Culture clash creates English

By Hermione Gray

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IT MAY seem a little unlikely, but an unpretentious Midlands city is the birthplace of the English language

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Until now, the only claims to fame Leicester had were Gary Lineker and Englebert Humperdinck. Now we're told that was the meeting place of two cultures, which forever changed the language in this country.

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According to Dr Elaine Treharne of Leicester University, the English language was created by Anglo-Saxons and Vikings at the end of the first millennium.

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Previously, the two communities lived quite separately, neither trusting the other. And, of course, they each had their own dialects.

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In Leicester, however, they found a way to live happily alongside each other for the first time, and this led to intermarriage. It was then that their languages - Norse and Anglo-Saxon (Old English) - were combined.

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It took 300-400 years before this new dialect spread as far as London, and from there to the rest of the country and all over the world.

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Says Dr Treharne, 'Leicester was absolutely crucial in the formation of standardised English. The new dialect was easier to understand and use.'

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Among the changes were adding the letter 's' to plurals, adjectives remaining the same whether singular or plural, nouns being neither masculine or feminine, and the natives saying 'them' and 'their'�- words which were originally Scandinavian.

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Before the change, Old English words had complicated grammatical endings, and sentences were constructed with the verb at the end, as in German.