The Multilingual Origins of Standard English

Book excerpt: In Part One (the Orthodox Version) the contributors to this volume show how monolingual explanations of the origins of Standard English are incorrect. Part Two (the Revised Version) provides an alternative sociolinguistic, multilingual history, where it is argued that English came to take over the roles, registers and written conventions of Anglo-Norman French, and that standardisation was the result of fourteenth-century socioeconomic shift.