Западносаксонский диалект древнеанглийского языка

Dialect of Old English

West Saxon is the term applied to the two different dialects Early West Saxon and Late West Saxon with West Saxon being one of the four distinct regional dialects of Old English. The three others were Kentish, Mercian and Northumbrian (the latter two were similar and are known as the Anglian dialects). West Saxon was the language of the kingdom of Wessex, and was the basis for successive widely used literary forms of Old English: the Early West Saxon of Alfred the Great's time, and the Late West Saxon of the late 10th and 11th centuries. Due to the Saxons' establishment as a politically dominant force in the Old English period, the West Saxon dialects became the strongest dialects in Old English manuscript writing.

The "Winchester standard" gradually fell out of use after the Norman Conquest in 1066. Monasteries did not keep the standard going because English bishops were soon replaced by Norman bishops who brought their own Latin textbooks and scribal conventions, and there was less need to copy or write in Old English. Latin soon became the dominant language of scholarship and legal documents, with Anglo Norman as the language of the aristocracy, and any standard written English became a distant memory by the mid twelfth century as the last scribes, trained as boys before the conquest in West Saxon, died as old men. The new standard languages that would come into being in the times of Middle English and Modern English were descended from the East Midlands dialect, which was Anglian, and not from West Saxon. Low Late West Saxon is the distant ancestor of the West Country dialects.