Submission declined on 14 August 2026 by M kuhner (talk). This draft appears to be a duplicate of an existing article. Wikipedia does not permit multiple articles on the same topic. To improve the existing article, please edit it directly at Middle English. If the article is protected and you cannot edit it, propose your changes on the article's talk page. If you are writing about a different subject with the same name, ask the reviewer to rename your draft to distinguish it. If you would like to continue working on the submission, click on the "Edit" tab at the top of the window. If you have not resolved the issues listed above, your draft will be declined again and potentially deleted. If you need extra help, please ask us a question at the AfC Help Desk or get live help from experienced editors. Please do not remove reviewer comments or this notice until the submission is accepted. Where to get help If you need help editing or submitting your draft, please ask us a question at the AfC Help Desk or get live help from experienced editors. These venues are only for help with editing and the submission process, not to get reviews. If you need feedback on your draft, or if the review is taking a lot of time, you can try asking for help on the talk page of a relevant WikiProject. Some WikiProjects are more active than others so a speedy reply is not guaranteed. How to improve a draft Wikipedia:Contributing to Wikipedia – a basic overview on how to edit Wikipedia. Help:Wikitext – how to use the markup Help:Referencing for beginners – how to include references Wikipedia:Article development – how to develop your article Wikipedia:Writing better articles – how to improve your article Wikipedia:Verifiability – make sure your article includes reliable third-party sources You can also browse Wikipedia:Featured articles and Wikipedia:Good articles to find examples of Wikipedia's best writing on topics similar to your proposed article. Improving your odds of a speedy review To improve your odds of a faster review, tag your draft with relevant WikiProject tags using the button below. This will let reviewers know a new draft has been submitted in their area of interest. For instance, if you wrote about a female astronomer, you would want to add the Biography, Astronomy, and Women scientists tags. Add tags to your draft Editor resources Easy tools: Citation bot (help) | Advanced: Fix bare URLs Declined by M kuhner 5 days ago. Last edited by Amw12255 3 days ago. Reviewer: Inform author. Resubmit Please note that if the issues are not fixed, the draft will be declined again.

• Comment: The Middle English article has a section on the alphabet. I recommend using your work here to improve that section, if possible, rather than making a redundant article.
  My other difficulty is that large chunks of this one are not about the Middle English Alphabet, but are about other aspects of Middle English that are off-topic for an Alphabet article. For example the whole section on the Great Vowel Shift does not mention the alphabet at all. M kuhner (talk) 02:40, 14 August 2026 (UTC)

The Middle English Alphabet was a Latin based alphabet that included up to about 24 to 26 letters and was used from the 13th century to the 16th century. Evolving from Old English, a few letters were able to be kept like Thorn (Þ þ) and Wynn (Ƿ ƿ), but others like Eth (Ð ð), Ash (Æ æ), and Ethel (Œ œ) fell out of use. The letters J and U did not technically exist at the time since they were variations of the letters I and V at first; however, scribes slowly separated them into different letters over time.

The development of Middle English had notably to do with the borrowing of words from other languages, most notably from Old Norse, Old French, and Classical Latin; and subtly from Italian, Irish, Hindi, Persian, and Arabic.^[1] Migrants had a big role in changing English, they opted for a much simpler style of English, featuring the breakdown of the Old English grammar system, which was much more flexible, and also the disappearance of grammatical genders.^[2]

After the Norman Conquest led by William The Conqueror in 1066, the French language began to have a huge impact on the English language, as a new nobility of Anglo-Normans along with their Anglo-Norman were introduced from France.^[3] For the next 200 years, French and Latin became the language of the upper class, like aristocrats and merchants, and the English language was slowly starting to decline as it was seen as the language of peasants.^[4] After the 13th century, the French nobility began to back down; however, up to 85% of native English words were lost, and more than 10,000 words from French arrived into the English language. As both languages and peoples coexisted, their vocabulary began to mix which formed the new dialects of Middle English.^[5] During the Middle English period, words from French and Latin appeared to be apparent in its vocabulary, even influencing existing words.

For example, words that started with "Ce" and "Ci" (like "Cyng" and "Cǣġe") were replaced by "Ke" and "Ki" (like "King" and "Key") because in French, the letter "C" makes makes the /s/ sound before the letters "E" and "I'.^[6]

The French had also affected the pronoun "you", if French, the pronoun "vous" could refer to both plural and formality, then English took that idea and modified it onto their pronoun. Part of this also influenced how the word "you" managed to outlast the word "thou".^[7]

Even before the Renaissance, people were still adding silent letters to words that came from Latin, like adding a "b" to the word "debt" and "plumber"; However, like the word "island" some of these silent letters word added mistakenly.^[8]

When English reemerges from the rule of France, English becomes the language of the land again, but it was unstandardized. People recognized three distinct dialects: Northern, Midlands, and Southern.^[9] The farther these dialects got, the more noticeable their differences got. The most notable was the Eastern Midland dialect which contained the city of London, the growing capital of England; the 15th century to the 16th century was marked by the spread of the specific London dialect, and because the London dialect was borrowing so many words from Anglo-Norman, those words began to be used by other dialects outside of London.^[10] This is how so many faraway dialects managed to keep on borrowing terms from French and Latin.

In the 15th century, the Printing Press was invented by Johannes Gutenberg.^[11] This made printing documents and books much easier and more accessible to people; it also lowered the cost of spreading books and made it faster to make them.^[12] When the Printing Press was brought to England by William Caxton, they were mostly located in Westminster or London, which contributed to the growth of the London English dialect across England.^[13] Because the Printing Presses came from Central Europe, they used the Latin script; the original Latin script did not have letters like Thorn and Wynn as they originated from Runic alphabets so they began to be replaced by "th" and "w".^[14] The printing press also increased the spelling of "gh", most notably from the word "ghost" which gained the "h" from Flemish Printers.^[15]

During the Great Vowel Shift, many dialects were affected by the change in the pronunciation of certain vowels; most vowels' sounds moved upwards in the mouth, changing their sounds completely.^[16] During the Printing Press, these sound changes had to become standardized mid-change, which gave us modern vowels like "ai" and "au"

• Anglo-Saxons
• English Dialects
• Gutenberg Bible
• Middle English
• Middle English phonology
• Old English
• The Canterbury Tales