Mercian was a dialect spoken in the Anglian kingdom of Mercia (roughly speaking the Midlands of England, an area in which four kingdoms had been united under one monarchy). Together with Northumbrian, it was one of the two Anglian dialects. The other two dialects of Old English were Kentish and West Saxon. Each of those dialects was associated with an independent kingdom on the island. Of these, all of Northumbria and most of Mercia were overrun by the Vikings during the 9th century. Part of Mercia and all of Kent were successfully defended but were then integrated into the Kingdom of Wessex. Because of the centralisation of power and the Viking invasions, there is little to no salvaged written evidence for the development of non-Wessex dialects after Alfred the Great's unification, until the Middle English period. History The Mercian dialect was spoken as far east as the border of East Anglia and as far west as Offa's Dyke, bordering Wales. It was spoken in an area that extended as far north as Staffordshire, bordering Northumbria, and as far south as South Oxfordshire/ Gloucestershire, where it bordered on the Kingdom of Wessex. The Old Norse language also filtered in on a few occasions after the foundation of the Danelaw. This describes the situation before the unification of Mercia. The Old English Martyrology is a collection of over 230 hagiographies, probably compiled in Mercia, or by someone who wrote in the Mercian dialect of Old English, in the second half of the 9th century. Six Mercian hymns are included in the Anglo-Saxon glosses to the Vespasian Psalter; they include the Benedictus and the Magnificat. In later Anglo-Saxon England, the dialect would have remained in use in speech but hardly ever in written documents. Some time after the Norman conquest of England, Middle English dialects emerged and were later found in such works as the Ormulum and the writings of the Gawain poet. In the later Middle Ages, a Mercian or East Midland dialect seems to have predominated in the London area, producing such forms as are (from Mercian arun). Mercian was used by the writer and philologist J. R. R. Tolkien to signify his fictional Rohirric language. Alphabet Modern Old English orthography adds additional diacritics above certain letters to show specific phonological features. These distinctions largely were not shown in Old English. Such diacritics include macrons for vowel length and overdots for