Medieval English (ca600-1500) in a multilingual context

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Multiculturalism and multilingualism have been part of British culture since the island received its name in classical times and continue to be key components in perceptions of British identity. During medieval times, understood here as the period from ca600 to ca1500, Britain saw the interaction of peoples speaking languages belonging to different branches of Indo-European, the most important for the purposes of the history of English being, besides English itself, various Celtic languages, Latin, French, Old Norse (the language of various groups of Scandinavian marauders and settlers) and other continental Germanic languages. The main objective of this network is to reassess the impact that language contact during the medieval period had on the evolution of the English language in terms of both its vocabulary and its formal structure, and to explore what medieval texts can tell us about how our medieval ancestors understood and dealt with multilingualism in their everyday lives. Methodological advances in the various fields of historical linguistics and literary criticism, and the recent realisation of the significance for the study of historical multilingualism of non-literary documents, as well as present-day heritage languages and urban vernaculars developed in multilingual contexts make this reassessment particularly timely. The network will facilitate the interaction between scholars working on various fields related to the study of the linguistic features and textual cultures of medieval English; we will also enable dialogue with scholars researching the linguistic effects of modern multilingualism. This will allow us to:1. Share the outcomes of methodological advances, thanks to the fact that the network will include scholars working on past and current projects which have themselves revolutionised our understanding of language contact between English and other languages (e.g. the Gersum Project: The Scandinavian Influence on English Vocabulary, www.gersum.org; and A Bilingual Thesaurus of Everyday Life in Medieval England, soon to be publicly available online; The Oxford English Dictionary, www.oed.com).2. Re-evaluate complex linguistic changes which can only be explained through the detailed understanding of the linguistic features of English and the various languages it came into contact with, and analyse the linguistic and sociolinguistic impact of such contact. Vocabulary is the level of linguistic analysis where the influence of language contact is often clearer but the formal structure of English also changed at a dramatic pace as a result of language contact. A fourteenth-century English speaker would not have been able to understand a tenth-century text, while a twenty-first-century reader can make sense of a text by Shakespeare or even Chaucer with relative ease. 3. Challenge the 'text-book account' of the nature and impact of language contact on medieval English, in terms of the extent of the impact of medieval multilingualism on the linguistic structure of English, speakers' perception and strategic use of foreign linguistic material in English, and the sociolinguistic status of the various languages. While accounts in textbooks in other areas of linguistics (e.g. first and second language acquisition) have evolved significantly in the last thirty years, that is not the case for textbooks focusing on the history of the English language because the atomisation of the field does not facilitate the integration of results arising from new linguistically and culturally informed research.4. Explore in further detail the multifaceted nature of how the effects of multilingualism were represented in both literary and non-literary texts (such as legal texts and administrative records) by bringing together scholars working on a wide-range of areas, including the study of manuscripts, spelling and writing practices, legal and administrative language, literary style and socio-cultural networks.