
Strang 1970: 265).
Certainly, as Thomason & Kaufman emphasize, English is hardly unique
in having lost grammatical gender marking on nouns themselves — Mainland
Scandinavian, Dutch and Frisian have only remnants of segmental indication
of gender on nouns. Even Old English had already moved considerably in this
direction, the emergence of multiple homophonies via phonetic change having
already rendered the nominal morphology “relatively inexpressive and
ambiguous”, as Lass (1992: 104) puts it and so many others have noted. The
Germanic syllable-initial stress system is well-known for having encouraged
the erosion of unaccented word-final segments, which left nominal morpholo-
gy especially vulnerable.
But nominal inflections were only a subset of the grammatical gender
marking apparatus. To quote Lass again, in Old English “the richest and most
distinctive marking for nominal categories is on determiners, in the strong
adjective declension, and in pronouns” (1992: 106). Here, the determiners are
particularly important; specifically, the articles. Concurrently with the erosion
of the nominal inflections, an initial three-gender distinction in the demonstrative
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/ article — se (masc.), seo (fem.) and þæt (neut.) — collapsed into the gender
neutral the.5
Scholars on the history of English typically subsume the inflectional erosion
and the collapse of the article’s gender distinctions under a general “shift” from
a grammatical to a natural gender marking system, such as Strang (1970: 265,
268) and Lass, who describes this as a “cumulative weighting of ‘decisions’ in
favour of natural gender”. However, in a broader view, the “drift” characteriza-
tion can serve only as a description rather than as an explanation. This is
because it begs the question as to why all of the other Germanic languages of
Europe, despite the erosion of the nominal inflections, maintained a grammati-
cal gender distinction in the articles.
Surely, Dutch, Frisian, Danish and Swedish collapsed the original Germanic
masculine and feminine into a common gender contrasting with a neuter. But
they only went this far, and it is unclear why English could not have done the
same. It would even seem to have been phonetically plausible for se and seo to
collapse into, perhaps, se, with þæt remaining as a neuter marker. Strang
(1970: 268) states that “Gender, as a grammatical system, can hardly survive the
transformation of the personal pronoun system” — but since Dutch, Frisian
and Mainland Scandinavian underwent similar collapses in their pronouns, it
is unclear that the disappearance of grammatical gender in English was so
foreordained. (Note also that Norwegian and many nonstandard Mainland
Scandinavian dialects retain all three genders [e.g. Haberland 1994: 324].)
Similarly, Lass’s observation on “cumulative weightings” is obviously correct in
itself, but reveals English speakers to have been unique among Europe’s
Germanic languages in this regard.
Is it possible that the phonetic shapes of Old Norse’s articles led to the
collapse of gender distinctions in Old English’s cognate items as English
speakers intermingled with Scandinavian settlers? It would seem that this
explanation will only serve us but so well. The definite articles English speakers
would have heard Old Norse speakers using were þæn (masc.), þe (fem.), and
þæt (neut.) (Gordon 1927: 302). It is logical that English speakers in contact
with Old Norse might have replaced the initial consonant of se and seo with [θ],

5."Given the occasional lack of fit in languages with nominal inflection between grammati-
cal gender and inflectional class (Spanish mano “hand” has masculine inflection but feminine
concord), more properly, English lost inflectional nominal class marking rather than
grammatical gender marking specifically. However, the observation crucial to my thesis is
that English also shed true grammatical gender marking on its articles.
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the varieties being so typologically close that small adjustments like these could
have gone a long way in easing communication. Yet contact qua se gives us no
reason to assume that the immediate result would have been a single gender-
neutral item the. When bilingualism between Western Danish and Low German
was common in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, Danish lost much inflec-
tion (Haugen 1981) but retained a two-way gender distinction in its definite
article (rather than reducing all forms to, for example, [d6] on the phonetic
model of what was common to the German definite articles). On the contrary,
one plausible scenario is that English would have developed, for instance, a
common gender item such as [θe] and preserved its neuter þæt. If such had
occurred, there are no grounds for assuming that phonetic erosion would
inevitably have eliminated the distinction in final consonant between the two
forms. Faroese is a living demonstration, with its cognate configuration,
masculine and feminine tann and neuter tað. After centuries of regular use, the
two remain distinct, partly due to the inherent conservativity of heavily used
items. Only in English was this tendency overridden in favor of eliminating
grammatical gender entirely.
Two broader observations highlight that English’s lack of grammatical
gender is a more “interesting” fact than generally assumed. First, among
Germanic languages, again English’s only parallel is Afrikaans, a language whose
history was heavy with second-language acquisition.
Second, it has been seldom remarked that in its lack of any kind of gram-
matical gender within the noun phrase, English is unique not only among
European Germanic languages, but among all the languages of Europe. As we
would predict from the tendency for erosion and analogy to erase word-final
morphology, there are scattered instances recorded in Europe of the loss of
grammatical gender — but only in a few nonstandard dialects of particular
languages, not all of the languages’ dialects. Examples include Western Danish
(Haberland 1994), Ostrobothnian Swedish, Tamian Latvian (Mathews 1956),
and Mandres Albanian (Hamp 1965). Crucially, in the last two cases, gender
was lost not through internal change but because of language contact (with
Livonian and Turkish respectively) — significant for our argument that English
was crucially affected by contact.
To be sure, the two cases of internal loss are both Germanic. Yet the
question remains: why is English the only European language in which all
dialects have lost grammatical gender, such that today English speakers are the
only Europeans who encounter grammatical gender marking as a new concept
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What happened to English? 231

when acquiring another European language?6 Or, to view this from another
angle, English is the only language in Europe where loss of grammatical gender
occurred so quickly and completely as to be a fait accompli across all dialects by
the time European languages were being standardized in the middle of the last
millennium.

3.4 Derivational morphology

As is well known, English is unusual among Germanic languages in the volume
of original Germanic derivational morphology that it has lost: the rich Proto-
Germanic battery of affixes (cf. Voyles 1992: 270–279) has been reduced to
scattered remnants. The typical account focuses on the frequent replacement of
Germanic derivational affixes with French ones. But some analysts note that
this loss appears to have predated significant contact with French (Strang
1970: 191, Dalton-Puffer 1995: 39); while French lexical items often only appear
in texts after the Norman occupation, Hiltunen (1983: 92) describes the
derivational loss as virtually complete as soon as Middle English texts begin.
This means that in the strict sense, Old English apparently simply let a great
deal of its derivational apparatus go; the French replacements were a later
consequence of geopolitical developments.

3.4.1 Verb prefixes

Of course, in the case of many of the Old English prefixed verbs, we cannot speak
properly of loss given that they were simply replaced by equivalent phrasal verbs,
as Hiltunen describes: toberstan > to break apart, inlædan > to bring in, etc.
However, this only happened where the prefix either co-existed with a free
preposition (e.g. in) or was of semantics robust and discrete enough to be readily
substituted by an equivalent free word: down for niþer-, around for ymb-, up and
out for the intensificational uses of for-, as in forbærnan > to burn up.
This process would then fall under the rubric of the general loss of mor-
phology in the inflectional realm, where similarly, distinctions encoded by
affixation are often replaced by ones encoded by free morphemes (e.g. preposi-
tions) or word order. But all of the derivational losses cannot be subsumed

6."I take the liberty of assuming that speakers of the aforementioned nonstandard dialects
have generally had enough exposure to the standard one to be familiar with the concept of
gender, especially in these times when dialects of this kind are so often threatened by
standard varieties and geopolitically dominant languages.
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under a simple substitution of the analytical for the synthetic, as certain prefixes
were instead eliminated from the grammar without any substitution. Namely,
the prefixes with semantics leaning more towards the grammatical, abstract pole
simply disappeared except for fossilized remnants. Thus English lost its transiti-
vizing be- (seon “to see”, beseon “to look at”), and ge-, alternatively described as
transitivizing (Visser 1963: 127) or perfectivizing (Mitchell & Robinson
1986: 58), as in winnan “to toil”, gewinnan “to conquer”.
Another question arises with another use of for-. Grammars typically
describe its relatively compositional uses, such as the intensificational one.
However, a survey of its uses across the Old English lexicon shows that its
contribution had often bleached to the point that there was little or no percepti-
ble difference of meaning between the bare verb and its conjunction with for-,
as in helan / forhelan “to conceal” and þolian / forþolian “to lack, be deprived
of”. This is also the case in German, Dutch, Afrikaans, Yiddish, Mainland
Scandinavian, and Frisian, where there are doublets of this type whose differen-
tiation of usage is, at best, highly subtle and sometimes register-bound (German
sterben / versterben “to die”). It is likely that these cases rest at one point on a
cline towards the reanalysis of the for- cognate as simply a marker of verbhood,
connoting transformation, extended in the usage to nouns and adjectives as well
as verbs: German verlängern “to make longer”, Dutch vernederlandsen “to
Dutchify”, Afrikaans verafrikaans “to Afrikaansify”, Swedish förgifta “to
poison”, etc. Even heavy contact has not hindered this development, as we see
in Afrikaans as well as Pennsylvania German, a language long in intense contact
with English, where nevertheless the cognate prefix is used to create new verbs:
[f6rbftwt] “all botched up” (Van Ness 1994: 433). Old English could, theoretical-
ly, have replaced the compositional uses of for- (such as the intensificational
one) with phrasal verb particles, but otherwise retained for- as a verbalizer of
this kind as many of its sisters did. But instead, while the intensificational uses
were indeed replaced by phrasal verbs, in its other uses for- simply disappeared
as a productive morpheme.
In short, English’s loss of prefixes entailed a significant degree of loss of
overt specification. As it happens, Icelandic and Faroese have also opted for
phrasal verbs to the virtual exclusion of the Germanic verbal prefixes, including
losing be-, ge- and for- cognates. Mainland Scandinavian also originally shed its
cognates of these three affixes, but then borrowed them back from Low
German. My thesis hardly rules out that a given Germanic language other than
English might have also shed a given feature, due either to developments
elsewhere in the grammar or to sheer chance. However, my thesis is indeed that
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What happened to English? 233

to couch the developments in English as unremarkable results of a ‘trend

towards analyticity’ misses a larger point. In that light, we must first note how
very much inflectional morphology Icelandic and Faroese nevertheless retain, as
well as the various other overspecified features discussed thus far (and hence-
forth) that both they and Mainland Scandinavian retain. Moreover, it is also
relevant that even Afrikaans, despite its heavy inflectional loss, has retained the
verbal prefixes be- (beslis “to decide”), ont- (ontken “to deny”) and ver- (ver-
pletter “to smash”), and not in fossilized form, but with a certain degree of
productivity, as demonstrated by neologisms such as beplan “to plan”, ontlont
“to defuse”, and verafrikaans “to Afrikaansify” (Ponelis 1993: 556–557).
When the derivational prefixes were lost in two languages otherwise heavy
with morphology, and meanwhile preserved in a language that otherwise
underwent major reduction in morphology, the loss in English appears trace-
able to something other than random phonetic erosion — something more
specific was at work.

3.4.2 Description versus explanation

The causes traditionally adduced for this rather striking sloughing away of
derivational apparatus within a few centuries leave more questions than
answers. The idea that lack of stress rendered the morphemes uniquely
vulnerable addresses a tendency rather than an inevitable death sentence.
German and others, after all, retain, for example, past participle marker ge-,
and even southwestern English dialects retained its cognates y- and a- (cf.
Barnes 1886: 27–28 on Dorset) as participial markers until pressure from the
standard rendered them extinct. This last questions Marchand’s (1969: 130–
131) suggestion that the vowel-initial prefixes in particular were uniquely
vulnerable, as well as the idea that erosion is the sole reason that the almost
three dozen Old English verbs transitivized by ge- that Visser (1963: 127) lists
were shorn of their valence markers.
Authors also sometimes suppose that an affix was ripe for elimination because
it had many meanings (Dalton-Puffer 1996:179 on adjectival marker -ly), or
because its contributions to many stems were no longer semantically predict-
able (Marchand 1969: 130–131 on for-). However, in any language, a given affix
may remain in productive use in a core meaning while its contributions to
myriad roots have drifted into noncompositionality. The noncompositional
uses are not evidence of imminent demise of the affix, but merely indications
that the affix has been in use for a long time. The German ver- is a useful
example. One usage conveys the notion of “away”: jagen “to hunt”, verjagen “to
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234 John H. McWhorter

chase away”. There are extended meanings from this one, such as error (“away”
from the right path), creating antonyms such as lernen “to learn” versus
verlernen “to forget”. But meanwhile many uses of ver- are unattributable to any
of these meanings and must be learned by rote, such as nehmen “to take”,
vernehmen “to perceive”. Yet this is not taken to signal that ver- is on its way out
of the grammar; on the contrary, it is used productively to create new verbs
(verschlagworten “to file under a subject heading” [Ingo Plag, p.c.]), with the
non- and semi-compositional results of its historical legacy simply dragged
along by speakers. Thus the question is why English does not drag along non-
compositional cases like forbid and forgive at the same time as creating words
like “forenglish” to mean “to Englishify”.
Finally, there are explanations such as Visser’s (1963: 134) that a given affix
disappeared because a great number of the words displaying it “dropped into
disuse”. Visser’s list of now lost words where be- was affixed to roots still used
in bare form in Modern English is worth citing in full: bebark, bedwell, bechirp,
beflow, befly, begaze, beglide, beglitter, bego, behoot, beleap, belie, bemew, berain,
beride, berow, beshite, beshriek, besit, bescramble, bescratch, besparkle, beswink.
First, why could a healthy subset of words of this kind not have persisted
alongside French equivalents, as help persisted alongside aid, etc.? Certainly we
would expect some to vanish by the sheer dictates of serendipity — but so many
that today the prefix occurs on too few words to be processible to any but highly
literate modern speakers? Even if all of the words on Visser’s list did for some
reason “drop into disuse” by chance, why did speakers not come to apply the
native affix to borrowed words, as they went on to apply borrowed affixes to
native words (speakable, bondage [Dalton-Puffer 1996: 221], or today, faxable)?
An alternate interpretation of the disappearance of the words is that it was the
affix that speakers were rejecting, not the words themselves — especially when
they so often retained the root itself (i.e. in reference to Visser’s list, bark, dwell,
chirp, flow, etc.).

3.5 Directional adverbs

Germanic languages typically distinguish forms of adverbs of place according to
location, motion towards, and motion away from (Swedish här “here”, hit “to
here”, and härifrån “from here” [Holmes & Hinchliffe 1997: 115–116]). This
was a Proto-Germanic feature (cf. Voyles 1992: 242).
Old English originally toed the Germanic line here (e.g. her, hider, heonan),
but the system was already fragile, with her often used for motion towards,
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What happened to English? 235

-an-suffixed forms losing their sense of “from” and being used as mere loca-
tionals, etc. (Mitchell 1985: 476, and Meroney 1945: 386, cited in Mitchell).
Given that these forms were used in high literary English into the 1800s, it is
difficult to place exactly when they passed out of the spoken language. However,
all would agree that they are no longer current today beyond frozen expressions
like hither and yon (which to this writer’s ear are restricted for modern genera-
tions to the ironic, at least in the United States).7
The loss of the “motion away from” forms did not in itself lead to a loss in
encoded meaning, since the word from was recruited to serve the same purpose:
heonan became from here, etc. However, motion towards a destination is often
contained within the semantics of a verb of motion, and in these cases, English,
as so often elsewhere, took the route of leaving the nuance to context:8
Table 2.!Directional adverbs in Germanic
Eng OE Ger Du Fr9 Yi Sc10 Ic Fa Afr

here her hier hier hjir hi här hér her hier

hider her(-) hiernaartoe hjirhinne aher hit hingaþ higar heirnatoe

there þær dort daar dêr dort där þar har daar
þider hin(-) daarnaartoe dêrhinne ahin dit þangaþ hagar daarnatoe

where hwær wo waar wêr vu var hvar hvar waar

hwider wohin waar..heen wêrhinne vuhin vart hvert waarheen

Certainly as directionality itself goes, the overt distinction is not entirely foreign
to English, as in sitting in the house versus running into the house. Moreover,
even with the adverbs themselves, colloquial Englishes often make the distinc-
tion variably with where as in Where is she at? versus A: We’re going now. B:
Where to? But this is hardly the case with most applicable adverbs, and the point

7."Shortly after writing this I noticed that thence is used occasionally in nonfiction prose,
and the same could be said for whence. However, both are foreign to the spoken register, and
hither and thither are utterly impossible in both spoken and written Modern English beyond
the ironic or deliberately archaic.
8."Pages for data in sources listed in fn. 1: Dutch: 125, Yiddish: 59, Swedish: 115–116,
Icelandic: 97, Faroese: 57–61; Afrikaans data from Eksteen (1997).
9."Frisian data in this table from Peter Tiersma (July 2001 p.c.).
10."The Mainland Scandinavian varieties differ in the fashions and extents to which they
indicate direction in their adverbs, but the distinction is overall very much alive in both
Danish and Norwegian.
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remains that it is obligatory in the standard not to mark the distinction on any
adverb: hither, thither, and whither are strictly archaic words foreign to even the
highest registers of Modern English. Moreover, arguably, the absence of the
distinction is grammatical to all English speakers — there is probably no
Anglophone context on earth where asking Where? rather than Where to? would
sound non-native or clumsy.
Other Germanic languages differ slightly in the degree to which the
distinctions are obligatory, to their scope of application within the grammar ,
and in where particular usages fall in terms of register. But in all of the languag-
es, the distinction is a robust aspect of their grammars (to my knowledge, even
nonstandard varieties), usually applying to a wide range of adverbs.
We cannot simply classify this loss as a mere symptom of the erosion of
morphology in Old English. For one, the “motion” forms in Old English
differed in shape from the locational reflexes far beyond the affix itself. If
morphological loss were the smoking gun here, then we might expect, for
example, hid and heon to have resulted, still distinct from her (> here). In any
case, too often Germanic languages have maintained this distinction despite vast
morphological losses: Afrikaans is the most pointed demonstration, followed by
Mainland Scandinavian and Dutch.
But English alone shed these forms, and Sapir (1921: 169–170) artfully
parsed the grammar-wide developmental impetus that this demonstrated:
As soon as the derivation runs danger of being felt as a mere nuancing of, a
finicky play on, the primary concept it tends to be absorbed … [an] instance of
the sacrifice of highly useful forms to this impatience of nuancing is the group
whence, whither, hence, hither, thence, thither. They could not persist in live
usage because they impinged too solidly upon the circles of meaning represent-
ed by the words where, here and there. That we add to where an important
nuance of direction irritates rather than satisfies.

Crucially, in Germanic only English speakers felt such an “irritation”.

3.6 Be with past participles

A hallmark of Germanic (and Romance) is the use of the verb to be with a large
subset of intransitive verbs in the perfect: German er hat gegessen “he has eaten”,
he ate”, er ist gekommen “he has arrived”, “he arrived”. Of course, the precise
domain of intransitives to which be applies varies across the languages, but the
basic distinction is retained even in Afrikaans (Ze zijn vertrokken “they have left”
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What happened to English? 237

[Ponelis 1993: 444]) and Yiddish (Ikh bin geblibn “I stayed” [Lockwood
1995: 83]). The virtually uniform distribution of this feature suggests Proto-
Germanic inheritance; it is found as early as Old Norse (Brenner 1882: 129) and
Old Saxon (Ramat 1998: 403). Accordingly, Old English marked this distinction
with the verbs beon and wesan:
(12) hu sio lar Lædengeðiodes ær ðissum afeallen wæs
how the learning Latin-language.gen before this.dat fall-away.part was
“How the learning of Latin was fallen away before this”
(Mitchell & Robinson 1986: 111)

Yet as so often with typical Germanic constructions, already in Old English the
usage was apparently in flux, with habban encroaching on the domain of beon
and wesan. Mitchell (1985: 302–304) suggests that none of the attempts over the
years to delineate a principled semantic distinction between the use of a verb
with habban as opposed to beon or wesan withstand scrutiny, and questions
whether the documentation even indicates a grammaticalized be-perfect, as
opposed to a typical use of a be-verb with stative adjectivals.
By the 1500s, the use of be in the perfect had largely shrunk to the change-
of-state class of intransitives such as come, become, arrive, enter, run, and grow
(And didst thou not, when she was gone downstairs, desire me to be no more so
familiarity with such poor people? [Henry IV, II.i.96, cited in Traugott 1972: 144;
cf. also Rissanen 1999: 213]). In their variationist analysis based on texts as
representative as possible of the spoken language, Rydén & Brorström
(1987: 200) show that by the early 1800s, overall usage of have over be surpassed
the fifty percent mark, with prescriptive grammarians granting tolerance of the
be-perfect to an ever narrower class of verbs over the century (1987: 206–211).
Today the usage has vanished except for in frozen form with go (i.e., if I may,
The construction is gone).11
The pathway English followed is striking given that the development of
be-perfects was an innovation in Germanic and Romance rather than an
inheritance from Proto-Indo-European, and in many languages the domain of
be has spread rather than contracted over time — cf. the varying extents of its

11."Rydén & Brorström (1987: 211) also include change, recover, turn (in its transformative
meaning), set (as in The sun is set), and fly. However, this author’s intuitions as a native
American English speaker sense these as strictly archaic, and suggest that go is indeed the only
remaining form in the modern language, in concurrence with authors like Christophersen
& Sandved (1969: 221).
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application across Western European languages in Sorace (2000). Southwestern

Norwegian dialects even went so far as to extend the be-perfect into the transi-
tive (Melchers 1992). But English instead withdrew from even allowing the
construction to overspecify intransitivity, thus joining the elimination of
inherent reflexive marking and the derivational prefixes be- and ge- in render-
ing English the Germanic language with the least overt marking of valence.
Obviously we cannot lay this change at the feet of inflectional loss, nor can
it be subsumed under the rubric of the drift towards analyticity. Typically, the
disappearance of the be-perfect is attributed to the recruitment of be as a marker
of the passive (Mustanoja 1960: 501, Traugott 1972: 145, Mitchell 1985: 299,
Rissanen 1999: 213). There is even comparative support for this explanation, in
the fact that Swedish, the only Germanic language other than English that lacks
the be-perfect (Vi har rest till Spanien förr “We have gone to Spain before”
[Holmes & Hinchliffe 1997: 100]), has also recruited its be-verb vara to mark
the passive (cf. Rissanen 1999: 215).
But the causal relationship here is not absolute. Icelandic, too, forms its
passives with its be-verb vera (ég var barinn “I was hit”) and in the perfect uses
have with both transitives and intransitives (ég hef komið “I have come”) (Kress
1982: 148–149). Yet Icelandic also uses vera with intransitive verbs of motion
and change-of-state to connote the resultative: ég er kominn “I am come, I am
here”, and the class of verbs used this way is large (Kress 1982: 152–153) — the
strategy is by no means the recessive, marginal archaism that it was, for exam-
ple, by Early Modern English.
It also bears mentioning that Swedish is unique even in Mainland Scandi-
navian in lacking a be-perfect. Danish and Norwegian retain it: Danish Barnet
er kommen “the child has come” (Thomas 1911: 133–134), Norwegian Han er
reist “he has left” (Strandskogen & Strandskogen 1986: 21). This highlights the
general tenacity of this feature in a language once it arises (although it happens
to be receding in Norwegian). Yet note that English parallels the Swedish
exception — as always, if a Germanic language other than English happens to
opt for context where family tradition calls for being explicit, English will have
done the same (the Faroese lack of a to-marked where being another example).

3.7 Passive marking with become

Another Germanic tribal marker is the use of a verb “become” to form the
passive (German Das Buch wird gelesen “The book is read”), this including
Afrikaans with its word (Die trui word gebêre “The jersey is put away”). Uniform
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What happened to English? 239

distribution again suggests a Proto-Germanic pedigree, with its presence as far

back as Old Norse (Heusler 1950: 137) and Gothic (Streitberg 1906: 182–183)
reinforcing the reconstruction. While Swedish indeed uses its be-verb vara in
the passive, it does so in conjunction with its verb “to become” bli: vara conveys
a “stative” passiveness in line with its semantics: Himlen är täckt av moln “The
sky is covered in cloud”, while bli conveys more perfective semantics: Han blev
påkörd av en bil “He was run down by a car” (Holmes & Hinchliffe 1997: 109).
Icelandic, too, retains its verða along with its use of vera “to be” in the passive,
in a division of labor in which verða is the marked, but hardly marginal,
member (Kress 1982: 150).
As frequently, Old English followed the Germanic pattern in already rather
atrophied fashion. Beon and wesan were already easing out weorþan in the
passive, and Mitchell (1985: 324–335) rather spiritedly refutes common claims
that this was instead a regularized distinction between actional semantics
conveyed by weorþan and stative ones by beon and wesan (along the lines of
Swedish’s vara and bli). Mitchell argues that all of the forms were used with
both readings, but Denison (1993: 418–419) and Kilpiö (1989) show that more
properly, weorþan was restricted entirely to the actional while beon and wesan
were grammatical in both this and the stative meanings. By Middle English, the
weorpan-passive is not just recessive, but nonexistent (Rissanen 1999: 325).
Modern English has innovated the marking of passive with get (He got hit)
and have (He had his hair cut), but both are pragmatically constrained, encod-
ing especial activeness on the part of the subject, with the have-passive essential-
ly a causative. (Pointedly, to the extent that the get-passive is analyzed as
suggesting an especial element of either volition or good or bad luck, Kilpiö
[1989: 67] suggests that the usage of weorþan had already taken on a shade of
negative effect.)
Overall, English remains the only Germanic language without a lexical item
dedicated exclusively to expressing a pragmatically neutral manifestation of the
passive. Only in Icelandic is it even grammatical to use the be-verb to say He was
kicked, and even it has retained verða alongside. Meanwhile, properly speaking,
Swedish has recruited vara into a subdomain of the passive, retaining bli to
distinguish the “true” passive as opposed to its more stative manifestations.
Once again, English opts for underspecification where its sisters insist on
dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s.
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3.8 V2
All Germanic languages but English have verb-second word order, including
Afrikaans. This is generally agreed to be a Proto-Germanic feature (Hopper
1975: 82, Ramat 1998: 410–413). The languages differ in their particular
manifestations of the phenomenon, often classified as “asymmetric” when V2
occurs only in root clauses and “symmetric” when V2 occurs in both root and
subordinate clauses. Which type of V2 Old English manifested is disputed
(Van Kemenade 1987 versus Pintzuk 1991), but it is uncontested that it was a
V2 language:
(13) On twam þingum hæafde God þæs mannes sawle gegodod.
in two.dat thing.dat have.past God this.gen man.gen soul
endow.part
“God had endowed this man’s soul with two things”
(Fischer et al. 2000: 107)

V2 in English begins a decline in the fifteenth century, and is essentially dead by

the seventeenth (Jacobsson 1951, Nevalainen 1997). The question obviously
arises as to why.
One current consensus links the loss to the erosion of verbal inflectional
morphology. A general assumption is that V2 results from verb movement,
specifically to C (Den Besten 1983), and inflection-based accounts of V2 loss
suppose that the erosion of verbal morphology led to the verb staying in place
rather than moving upwards in its clause (e.g. Fischer et al. 2000: 135–136).
But overall, the explanations offered in this case lack explanatory power or
falsifiability.
For example, an inflection-based account of the loss of V2 presumes that the
very small difference in degree of verbal inflection between Mainland Scandina-
vian and English determined that the former would preserve V2 while the latter
would lose it. Yet this difference consists only of the fact that Mainland Scandina-
vian marks the present in all persons and numbers with -r (Swedish jag arbetar “I
work”) while English inflects in the present only the third person singular. This
would appear to attribute a profound configurational transformation to a rather
minor discrepancy, especially given that discourse studies show that the third
person singular is by far the most frequent in speech (e.g. Greenberg 1966: 45),
such that the inflected form in English constitutes a disproportional component
of input to learners. Where is the cut-off point that determines how “weak”
inflection must be before it conditions a change in movement rules?
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Rohrbacher (1999), noting that Faroese verbs do not move to I despite

robust plural inflection on verbs, surmises that “strong” inflection entails overt
marking of the first and second persons in at least one number of at least one
tense. But (1) this stipulation is rather ad hoc, contradicting the centrality of the
third person singular in discourse, (2) it would seem to have been invalidated
by dialects like Kronoby Swedish, which preserves V-to-I despite the inflection-
al erosion (Platzack & Holmberg 1989), and (3) it founders upon Baptista’s
(2000) demonstration of verb movement in Cape Verdean creole despite its
having but a single verbal inflection.
This question is all the more pressing given that in reference to a related
process, Roberts (1993), Rohrbacher (1999), and others have argued that loss of
verbal inflection in both English and Mainland Scandinavian led to the loss of
verb movement to I in subordinate clauses. A demonstration case is English, in
which previously the verb moved ahead of the negator, adverbs, and other
elements, as in … if I gave not this accompt to you from 1557 (Görlach
1991: 223). But there appear to be no principled accounts to date which
motivate the differing fates of V-to-I and V-to-C movement in English.
Precisely why did inflectional loss preserve V2 in matrix clauses but eliminate
V-to-I in subordinate clauses in Mainland Scandinavian, while eliminating both
movement processes in English?
We might be tempted to suppose that for some reason, the small difference
in degree of inflection was indeed responsible for the very specific effect of
preserving V2 but not V-to-I movement in Mainland Scandinavian. But then the
latest evidence suggests that the decisive causal link is solely between “strong”
inflection and verb movement; when inflection is “weak”, then the verb may or
may not move (Bobalijk & Thráinnson 1998, Roberts 1999:292). Meanwhile,
Kroch & Taylor (1997) argue that when verbal inflection eroded in English dialects
in the north (under Scandinavian influence), the result was not the loss of V2, but
a mere change in its configuration, from symmetric (the authors assume Pintzuk’s
analysis) to asymmetric.
Overall it would appear that, simply, the correlation between inflection and
verb movement per se is rather loose and indirect.While work on the relationship
of overt morphology to verb movement continues to be refined, it seems clear
that the link is too weak in itself to offer a conclusive explanation for what
happened in English in comparison to its sisters.
Lightfoot (1997: 268–269) argues that this kind of gap in explanatory power
is not problematic for generative diachronic syntacticians. In his view, their
enterprise is strictly to use language change to illuminate the effects of synchronic
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242 John H. McWhorter

parameters, and under this constrained conception, the reasons for the changes
are irrelevant: “Sometimes the concern with explanation is excessive … such
things happen for various reasons which are often of no particular interest to
grammarians”. Thus Lightfoot prefers to simply chart changes like the loss of
V2 in terms of input gradually depriving learners of “triggers” motivating the
setting of the appropriate parameters.
However, the reason for the disappearance of the “trigger” for V2 is crucial
to this particular thesis, and I suggest that the reason is less obscure, or “contin-
gent”, as Lightfoot (1997) has it, than it might seem. In becoming the only
Germanic language without V2, English opted for what can be argued to be the
less complex syntactic configuration. Despite its air of “linguocentricity” when
argued by an Anglophone, there is evidence that SVO is a universally unmarked
order. Kayne (1994) is an articulate generative demonstration. Creolization data
also support SVO as a “universal” order. Creoles tend to be SVO regardless of
the word order of their substrate languages, such as Berbice Dutch Creole,
formed between speakers of Dutch and the SOV Niger-Congo language Ijo
(Kouwenberg 1994), and Tayo Creole French of New Caledonia, where of its
three substrate languages, only Drubea is SVO, while Cèmuhî is VOS and
Xârâcùù is both SVO and VOS (Corne 2000: 293).
Linking the disappearance of V2 to a decomplexifying imperative also sheds
light on another analysis of English’s unique treatment of this feature, cf. Kiparsky
(1995). Kiparsky proposes that the development of COMP in both subordinate
and matrix clauses was an innovation in Proto-Germanic, Proto-Indo-European
being presumably a more clausally paratactic grammar (cf. Hermann 1895). He
reconstructs that while all other Germanic languages conventionalized COMP in
matrix clauses, English was unique in first having matrix COMP as only
optional in Old English, and then eliminating it. He notes that Old English is
unique in Germanic in allowing matrix clauses such as the one below where the
verb does not raise, while equivalent sentences were unattested in other early
Germanic languages like Old High German and Old Norse:
(14) He þa his here on tu todælde.
he then his army in two divide.past
“He then divided his army in two.” (Orosius 116.16)
(Kiparsky 1995: 143)

Kiparsky’s analysis is not dedicated to any argument that English’s diachronic

development was impacted by contact phenomena; he is interested in the
implications of the data for the Principles and Parameters framework, and thus
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What happened to English? 243

presumably concurs with Lightfoot regarding the theoretical import of contrasts

between grammars of this kind. However, within a frame of reference where the
causation of such contrasts is an urgent question, Kiparsky’s analysis begs the
question, like so many accounts of the history of English, as to just why English
was unique in this regard. In that light, we see that English, in failing to develop
an obligatory COMP node in matrix clauses, would once again be opting for the
less complexified path than its sisters, eschewing V2 like most of the world’s
languages while its sisters drifted into a typologically unusual quirk.
Importantly, Kiparsky notes that the presence of COMP in matrix clauses
in Old English is variable rather than absent. But as with inherent reflexives, we
must ask why English did not conventionalize rather than eliminate the feature.
As Kiparsky notes, Old Norse did: by the time it is documented in about 1100,
it has already grammaticized COMP in matrix clauses; Old High German was
similar. Meanwhile, only Old English maintained the feature as variable — and
then dropped it entirely.
In sum, in eliminating V2, English eliminated a feature requiring the
operation of a rule moving the verb to C, a feature whose supplementary
character in general is illustrated by the typological rarity of the V2 feature
beyond Germanic. Other Germanic languages held on to V2 despite inflectional
erosion as rampant as that in English, viz. Mainland Scandinavian and Afri-
kaans. Inflection-centered, syntax-internal accounts have yielded stimulating
explanations proper for assorted variations upon the manifestation of V2. But
for the complete elimination of verb movement, the best they have provided to
date are loose correlations. No amount of refinements of this framework has to
date been able to explain why only English shed V2 in affirmative sentences
altogether. I suggest, along with Danchev (1997), that only a larger, contact-
based explanation can surpass this obstacle.

3.9 The disappearance of thou

By the 1700s, the originally plural you had replaced thou in standard English.
Research on court documents from the northeast suggest that in spoken English,
you was already the conventional second-person singular form as early as the late
1500s, with thou used only in particular marked contexts (Hope 1994). Hope
suggests that the wider use of thou in literary sources such as Shakespeare may
have been a conservatism that spoken English had moved beyond.
This development is typically discussed within the larger context of the use
of second-person plural pronouns in formal address to single persons across
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244 John H. McWhorter

Europe. But Strang’s (1970: 139) comment that “Such a use, once introduced,
must snowball”, while obviously apt, does not explain why the “snowballing”
went so far in English as to leave it the only Germanic language which lost a
distinct second-person singular pronoun altogether. The usual result of the
well-known development of “T-V” forms was for the V form to encroach ever
more upon the realm of familiarity — but all of the other Germanic languages
nevertheless retain the familiar form. If anything, the modern development has
been towards the reassertion of the T form within the democratizing ideological
tendencies of the post-Enlightenment age. Yet during just this period, English
relegated thou to the archaism of the religious and poetic registers. As Strang
notes (1970: 140), it might not have persisted even here if the King James Bible
had not happened to reproduce to such an extent the usage of Tyndale, who
wrote in the early 1500s when thou was still in current use.
Clearly, neither inflectional loss nor a drift towards analyticity were related
to a change which did not transpire even in Afrikaans, in which both of those
processes were rife in its development. Furthermore, even highly isolating
languages rarely display an isomorphy between singular and plural pronouns in
the second person. Even the inquisitive undergraduate is often given to ask,
when exposed to the T-V pronoun issue, why English went as far as to eliminate
thou entirely while German retained its du, etc. Often the professor can only
offer an articulate shrug.
But in fact, this development correlates with the eight we have seen so far in
rendering English less overspecified than its sisters. Dutch and Frisian have lost
the du-cognate itself, but have nevertheless “exapted” other material to main-
tain a T-V distinction.
To be sure, thou disappears only in the written standard, regularly appear-
ing in surveys of nonstandard dialects into the twentieth century. One might
suppose that the demise of thou in the standard dialect was merely an accident.
However, the uniqueness of the development compared with (all dialects of) all
of English’s sisters — as well as with European languages in general — remains
striking. As a chance occurrence, the eclipse sits as an eternal loose screw — but
a more elegant analysis subsumes it under the general trend in English’s
development towards underspecification.
Just why this occurred only in the East Midlands dialect will most likely
remain a mystery. Perhaps it lends support to Poussa’s (1982) argument that
this variety was a particularly koineized one serving as a lingua franca between
speakers of still-divergent Middle English dialects. But our perspective on thou
must be informed by its utter anomaly. In being the only Germanic language
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What happened to English? 245

refraining from distinguishing number in the second person — a cross-linguis-

tically rare trait that the typologist associates with a few languages in Papua New
Guinea — standard English displays one of a great many underspecifications
which, in their sheer number, suggest an external explanation.

3.10 The disappearance of man

English began with the usual Germanic endowment of an indefinite pronoun man,
grammaticalized enough to have eroded phonetically to me by Middle English:
(15) Ac me ne auh to bien hersum bute of gode.
but one neg ought to be obedient except in good
“But one should not be obedient except in good things.”
(Rissanen 1987: 520)

The pronoun appears to trace to Proto-Germanic. The only Germanic languages

lacking a distinct indefinite pronoun are Icelandic and Faroese (Icelandic recruits
maður “men” [Kress 1982:113], while Faroese uses man but only as a Danicism,
preferring to use tú “you” and teir “they” like English [Lockwood 1955:125]). But
man is present (although variably) in their ancestor Old Norse (Heusler 1950:147),
suggesting that its eclipse in two daughters was a subsequent development.
Meanwhile, Afrikaans does not retain Dutch’s men, but instead uses the colloquial
Dutch ’n mens (< “a person”) — and the tendency is to shorten this to mens,
creating what Ponelis (1993: 224) analyzes as a new pronoun.
As always, where a few of its sisters eliminated a feature English followed
suit: English’s man rapidly disappeared, essentially gone in the written language
by the late fourteenth century. To the extent that it appears in regional speech
after this, it is marginally, such as in the early 1900s in Cumberland as attested
by Brilioth (1913: 111).
In fact, the original form man had split off to connote “a human being”:
(16) þanne man forgiet that he seien sholde,
when one forget what he say.inf should
þanne beþ his tunge alse hit cleued were.
then be.3sg his tongue as it stuck were
“When a person forgets what he should say, his tongue is as if it were stuck.”
(Rissanen 1987: 520)

Yet this usage as well did not eventually survive, and Modern English recruits you,
they, and people in the function once served by its birthright man.
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246 John H. McWhorter

Rissanen surmises that the disappearance of me was due to two factors. If I

read him correctly, his proposition that me “was too weak for the subject position”
leads us to ask why similarly weak forms survive across Germanic, such as the
unemphatic forms in Dutch (je for jij, etc.).12
His other suggestion is that homonymy with the oblique me, especially with
impersonal verbs (me semeth), was a factor. Yet Rissanen himself elsewhere
(1997:517) notes that “admittedly, homonymy and disambiguation offer only a
shaky argument for the loss of forms”, and this is especially à propos here. Crucial-
ly, it is likely that in the spoken language oblique me and indefinite me were not
homophones: the former retained a long vowel while the vowel in me was likely a
weakened one such as schwa (Meier 1953:179–182 cited in Rissanen). Thus
especially given that we are dealing with phonetically similar but hardly identical
forms, the homonymy argument is weakened in view of, for example, near-
homonymies like det ([de:]) “it” and de ([de])“they” in many Swedish dialects,
which like oblique and indefinite me in Middle English occur with the same verbal
ending in the present (since Swedish has but one across person and number).
While one might argue that the increasing prevalence of dom as “they” in Swedish
responds to this homonymy, note that dej ([d7j]) is now established in colloquial
Swedish in the second person singular. This creates yet another near-hononymy
with det — certainly close enough that some scholars might treat it as potentially
confusing if there were some subsequent pronominal replacement begging
explanation — even in the absence of conjugational allomorphs of verbal inflec-
tion to signal a distinction in meaning. Then beyond Germanic, there are of course
cases like lei used both as “she” and as a term of polite address in Italian (both with
the same third-person verbal ending), and the absence of a number distinction in
third person pronouns in spoken French (il/ils, elle/elles), despite there being no
verb endings to distinguish them. Finally, even English’s use of you in both the
singular and plural second persons as well as the indefinite function is germane.
And meanwhile, obviously neither of Rissanen’s two explanations would
apply to the more robust form man that persisted alongside its more deeply
grammaticalized descendant me. One might decide that the disappearance of
the distinct indefinite pronoun “just happened”, but we must recall that this,
when combined with thou’s eclipse, left the English pronominal array the most
context-dependent of any Germanic language.

12."To the extent that we analyze forms of this kind as clitics, we might ask why indefinite
me could not have simply evolved into one rather than simply disappearing.
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What happened to English? 247

4. Implications

That one language can be overspecified in a particular area compared to another

one is clear to all analysts. However, linguists often claim that overall, languages
“balance out” in terms of complexity of this kind (e.g. Edwards 1994: 90;
Bickerton 1995: 67; O’Grady et al. 1997: 6; Crystal 1987: 6–7). But this assump-
tion has never been investigated in any wide-ranging fashion. Those few
examining the issue more closely have tended to venture that, more properly,
all languages are complex to a considerable, but not equal, degree (Crowley
2000, Gil 2001).
In this light, it must be reiterated that while I do not claim that English is a
“simple” language in the cross-linguistic sense, I do claim that English is
significantly less complex overall — in the specific senses of overspecification
and complexity presented in Section 2 — than its sisters. The contrast I refer to
is illustrated by this comparative table.
Table 3 demonstrates that the relative innovativeness of English has
consisted not only of the transformation of original materials, but of simply
shedding much more of it than any of its sisters have. (Lass 1987: 318 finds
related results in analogous tables.)

Table 3.!Losses in English compared to other Germanic languages

G Du Y Fr S N Da I Fa A OE E

inherent reflexives
external possessors

gender beyond noun

loss of prefixes

directional adverbs

be-perfect

passive become verb

V2

singular you

indefinite pronoun
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248 John H. McWhorter

Indeed, it is difficult to conceive of any complex of original Germanic

features that would yield a chart where any Germanic language but English
proved to have lost all of the features while English and the other languages had
retained all or most of them. Obviously, my Table 3 can fairly elicit the objec-
tion that it is not representative of the Germanic inheritance, my having
potentially “stacked the deck” by choosing features absent in English and
neglecting the possibility that English may have retained just as many features
that many or most Germanic languages have lost.
However, the results are in fact the same even when we bring to bear a more
representative array of the Germanic legacy. Below is a generous outlay of
grammatical features traditionally treated as tracing to Proto-Germanic, for good
measure assembled through reference to two sources, Voyles (1992: 227–279)
and Ramat (1998).
1. nominal inflection classes specific to Germanic
2. nominative, genitive, dative, accusative case marking in NP markers in both
numbers on nominals and demonstratives, instrumental in singular
3. strong/weak distinction in adjectives
4. masculine, feminine and neuter adjectival classes
5. nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative inflections in singular and
plural in masculine and feminine, locative and instrumental inflections in
masculine singular
6. simple singular/plural distinction in neuter
7. comparative and superlative suffixes -o¿ , -az
8. small class of suppletive comparative and superlative forms
9. interrogative adjectives decline as strong
10. pronominals in nominative, genitive, dative and accusative in singular and
plural
11. dual paradigms
12. reflexive *sı̄n
13. inherent reflexive construction
14. external possessive constructions
15. one to four declinable
16. four to ten undeclinable
17. eleven and twelve remnants of duodecimal system (*ain-lif “one left over”,
*twa-lif)
18. thirteen to nineteen composed of unit numeral + “ten”
19. 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 composed of unit numeral + *ti;ı̄z/juz “10-ness”
 What happened to English? 249

20. 70 to 90 composed of genitive plural of unit numeral + derivational *-t +

*kn® tom
21. 1000 derived from PIE *tu¿ s “large” + *kn® tom reflex13
22. strong/weak distinction in verbs
23. verbal inflection classes specific to Germanic (class VII forms past and
participial form via reduplication)
24. present and preterite paradigms in active and subjunctive
(dual inflections for 1P and 2P except in preterite subjunctive)
25. present passive indicative and subjunctive paradigms (same inflection
allomorph for all numbers in plural in both paradigms)
26. infinitive
27. participles for present, past and past passive
28. use of be in intransitive auxiliary + participle constructions
29. use of become for passive
30. preterite-present verbs
31. athematic verbs (be, do, go, stand)
32. will-marked “subjunctive”
35. adverbial suffixes -e¿, -o¿ , -ba
36. adverbial comparative and superlative suffixes -o¿ z, -o¿ st
37. suppletive well for good
38. directional adverbs for “at X”, “to X”, “from X”
39. prepositions doubling as preverbs
40. conjunctions *endi / *undi “and”, *auk “also”, þauh “but”, *i'¿a / *u'¿a “if”
41. OV word order
42. large number of derivational prefixes and suffixes

Table 4.!Reconstructed Proto-Germanic features

It is clear from this list, especially to Germanicists, that it would be quite

impossible to derive from it a table of features that English has retained that all
or most of its sisters have not. More to the point, there is not a single feature on
the list of this sort. Admittedly, I added a few features from Table 3 not tradi-
tionally examined in studies of Proto-Germanic: inherent reflexives, external
possessor marking, the be-perfect, and the become passive. However, I am
unaware of any other features absent from Proto-Germanic surveys that are

13."Numeral reconstructions after Voyles 1992: 245–246.

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retained in English but rare to nonexistent elsewhere in Germanic, and have the
distinct impression that few could identify many — if any.
Certainly English has developed individual features of overspecification and
complexity that its sisters have not. My thesis is that there was a significant
disruption in the transmission of English at one point in its history, but this
scenario nothing less than requires that after this, English would naturally drift
into its own elaborations as all languages do. Thus English is unique amidst
Germanic in its do-support; in its conventionalization of the present participle
with be as obligatory in marking imperfectivity in the present, thereby render-
ing the bare verb zero-marked for habituality; in its distinction of shades of
futurity with will, going to, and be + present participle.
Nor, however, have the other Germanic languages simply retained more of
the Germanic legacy while otherwise developing no new features. On the
contrary, just as we would expect, they developed overspecifications and
complexities of their own after branching off from Proto-Germanic. The result was
the many well-known Germanic features absent in English that cannot be treated
as Proto-Germanic, such as the conventionalization of modal particles in German,
Dutch, Frisian, and Mainland Scandinavian; tone in Swedish; and lesser-known
cases such as noun incorporation in Frisian.
The result is that overall, English has not developed so many new over-
specifications and complexities as to “balance out” with its sisters. To wit: while
English consists of a massively abbreviated Germanic legacy plus a few later
developments, its sisters retain much more of the Germanic legacy plus later
developments of their own. A claim that English must necessarily be equal in
overspecification and complexity to its sisters is, in the strict sense, illogical. It
would require either that (1) not one of the several other Germanic languages
have drifted into as many new developments as English over the past several
centuries, or that (2) English for some reason was uniquely innovative, as if once
“burned” by extensive second language acquisition, a grammar is somehow
inherently driven to restore a particular degree of needless elaboration. Obvi-
ously, neither scenario has any theoretical motivation, leaving the conclusion
that English is, indeed, the least overspecified language in the Germanic group.

5. Reassessing the Scandinavian Impact

One response to the contrast in Table 3 might be to suppose that English just
shed these features by chance. Crowley (2000) gives clear demonstration of a
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What happened to English? 251

case where a complexity differential between sisters is unlikely to trace to

contact effects. The Oceanic language Ura is less complex morpho-
phonemically and inflectionally, and marks fewer categories overtly with its
inflections, than its sister Sye, despite Ura having no documented history of
use as a lingua franca. Many might prefer to treat English as the “Ura” of
Germanic. We, however, will investigate a causal account, especially given that
the qualitative difference between Sye and Ura, the latter still very much a
“card-carrying” member of the Oceanic family, is much less than that between
English and its sisters.
We will reject two other possible explanations. It is unlikely that English’s
departure from the Germanic template was a function of its isolation on an
island — generally, this kind of isolation is associated with relative conserva-
tism, Icelandic and Faroese being the obviously pertinent cases here. Further-
more, it cannot be upheld that the standardization of English was the culprit:
this would leave the question as to why similar processes did not leave standard
French (developed amidst contact between dialects brought to the Île-de-France
region) or Russian (developed amidst contact between several dialects in
Moscow), similarly simplified in comparison to their sisters. In any case, most
of the features I have covered are defunct or on the ropes long before the 1400s.

5.1 Evaluating the alternatives

5.1.1 The usual suspects
I accept the arguments of Thomason & Kaufman (1988) and others that the Nor-
man occupation cannot have caused a significant break in the transmission of Eng-
lish. The invaders were too slight in number and removed from the general
population to affect the structure of a language meanwhile spoken by millions
of people. I would propose that the Normans could not have had any significant
impact on English beyond the lexical (which would thus encompass de-
rivational affixes).
I also find it implausible that Low Dutch varieties14, imported from 1150
to about 1700 by Flemish immigrants and agents of the Hanseatic League
(Viereck 1993, Thomason & Kaufman 1988: 321–325), had any significant
impact on English grammar. There is nothing in accounts of the Hanseatic

14."The term includes Low German, which some contemporary observations suggest was
processed as “the same language” at the time (Peters 1987: 80).
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252 John H. McWhorter

League like Pagel (1983) to suggest that Low German speakers were thick
enough on the ground in any one place to influence general speech patterns; on
the contrary, such sources indicate that the Hanseatic agents were generally
housed in their own quarters of town. Moreover, if Low Dutch speakers’ non-
native English had influenced the language, we would also expect that their
lexical contribution would extend into the grammatical realm. Yet it did not to
any significant or conclusive extent (Bense 1939), which would include the -kin
derivational suffix noted by Thomason & Kaufman (1988: 325). These authors
(323) also propose that Low Dutch lent several dialects of English an enclitic
object form for she and they, /6s/, but Voss (1995) is rather compellingly
skeptical of this account, as well as others concerning sound changes.

5.1.2 Celtic
Vennemann (2001) argues that interference from Insular Celtic was the culprit.
While he stresses the absence of external possessive constructions and the pres-
ence of be-marked imperfectives in Insular Celtic, his argument can be extend-
ed in view of the fact that Brythonic also lacks inherent reflexives, Indo-Euro-
pean’s derivational prefixes, V2, the be-perfect, an indefinite pronoun, and a
become-passive (Martin Haspelmath, p.c.).
The first problem is that we would expect that a structural impact so
profound would be accompanied by a robust lexical one. Yet the Celtic contri-
bution to the English lexicon, beyond place names, two now defunct items
incorporated on the continent before the Germanic settlement of England, and
seven mostly defunct ones introduced by Christianizing missionaries from
Ireland, is so small that Kastovsky (1992: 318–319) requires barely half a page to
list the fourteen, most now obsolete. To be sure, Thomason & Kaufman
(1988: 116–118) note that lexical loans amidst shift-based interference are often
not as numerous as in cases of one language borrowing from another. However,
the glaring paucity of Celtic loans in English surpasses even the degree
Thomason & Kaufman refer to, suggesting that it is appropriate to question
whether any interference in fact took place.
An equally grave problem is timing. Vennemann supposes that Celtic was
no longer spoken in the north of England after the late eighth century at the
latest (2001: 356), whereas English begins its sharp departure from the German-
ic template after the Norman Invasion, four centuries later. Vennemann argues
(364) that this delay may have been due to a diglossic distinction between the
written register and common speech, the latter only committed to paper after
 What happened to English? 253

the “liberation” of English upon the lifting of the documentational “blackout”

during the Norman occupation.
This is a deft argument, and it is most likely true that Old English docu-
ments trailed behind developments in the spoken varieties. But if the Celtic
influence was decisive enough to erase external possessive constructions and
contribute a new progressive construction, then why precisely did the influence
stop there? Vennemann concurs with Gensler (forthcoming) that Celtic itself
owes its VSO word order, lack of external possessive constructions, and other
departures from Indo-European patterns to Semitic influence, considering
English’s transformation due ultimately to Semitic interference passed on
through Insular Celtic. However, why, then, did Celtic interference not render
English VSO?
In general, we have vivid evidence as to what happens to English amidst
extensive and concretely documented interference from Celtic; namely,
Hiberno-English. The influence has not gone as far as lending the dialect VSO
word order, but nevertheless we see closer and unmistakeable other parallels to
Celtic, such the after + V immediate past calque and interrogative constructions
such as Is it out of your mind you are? On top of this is a vast quantity of Gaelic
lexical borrowings. Certainly there are differences between Irish and British
Celtic varieties, but this merely leads us to ask why English does not display
clear parallels to, for example, Welsh as opposed to Gaelic. As presented to date,
Vennemann’s hypothesis begs the question as to why English in Great Britain
is not as rife with unequivocally Celtic-derived constructions — and loanwords
— as Hiberno-English.

5.1.3 Process of elimination

This leaves us with the Scandinavian invaders, who arrived in England in the
late ninth and early tenth centuries; roughly speaking, Danes settled in the
northeast area that came to be called the Danelaw while Norwegians later settled
in the northwest. The Scandinavians settled among the general population
rather than ruling from afar as an elite as the Norman French did, often
marrying Anglo-Saxon women. The massive lexical impact of this contact is
hardly in dispute, eliminating one serious problem in the Low Dutch and Celtic
cases. In terms of sheer number of words, the Normans of course had a vast
impact as well. But they imposed their language mainly “from above”, lending
mainly content words, generally hewing towards the formal realm. In contrast,
there is no such “high” cast to the Scandinavian legacy, dominated by content
words of even the homeliest nature (window, knife, skirt, happy, etc.), and
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extended to grammatical words such as they, their, them, both, same, against,
and others since lost. This alone indicates a highly intimate contact scenario.
Our question, then, is whether the Scandinavian impact upon English went
even deeper. I propose that there are indeed indications that the Scandinavian
invasions were responsible for the very decrease in overspecification and
complexity that I presented in Section 3. In this, I will attempt an argument
similar to that of Poussa (1982) but in more extended fashion. I will also
complement O’Neil (1978)’s observation that English is one of various German-
ic languages whose development was affected by contact: first, in fashioning an
argument within the context of language contact studies as they have progressed
since he wrote, and second, by exploring why the degree of reduction in English
was greater than in any other Germanic language.

5.2 Support for Scandinavian influence: Timing

The first piece of evidence pointing specifically to the Scandinavian impact is
evidence that many of these features persisted longest in regions where Scandi-
navians did not settle, or in those where place-names suggest that they were less
robustly represented. Under this perspective, we might assume that these
features would be represented even more vividly in these regions even today if
a particular dialect that emerged in the Danelaw — standard English — had not
gone on to dilute the regional dialects via sociological pressure to such a degree.
To put a point on it, if England had remained a pre-industrial society where
literacy was largely limited to elites, then we might hypothesize that English
varieties outside of the Danelaw would remain garden-variety descendants of
Proto-Germanic.
The evidence here is solely a first plank in my argument. The vast majority
of our substantial sources on regional grammars (as opposed to lexicons and
phonologies) were written after standard English came to prevail. As such, in
the technical sense, most of our views of nonstandard dialects of England treat
varieties in decline, having long ago taken their place on a pole of variation
between standard and nonstandard forms. However, even these sources give
some support to my thesis.
a.!External possessor marking. Upton et al. (1994: 488) record wring the neck of
him — rather analogous to the locative Scandinavian configuration of this
strategy — in Derbyshire and, pointedly, Cornwall, where there was no Scandi-
navian settlement at all. (It may also be relevant that they record He’s pulling that
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What happened to English? 255

chap his leg in Yorkshire, the western region of which was rather thinly settled by
Scandinavians.)
b.!Grammatical gender. Scandinavian settlement was concentrated in the north-
east; Lass (1992: 113) notes that “loss of inflection [in the noun phrase] is
earliest in the east and north, the south and west generally remaining more
conservative”. The loss of gender on the definite article began in the north and
then was attested only variably in the southwest Midlands in late 1200s (Lass
1992: 113); meanwhile, the old three-way distinction persisted in the south at
this time (Strang 1970: 267), and traces of gender marking hung on in Kent as
late as 1340 (Strang 1970, Lass 1992: 113).
Indicatively, of the regions where Upton et al. (1994: 486–487) record the
use of he/him and/or she/her to refer to objects, sixteen out of twenty are outside
of Scandinavian concentration (most south of the Danelaw).
There is also evidence that remnants of the gender distinction persisted in
especially grammaticalized form in the Viking-free Southwest. In the early
1200s, there is occasional gender marking of inanimates in documents there
(Strang 1970: 265), and this was still attested in the late nineteenth century in
Barnes’ description of Dorset dialect. Here, Barnes (1886: 17–18) describes
precisely what we might expect to have evolved in English short of “interven-
tion”: a distinction between a common and neuter genders, which he terms
“personal” and “impersonal”. The “personal” class includes “full shapen things,
or things to which the Almighty or man has given a shape for an end” and
includes people, living things, and tools: thus of a tree one said He’s a-cut down
but for water, It’s a-dried up. The distinction extended to demonstratives (theäse
vs. this, thik vs. that).
c.!Directional adverbs. Upton et al. (1994: 92) find variations on come hither
only in regions south of the Danelaw except Lincolnshire. They find Where to
is it? or Where is it to? only in Monmouthshire, Somerset, Wiltshire, Cornwall,
Devon, and Dorset (1994: 502).
d.!V2. For one, V2 persists in Kentish documents while eroding elsewhere in
English (Kroch & Taylor 1997: 312). These authors’ analysis even offers more
fine-grained evidence that the erosion of V2 was caused by Scandinavian. They
argue (318–320) that the transition from “symmetric” (verb movement in both
matrix and subordinate clauses) to asymmetric (verb movement only in the
matrix clause) V2 was occasioned by the inflectional loss that Scandinavian
settlers’ incomplete acquisition of English led to. Under the assumption that
complete loss of V2 would only be possible with sharp diminution of inflection,
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256 John H. McWhorter

the implication of Kroch & Taylor’s analysis is that the transition to asymmetric
V2 was an intermediate stage between the original configuration and today’s —
and that by extension, the disappearance of V2 was initiated by language
contact in the Danelaw.
e.!Inherent reflexive marking. Upton, Parry & Widdowson (1994: 488) show sit
thee down and variants persisting in nonstandard dialects throughout England.
While they find laid him down and laid her down only in regions where Scandi-
navian settlement was relatively thin according to Wakelin (1972: 20) —
Cheshire, Derbyshire, and Staffordshire — it is documented in other sources in
heavily Scandinavianized Cumberland (Brilioth 1913: 107) and West Yorkshire
(Wright 1892: 120; Hedevind 1967: 242). However, it is perhaps notable that
Upton et al. only find attestations with other verbs (1994: 488–489) (they
play(en) them “they disport themselves”) in Lancashire and Derbyshire.
Possibly the usage conventionalized as an archaism with heavily used sit and lie
throughout England (cf. Hedevind’s description of the feature as used only with
“certain verbs”, giving the usual sit and lie as examples [242]), but persisted
more robustly in areas with less Scandinavian influence.

5.3 Support for Scandinavian influence: Transfer

Modern dialectal remnants, however, are only one indication that Scandinavian
contact profoundly affected the course of English’s evolution. Transfer evidence
provides further, and more striking, support for the hypothesis.
Thomason & Kaufman’s (1988: 302–303) verdict on the evidence of transfer
from Scandinavian in English is the following:
The Norse influence on English was pervasive, in the sense that its results are
found in all parts of the language; but it was not deep, except in the lexicon.
Norse influence could not have modified the basic typology of English because
the two were highly similar in the first place.

This conclusion is justified for their masterful argument on the basis of the fea-
tures they treat as part of their “Norsification package”. However, other
evidence suggests that the Norse influence was indeed deep, and that Thomason
& Kaufman’s Norsification package, comprising mostly phonological and
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What happened to English? 257

morphological traits, various grammatical items, and some lexical items,

constitutes but a subset of the relevant evidence.15
According to tradition, Thomason & Kaufman assume that Old English and
Old Norse were too similar for structural transfer to be particularly relevant to
analyzing their effect upon one another in contact. Yet a closer look at Old
Norse reveals grammatical differences crucial to this thesis. Specifically, no
fewer than six of our ten losses in English have parallels in aspects of Old Norse
hitherto overlooked, to my knowledge, in studies of the Danelaw situation.
a.!Inherent reflexives. In Old Norse, the reflexive use of the first person and
third person pronouns had eroded and affixed to the verb as a suffix, the latter
used in all persons but the first singular: bindomk “I tie myself”, býsk “you arm
yourself”, staksk “he stabbed himself” (Heusler 1950: 107). This extended to
inherent reflexives: þeir setiask niþr “they sat down”, er hefnezk á honom “you
revenge yourselves upon him”, þetta felsk honom vel í skap “that felt good to
him, agreed with him” (1950: 137–138). Use of free pronouns in the reflexive
was not unknown, but was largely restricted to dative forms (hann brá sér “he
wandered”), but even here was variable (hann brásk was also grammatical)
(1950: 138).
The variability of inherent reflexive marking by Middle English may have
been the result of a tendency for Old Norse speakers to omit the inherent
reflexive pronouns in speaking English. Use of the full pronoun was the marked
case in their native language, and meanwhile, English lacked any equivalent of
their reflexive inflection. English diachrony specialists often note that morphol-
ogy could be shed in the Danelaw because it was incidental to communication.
Morphological marking of inherent reflexivity would have fallen under this
rubric by definition.
Thus because it was encoded morphologically, Old Norse speakers would
have been comfortable refraining from marking the distinction when speaking
English — just as Modern English speakers are.
b.!External possessives. Scandinavian is unique in Germanic in encoding
external possession with the locative rather than the dative (cf. [7], [8], [9]).
Faced with this disjunction between external possessor encoding in the two

15."However, it must be reiterated that this influence was not disruptive enough to yield a
creole under any conventional definition (pace Poussa 1982, although many authors,
especially those outside of creole studies, operated upon a broader definition of creole when
she wrote).
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languages, Scandinavians may have taken the choice of eliminating the distinction
altogether, given that it was not vital to the expression of the relevant concepts.
This is a common process in the development of koines, for example, where often,
the koine eschews features which were present in most or all of the source varieties
but expressed with different morphemes or strategies (cf. discussion in 5.4. below).
c.!Derivational prefixes. The absence of the core Germanic verbal prefixes in
Icelandic and Faroese traces back to Old Norse (Heusler 1950: 40). It could be
that the rapid eclipse of these prefixes in English was due to the absence of cog-
nates in Old Norse speakers’ native language.
d.!Be-perfect. In Old Norse, as in Modern Icelandic, the be-perfect largely
connoted the resultative and the passive (Heusler 1950: 136). Its use as a true
perfect was limited to a few intransitive verbs such as “to go”: ek em gengenn “I
have gone” (Brenner 1882: 129). This may have been the spur for the disappear-
ance of the feature in English, including the possibility Mitchell (1985: 302–304)
notes that what has been analyzed as a be-perfect in Old English may have
actually been only a resultative construction.16
e.!Become-passive. In Old Norse, the passive was usually expressed with vera
“to be”. Verða “to become” was relatively restricted in meaning, encoding
roughly the saliently active semantics of Modern English’s get-passive:
(17) Þ5́r saker skal fyrst dǿma,
the.pl issue.pl should first adjudge.inf
er fyrra sumar varþ eige um dǿmt.
that last summer become not to judgment
“The complaints should first be decided upon that didn’t manage to get
to judgment last summer.” (Heusler 1950: 137; translation mine)17

16."In the Shetlands and the Orkneys, where Norse was spoken for centuries longer than in
England, the be-perfect has been generalized to transitives (Melchers 1992) rather than
contracting and disappearing. However, this cannot be taken as counterevidence that
Scandinavian contact spurred the demise of the be-perfect in England. As Melchers and
myself note, the be-perfect was already quite restricted in Old Norse, such that the develop-
ments in the Shetlands and Orkneys cannot be seen as a transfer. Melchers (1992: 608)
suggests that the culprit may have been southwestern Norwegian dialects where the
be-perfect has extended to the transitive in just this way, given that most settlers of the
Shetlands and the Orkneys came from southwestern Norway.
17."Original German: “Die Klagen soll man zuerst aburteilen, über die man im vorigen
Sommer nicht zum Urteil gelangte”.
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This restricted usage may have been a cause of the otherwise mysterious absence
of English’s weorþan after Old English.
f. Indefinite man. Icelandic and Faroese lack a man-cognate, and already in Old
Norse it was recessive (Heusler 1950: 147), generally replaced by impersonal
verb constructions or third person verbs without pronouns. This may possibly
have set in motion a de-emphasis on the use of Old English’s man-cognate that
eventually resulted in its disappearance early in Middle English.

English is traditionally considered closest to Dutch and Frisian. But in many

aspects where Old Norse and its descendants depart from the Germanic pattern,
they parallel English, although having overall retained a great deal more of the
Germanic legacy. Only Old Norse and its modern descendants offer anything
approaching six out of ten features which could be expected to result in
elimination in a contact situation with English, a clustering which the author
did not even expect to find upon beginning this investigation. This — especially
in congruence with the dialectal evidence adduced in 5.2 — suggests a specific
effect from Scandinavian.

5.4 Support for Scandinavian influence: Reduction

Generally, discussion of the Scandinavian impact on English is largely restricted
to transfer effects: sound changes and lexical borrowings. I have attempted to
add possible structural transfers to the relevant discussion. As such, however, it
might be objected that my attempt to expand our conception of the Scandina-
vian impact is hindered where Old English and Old Norse have parallel struc-
tures, under the assumption that English would likely have retained these
features rather than shed them.
But as Thomason & Kaufman (1988: 129, passim) note, when a population
shifts to a new language and their rendition of the language ousts the original
native one, then transfer effects often occur alongside evidence of incomplete
acquisition — that is, outright reduction rather than transfer. Importantly, these
effects often occur even where the languages in question have parallel or
cognate structures.

5.4.1 Traditionally accepted: Inflection and grammatical morphemes

Scholars of English’s history traditionally recognize this in the area of inflection,
where it is often reconstructed that when Old English and Old Norse speakers
were confronted with equivalent but phonetically differing inflections, they
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260 John H. McWhorter

simply shed them to ease communication (O’Neil 1978: 256–260 being an ex-
tended presentation).
As it happens, more specifically the best assumption is that the inflectional
loss resulted from Old Norse speakers’ incomplete acquisition of English (cf.
Danchev 1997: 90). Contact alone, amidst extensive first-language bilingualism,
can lead to a language with a mixture of inflections from several languages, but
no less inflected overall than its pre-contact form. Pace arguments like O’Neil’s
(1978: 256–260), this is even true when languages are closely related, despite
initial impressions that the confusions created by cognate affixes would simply
drive speakers to shed morphology altogether. One example is Rusyn, formed
through contact between dialects of Ukranian, Slovak, and Serbo-Croatian
(Harasowska 1999).
Because it is amidst extensive adult acquisition that loss plays a central role,
it is promising to look to this process in tracing the reason for the curious
degree of structural erosion in English. The question here is whether the Norse
were more likely to be bilingual — thus developing an English bedecked with
Norse grammatical items — than the native English speakers were.
There would appear to be little question. The Danes and Norwegians were
newcomers, who were largely illiterate and thus did not impose their language
in writing or in government, and eventually gave it up. Obviously the impulse
towards bilingualism would have been much stronger among the Vikings than
among the English. In this light, items such as they/them/their, both, same, etc.
would stand as remnants of Scandinavian brought into the English spoken by,
first, immigrants, and then just as plausibly by succeeding generations bilingual
in Old Norse and Old English.
It is rarely acknowledged that after the first generation, descendants of the
Scandinavian invaders may well have begun to speak English as well as Norse
even among themselves, as is typical of shifting speakers, with Norse and
English perhaps taking their place in a kind of diglossia. As such, for Norse
descendants born in England, an English sprinkled with the occasional Norse
grammatical item would have been not only comprehensible, but even a marker
of, if we may, “ethnic” kinship.

5.4.2 Extending the paradigm

These observations, then, suggest that English could easily have shed even fea-
tures it shared with Old Norse, if its fate was determined by non-native
speakers’ functional yet approximate rendition, as the timing and transfer
evidence suggest. This is in itself hardly a venturesome proposal, the conception
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What happened to English? 261

having long been considered unexceptionable as applied to morphology. My

suggestion is simply that we extend this mechanism to other aspects of gram-
mar, given that language contact studies offer no grounds for supposing that
this would be scientifically inappropriate.
The relevant comparison, for example, is with koines, such as Siegel’s
(1987: 185–210) description of the koine Hindustani of Fiji, developed amidst
contact between speakers of divergent varieties of the Hindustani dialect
complex. Certainly, to an extent the koine has picked lexical and morphological
features “cafeteria” style from assorted dialects rather than shedding them.
However, on balance, the koine is not as elaborated as any of these dialects,
instead being markedly simpler in the structural sense than any of these, even
when the dialects all display the feature in question. This includes the elimination
of the three-way formality distinction in second-person pronouns (1987: 199),
a general tendency towards replacing synthetic with analytic forms, (1987), and
a strong tendency to replace SOV order with SVO (1987: 198). (This last is
especially indicative regarding the loss of V2 in English.)
A less well-known example is the Riau dialect of Indonesian (Malay)
described by David Gil (1994). While developed amidst speakers of languages
closely related to Indonesian and to one another, Riau Indonesian has vastly
simplified Indonesian’s valence-marking morphological apparatus — of much
greater semantic and syntactic import than mere gender or person/number
markers — and other grammatical features with close cognates in the languages
spoken by its creators, such as Minangkabau.
These cases demonstrate that even when languages in contact are closely
related, reduction can play as significant a part in the outcome as exchange of
materials — far beyond mere inflection.18 In processes of linguistic accommo-

18."In both the Fiji and Riau cases, the scenario is complicated somewhat by the possible
impact of pidgin varieties in the contact situations: here, Pidgin Hindustani and Bazaar
Malay, respectively. However, this may be an artifact of our temporal proximity to cases such
as these. It is hardly inconceivable that there was a “pidgin English” spoken by the first wave
of Scandinavians, reflecting the limitations of adult language-learning capabilities. (This is
especially the case given the observed fact that Old English and Old Norse were not essential-
ly dialects of the same language as is often implied; cf. Lass 1987: 52 and Kastovsky
1992: 328–329.) It may have been the progeny of these invaders who acquired a more
proficient English, nevertheless pervaded with Norse features. Our microsociolinguistic
knowledge of how interference through language shift (in Thomason & Kaufman’s terminol-
ogy) proceeds is currently limited, most cases having occurred beyond the purview of written
history. Certainly this is, and will likely remain the case with the Norsification of English over
a thousand years ago.
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262 John H. McWhorter

dation, speakers often contribute a less overspecified and complexified rendi-

tion of their language. The extreme manifestation here is Foreigner Talk; a less
radical manifestation would be the tendency for creators of creoles to contrib-
ute a “streamlined” version of their native grammars to the new language, such
as among Oceanic speakers (Keesing 1988, Siegel, Sandeman & Corne 2000).
Koine scenarios exhibit an analogous process, and there is no theoretical reason
that this would not have been the case in the Danelaw.

5.4.3 Two mechanisms for fostering underspecification and simplification

in English-Norse contact
1. Trigger weakening. In many cases, already in Old English features were ripe
for marginalization in a contact situation, because they occurred only variably.
This is the case with inherent reflexives, external possessors, directional adverbs,
the be-perfect, the become passive, V2, and indefinite man.
It is tempting to hypothesize that the optionality of these features in Old
English was itself due to Scandinavian contact. But this is unlikely given that
most Old English documentation from 900 A. D. onward is in the West Saxon
dialect, outside of Scandinavian settlement. Crucially, however, this hardly
means that these features were used in more tightly conventionalized fashion
beyond West Saxon. On the contrary, this kind of variability is attributable to
speech varieties that are primarily spoken, as was true of Old English — while
it comes down to us in writing, it was spoken in a society where literacy was
largely limited to an elite. The especial prevalence of “unfocused” conventions
is familiar to any linguist working on an unwritten indigenous language, and
even characteristic of other early Germanic varieties like Gothic and Old Norse
itself (in the latter of which inherent reflexives, become with the passive, and
indefinite man were variable). As such, we can assume that the “softness” of the
relevant rules was typical of English dialects in general, not just West Saxon.19
In any case, this would mean that such features were especially vulnerable
to falling below the line of acquirability, via a process outlined by Lightfoot
(1997, 1999). Namely, the tendency in non-native varieties towards simplifica-
tion — which for our purposes we can term a resistance to overspecification

19."This also discourages supposing that the variability of many features in Old English was
due to Celtic influence “softening up” the grammar initially, with Scandinavian contact
merely reinforcing a process already begun. If other early Germanic languages unaffected by
Celtic already displayed similar variability, then the Celtic explanation for English loses
necessity.
 What happened to English? 263

and complexification — would have led Norse speakers to use these features,
processed as ones omissible without impeding communication, even less in
their rendition of English. This could have initiated a snowballing decline in
frequency of occurrence over generations of the sort that Lightfoot analyzes as
weakening and eliminating the sufficient “trigger”, in his terms, for its trans-
mission to new generations.
Importantly, the weakening of many of these features would have been
reinforced by being variable or marginal in Old Norse itself, examples being
inherent reflexives and the indefinite man. Here we are also in a position to
refine the argumentation above regarding the be-perfect and the
become-passive. These features were not absent in Old Norse, but under this
analysis, their restricted function in that grammar would have rendered them
prime candidates for outright elimination in a version of a language its speakers
acquired, even when that language had equivalent constructions. To wit, English
underwent the same process as Hindi did in Fiji.
Importantly, Lightfoot’s framework entails no stipulation that a given feature
would vanish immediately. Rather, once initiated, the weakening of a trigger
proceeds gradually towards its total obliteration, each generation using a feature
less often than the previous one and providing even less stimulus for the next
one.20 As such, my claim is not that contact in the Danelaw would have oblit-
erated the features in Table 3 immediately.
Certainly the optimally “clean” version of my argument would demonstrate
that all of these features evanesce from English before 1200 A. D. — but the
documentary evidence obviously does not support such a scenario. Our goal is
to construct a scientifically responsible explanation to account for the gradual
disappearance of the features in question — this being as imperative to explain
as their more abrupt disappearance would be, given that they were retained in
a dozen-odd sister languages. Lightfoot’s framework provides a basis for
proposing that Scandinavian contact “tripped off” a decline of these features,
that only later culminated in complete disappearance.
2. General “trimming” of overspecified and complex features. Other features may
have been eliminated even when downright robust in both languages. To reiterate,

20."Certainly Lightfoot’s work emphasizes “catastrophic” parameter shifts. However, he

makes no stipulation that the process of trigger weakening that eventually causes these
parameter shifts is, itself, of such an abrupt nature. (To the extent that his earlier work
claimed that such changes occurred in highly narrow time frames, in later work he has
considerably tempered this view.)
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this is the very conception that is common consensus regarding grammatical

gender in the noun phrase. I suggest that it was also the case with the collapse of
gender distinctions on the articles. A non-native speaker of English, confronted
with three forms of the article corresponding to gender assignments that often
conflicted between Old English and Old Norse, would plausibly have made do
with a single gender-neutral marker rather than applying their native genders
to their version of English. Koine data worldwide, such as Fiji Hindustani,
indicate that when grammatical features are functionally equivalent but
paradigmatically or behaviorally incommensurate in closely related varieties,
the speaker of one of them is as likely to eliminate their reflex of that feature as
to preserve it.
I also suggest that the gradual disappearance of V2 falls under the same
rubric. An analogy is the weakness of SOV order in Fiji’s Hindustani koine,
created by people all of whom spoke languages where SOV was obligatory.
Here, the issue was less structural discrepancies — minor in both the Danelaw
and Fiji — than the simple impulse towards simplification in non-native
speech varieties.

5.5 The nature of evidence

Obviously we yearn for particulars of the sociolinguistic terrain in the Danelaw.
However, this was a largely illiterate setting of primarily oral communication
lost to the ages; the writing that has come down to us was, in broad view, a
marginal activity aimed at a small elite. Even the numerical size of the Scandina-
vian presence remains controversial — and most likely unknowable. Thomason
& Kaufman (1988: 276, 361–363) cite Sawyer’s (1971) arguments that there is
no evidence that vast streams of peasant settlers followed in the wake of the
invaders as often supposed.
Sawyer may be correct that this impact was due more to prestige than brute
numbers, and the questions here naturally evoke an interest in the precise
mechanics of how a language is transformed by widespread second-language
acquisition. But at the end of the day, a pre-literate society 1200 years removed
from us is unlikely to ever shed much light on this question. To serve our
interest in the on-the-ground aspects of this kind of process, there are various
living or amply recorded analogues to what I propose happened in the Danelaw
(e.g. see LaCroix 1967 on vehicular Fula). My aim has been to demonstrate that
even if we will likely never know precisely how the transmission of English was
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What happened to English? 265

temporarily diluted in northeastern England, there is evidence allowing us to

know that this did happen.21

6. Conclusion

As many readers may have noticed, my list of features is hardly complete.

Radiating outward from the core of losses that leave English unique or close to
it in Germanic, there are other losses that English shares with a few Germanic
languages, their interest being that where a subset of Germanic languages have
departed sharply from the original Germanic “typology”, English never fails to
be a member. Examples include subjunctive marking (lost or marginal in
Mainland Scandinavian, Dutch, Frisian, and Afrikaans) and verb-final word
order in subordinate clauses (lost in Mainland Scandinavian, Icelandic and
Faroese and Yiddish). English is also alone in Germanic in lacking a strong-
weak distinction in adjectival inflection (even Afrikaans retains this based
largely on syllable count), which I omitted from my presentation to detract
from the traditional focus on inflectional loss.
A perhaps surprising implication of this thesis is that English evidences a
much greater disruption of transmission from Proto-Germanic than Afrikaans,
despite this language’s established analysis as a “semi-creole”. Compared to its
sisters other than English viewed through the lens of Table 3, Afrikaans differs
largely in inflectional loss, with the mere addition of loss of the external
possessive construction and indefinite man. Overall it remains very much a
“well-behaved” Germanic language.
That the difference between English and Afrikaans suggests a difference in
degree of transmission disruption is suggested by evidence that inflectional loss
is a “first layer” along the cline towards outright pidginization, with losses of
other “overspecificational” features following (cf. McWhorter 2001). For
example, there are creoles that lack most or all of the inflections of their source
languages but largely retain the remainder of their those languages’ grammatical
machineries, but none that lack source language features such as derivational

21."As such, the contrast that English presents with its sisters in broad view suggests that it
would be more elegant not to surmise, contra Thomason & Kaufman (1988: 303), that the
inflectional simplifications in northerly English dialects were already taking place to a
significant degree before Norse contact.
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266 John H. McWhorter

markers, inherent reflexive marking, or inalienable possessive marking while

retaining source language inflections.
English is the most context-dependent grammar in the Germanic family by
a strikingly wide margin. Of course, if there were only three or four Germanic
languages, then serendipity might remain a plausible explanation of the
discrepancy. But instead there are about a dozen Germanic languages, each of
them subsuming a number of dialects. To assume that the nature of the changes
in English was merely a matter of chance would seem to require that the slings
and arrows of outrageous fortune had led at least one of the many other
Germanic languages — or even dialects — to shed, rather than transform, a
comparable volume of the Germanic legacy.
Otherwise, the conclusion would seem almost unavoidable that the English
timeline was decisively influenced by what Trudgill (2001) has termed, in apt
and savory fashion, “the lousy language-learning abilities of the human adult”.

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Summary

It has become widely accepted that English has undergone no interruption in transmission,
its paucity of inflection treated as a random loss paralleled in Scandinavian. This paper
argues that English has in fact lost more of the Proto-Germanic inheritance than any other
Germanic language including Afrikaans. These losses extend far beyond inflection: where
other Germanic languages overtly mark a given feature, in a great weight of cases English
leaves the distinction to context. While there are no grounds for treating English as a
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272 John H. McWhorter

“creole”, the evidence strongly suggests that extensive second-language acquisition by

Scandinavians from the eighth century onwards simplified English grammar to a consider-
able extent.

Résumé

On accepte que l’anglais est une langue qui s’est transmise sans heurts, et que la disparition
quasi-totale de sa flexion n’est qu’un changement aléatoire, que l’on retrouve également dans
les langues scandinaves. Dans cet article, on soutient qu’en fait, l’anglais est la langue qui a
éliminé le plus de traits du germanique commun, surpassant même l’Afrikaans. Parmi ces
traits éliminés, on ne compte pas que la flexion: là où d’autres langues germaniques marquent
de façon obligatoire divers traits, dans un nombre déterminant de cas l’anglais laisse ces
distinctions au contexte. Bien qu’il n’existe aucune raison de qualifier l’anglais de “créole”,
tout porte à croire que l’apprentissage à grande échelle de l’anglais par des scandinaves à partir
du huitième siècle a considérablement simplifié la grammaire de l’anglais.

Zusammenfassung

Es ist mittlerweile allgemein anerkannt, dass die englische Sprache sich ohne Bruch ent-
wickelte, wobei man davon ausgeht, dass der Verlust der Flexionsendungen wie auch im
Skandinavischen rein willkürlich vonstatten ging. Dieser Aufsatz zeigt, dass die englische
Sprache tatsächlich aber mehr von ihrem protogermanischen Erbe verloren hat, als jede
andere germanische Sprache, eingeschlossen Afrikaans. Diese Verluste beziehen sich auf weit
mehr als die Flexion. Wo andere germanische Sprachen ein bestimmtes Merkmal aus-
drücklich kennzeichnen, überlässt die englische Sprache in vielen Fällen dem Kontext die
Unterscheidung. Obwohl es keinerlei Anhaltspunkt gibt, Englisch als Kreolsprache zu
betrachten, gibt es Beweise, die eindeutig darauf hinweisen, dass die englische Grammatik im
Zuge des Zweitsprachenerwerbs der Skandinavier, die seit dem 8. Jahrhundert nach
Großbritannien strömten, erheblich vereinfacht wurde.

Author’s address
John H. McWhorter
1203 Dwinelle Hall
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720 U.S.A.
e-mail: [email protected]