As no autograph of the poetical works is known to be extant what can be said of his language must be based on probable inference. A study of the rhyme-vowels shows beyond reasonable doubt that the Great Vowel Shift has not yet begun. The inflectional characteristics have been obscured by scribal overlay of a decorative final -e, after the loss of the residual traces of inflectional syllables in the early 15th c. If one accepts as genuine only those final -e's for which there is some historical warrant, what emerges (after allowing for elision) is a remarkably regular verse. It then appears that, from the point of view of morphology, this dialect is conservative, inasmuch as it regularly indicates, by means of -e, the plural and the weak declension of monosyllabic adjectives. The verbal inflections of the present indicative are (sg) -eth and (pl.) -en; that is, they are of a Midland type. The reflexes of OE eo and y point more specifically to the East Midlands. However, here and there, SE traces can also be found.

This is the Court-dialect of the reign of Richard II, also to be found in the works of Gower, Hoccleve and the Trinity MS of Piers Plowman. It is historically important as the language current among the aristocracy after the Norman community had becomes substantially monolingual in the middle of the 14th C. (Parliament was opened for the first time with a speech in English in 1362).

The lexis is remarkable for the admixture of words of Germanic and French origin. Particularly noteworthy are those French words which provide the English language with the 'cultural superstructure' which it had lacked for centuries after the decay of the old Saxon nobility.

This dialect is similar to, but clearly distinguishable from that used commonly by the Chancery clerks from 1430 onwards - the 'Chancery Standard' from which Early Modern Standard English is directly derived.

 Chaucer's poetical work at large betrays stylistic influence from at least three major sources: firstly, the common narratvie style of the earlier English and French romances; secondly, the language of fin' amour, especially as represented by the Roman de la Rose; the language of learning, for use in treating of specialist subjects like rhetoric, astrology, philosophy and theology (the major influence being Boethius).

 Nouns - the regular mark of pluraily is -es, (derived historically from the -as pl. inflection of old strong masc. nouns like stan). This is found even with words which were originally of a different grammatical gender, or had no plural inflection, or were from another language: e.g. wyves, freendes, rokkes, clerkes, causes. Elsewhere there are a few pl. nouns in -en like eyen, toon, shoon, or uninflected or mutating nouns like sheep etc.

Pronouns - The paradigm for the 3rd personal pronoun pl. is they - hem - hir(e) - hem: that is to say, the forms derived from the Old Norse had not penetrated further than the nom.
 Note: 2nd person sg and pl thou, ye, used for other than grammatical purposes.
 Genitive sg. of it is his (its does not appear until late c16).

In general, grammatical gender has been replaced by natural gender: articles adjectives and demonstratives no longer agree with following noun.
Prepositions have taken over many functions of inflectional endings. Influence of French usage de has encouraged spread of phrases with English genitive of. Dative increasingly expressed by to and for.

 Relatively fixed word-order, normally SVO though inversions still far more permissible than in Modern English.

 Single word modifiers usually appear before nouns: greet chiertee; but multiple word modifiers can be before and after: grisly, feendly rokkes blake, othere places delitables.

 Complex sentences organized as in Modern English, using rel. pronouns that and which; who and whose have yet to develop as relatives.
 

links to other Chaucer pages
ORB Chaucer resource page
Chaucer metapage
Chaucer pedagogy page
Chaucer review bibliography
Larry Benson's Harvard Chaucer page
Online reviews of recent books on Chaucer