During these Normanruled
centuries in which
English as a language had no official status and
no regulation, English had become the third
language in its own country. It was largely a
spoken rather than written language, and
effectively sank to the level of a patois or creole.
The main dialect regions during this time are
usually referred to as Northern, Midlands,
Southern and Kentish, although they were really
just natural developments from the
Northumbrian, Mercian, West Saxon and
Kentish dialects of Old English. Within these,
though, a myriad distinct regional usages and
dialects grew up, and indeed the proliferation of
regional dialects during this time was so extreme that people in one part of England
could not even understand people from another
part just 50 miles away.