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The Norman conquest meant that for 300 years English virtually ceased to be a written language, with both literature and administrative documents being written in French or Latin. So we simply have no idea how quickly it developed from Anglo Saxon into Early Modern English. However, what little evidence there is seems to put the change later rather than earlier.
According to Wikipedia's article on Middle English, the period 1100-1300 saw English retain the vocabulary of Old English almost intact, but simplifying the grammar significantly. Old English was an inflected language with lots of case endings, for instance (a dative case, a locative case, etc) but these were abandoned and replaced by prepositions and word order instead.
Then in 1300-1400 - the time when the English aristocracy were starting to speak English instead of French - the change became much more dramatic, with a lot of Old English vocabulary being dropped and French or Latin loan-words coming into the language instead. Chaucer wrote in Middle English (around 1380) but it's much easier for modern English-speakers to understand his work than it would be to understand something written just a hundred years earlier.
According to Wikipedia's article on Middle English, the period 1100-1300 saw English retain the vocabulary of Old English almost intact, but simplifying the grammar significantly. Old English was an inflected language with lots of case endings, for instance (a dative case, a locative case, etc) but these were abandoned and replaced by prepositions and word order instead.
Then in 1300-1400 - the time when the English aristocracy were starting to speak English instead of French - the change became much more dramatic, with a lot of Old English vocabulary being dropped and French or Latin loan-words coming into the language instead. Chaucer wrote in Middle English (around 1380) but it's much easier for modern English-speakers to understand his work than it would be to understand something written just a hundred years earlier.
Neeeeu-no-no. I suggested ~300 years for mass conversion to introduced religion to the point of it becoming dominant and completely embraced by the masses. Somehow I imagine religion was the primary cultural marker in Anatolia.
"The extent to which gene flow from Central Asia has contributed to the current gene pool of the Turkish people, and the role of the 11th century invasion by Turkic peoples, has been the subject of several studies. These studies conclude that local Anatolian groups are the primary source of the present-day Turkish population. Anatolians do not significantly differ from other Mediterranean populations, indicating that while the Asian Turks carried out an invasion with cultural significance (language and religion), the genetic significance is only weakly detectable".
As for languages, I find it hard to buy that the impact of literate people and elites on languages and dialects spoken by peasantry could be so swift. An example of France was provided to support this view. History also provides a lot of examples of failed "Germanization", "Russification", "Polonization" and so forth. Even if we suppose that the advent of nationalist sentiment in the 19th century saved a lot of to-be-nations, it still seems that 2 generations is far from enough (a lot of future nations were culturally subjugated for much longer periods prior to arrival of national ideas).
"The extent to which gene flow from Central Asia has contributed to the current gene pool of the Turkish people, and the role of the 11th century invasion by Turkic peoples, has been the subject of several studies. These studies conclude that local Anatolian groups are the primary source of the present-day Turkish population. Anatolians do not significantly differ from other Mediterranean populations, indicating that while the Asian Turks carried out an invasion with cultural significance (language and religion), the genetic significance is only weakly detectable".
As for languages, I find it hard to buy that the impact of literate people and elites on languages and dialects spoken by peasantry could be so swift. An example of France was provided to support this view. History also provides a lot of examples of failed "Germanization", "Russification", "Polonization" and so forth. Even if we suppose that the advent of nationalist sentiment in the 19th century saved a lot of to-be-nations, it still seems that 2 generations is far from enough (a lot of future nations were culturally subjugated for much longer periods prior to arrival of national ideas).
1/3 of the current turkish population are descendents that surviveved and fled the massacres and ethnic cleanses in Balkans, Caucasia and Crimea while OE lost these provinces. So i am actually supriced that it was only 2 millons who could not talk the main language. Two big waves of immigrants, one right after tha Balkan Wars 1912 and one after the population exchange with Greece happened recently 1924. As an example, majority of greek muslims from Crete couldnt use a single word turkish, there were albanians, chechens, Kaukasian mosims, pomaks, Bosniaks and various others that had recently fled to Anatolia. So that "Citizen, speak Turkish" was mainly aimed at those groups and of course the Kurds...
Anatolia under the Byzantines and Seljuks wasn't some feudal place where people were fixed to their land and forbidden from marrying any one from or moving to another place, was it? People moved around, went to town to trade and shop, joined passing armies to see the world, and so on... they weren't totally stationary like some medieval European peasant or a Caucasus mountain villager. For things like selling your merchandise in town you need to speak the town's language... also what happened to the monasteries? I can't imagine the Seljuks let them unmolested. Surely they would at least have confiscated part of their lands and handed them over to Sufi orders. What does that leave people for whom religion is a center of their life?
Lots of little drivers for cultural change...
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Most monasteries were left alone under the Seljuks, but since they were cut off from the Byzantine church they lost a lot of their funding and decayed. Church land was sometimes turned into Waqf to fund the upkeep of mosques instead, even though the buildings themselves weren't touched.