Dialects and Standard English — the present

Abstract

When Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales at the end of the fourteenth century, there was no Standard English. He wrote in the educated variety of the London area, where he lived and worked. William Langland wrote Piers Plowman in the South Midland dialect. The York Mystery Plays were written in the Northern dialect. The poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is in the West Midland dialect of Lancashire or Cheshire. The writer John of Trevisa used a South-Western dialect.