How and when did Old English evolve into Middle English and later Modern English?
Old English was a thoroughly developed literary and official language, the very first “barbarian” dialect to come anywhere near to rivalling Latin for serious purposes. It survived the Conquest a short while as a few monks continued its use, notably in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, but it had effectively disappeared by 1150. William arrived with an army largely composed of unwed knights on a land-grabbing venture to turn themselves into feudal lords. They shacked up with native concubines who became their housekeepers and the mothers of their bastards. These largely uneducated women used their own ungrammatical English as baby talk in the nursery, a crude dialect destined to become the first language of their offspring, who when grown up would also use it to give orders to their English-speaking serfs in the field. A similar situation would later secure the survival of Guarani as the normal colloquial language of Paraguay. But whereas Spanish became and remains the official, governmental
