By AD 850, Old English was spoken everywhere in England, though not necessarily exclusively, with three geographically peripheral exceptions: the far south-west, where Cornish remained for another thousand years; the far north-west from the Lake District northwards into south-western Scotland; and small areas of the English border counties of Shropshire and Herefordshire which remained Welsh-speaking until the eighteenth century. Scotland had originally been no less Brittonic-speaking than England; but by AD 650–700 English had become dominant in the south-east of Scotland from the region around Edinburgh in the Lothians down to what is now the border with England. Cumbric remained dominant in the south-west of the country, in the Brittonic kingdom of Strathclyde.

This chapter offers an analysis of the shifting fortunes of Latin, English and French between the mid eleventh and early thirteenth centuries, through the lens of linguistic ecology, drawing evidence from metalinguistic commentary in narrative sources, surviving texts, prosopography and onomastics and the findings of the linguistic subdiscipline of language contact. It argues for distinguishing between the period between 1066 and 1140, when the relatively high status English had enjoyed before the Norman Conquest reduced primarily at the hands of Latin, from that between 1050 and 1215, when emergence of French as a literary language, coupled with other late-twelfth-century social changes, more significantly diminished English’s importance as a written language. The chapter closes with some reflections on the factors that condition language choice in multilingual societies, rejecting a simple equation of language and identity.

In this chapter we discuss not only languages of Europe but also those which are no longer entirely European, because they have spread to other parts of the world, like Canadian French and Chilean Spanish. We also mention one language which used to be European but no longer is, namely Arabic. And we also discuss European languages which are, sadly, no longer spoken, such as Prussian and Ubykh, and other languages which are severely endangered, such as Sorbian and Ladino.

Literary representations of climate come in a range of forms, informed as much by culture as by physical conditions. The interregional applicability of climate motifs has implications for their dissemination, as narratives relying on specific environmental variables may tend to spread less widely unless they are read as accounts of the exotic. This chapter introduces responses to climate in medieval European literature by examining one motif at either extreme of the universality spectrum. Icelandic prose responds to Iceland’s short growing season by rooting many of its feuds in tensions over natural resources, with a prominent role for hay as the island’s most productive crop. At the other extreme, homiletic accounts of end-time climate describe conditions beyond anyone’s experience but made universally relatable by way of an analogy between world history and human ageing.

Over the past decade, anthropogenic climate change has encouraged authors and readers to confront new modes of imagining time, selfhood, and narrative and to reassess the relationships among experiential, historical, and climatological time. In Western literary culture, historical and climatological time traditionally have seemed one and the same. Working within the 5000-year time frame of biblical history, writers envisioned a world that, since the sixth day of creation, always has been inhabited and therefore always had been shaped and reshaped by humans. In this worldview, ‘nature’ is always a product of anthropogenic intervention. Beginning around 1800, however, work in geology, planetary astronomy, and palaeontology transformed conceptions of climate by decoupling planetary history from human experience, memory, and myth. In giving narrative form to the collision of experiential and climatological time, Anthropocene fiction explores the problem that science fiction often seems more ‘realistic’ than traditional narrative realism.