Usually when an English word appears only in local dialects for part of its history, that’s the earlier part of its story. But sometimes a widely-used word disappears from general use only to survive locally. That’s the case with “ken,” which had quite a list of meanings back in the day, but since the beginning of the 20th century has only been used in and around Scotland.
It all started in Old English, where “ken” meant to declare or confess something. It appears in Beowulf, but was also found in a text that’s centuries older. Before that it was “cennan,” and could be found among the usual suspects; precursors to Old English like Old German, Frisian, Old Saxon, and so on.
By the 1200s “ken” was used to mean teaching someone. After another century it also meant to simply give instructions. And ye must ken that we’re still talking about so long ago that the citations aren’t even readable today unless someone kens you how. The first way “ken” is used in that sentence, by the way, to recognize or know, arose around 1400 or so. By then English was beginning to resemble what we now speak: “Schir, kenys thow this is thi sele and thine appele?” Okay, it doesn’t resemble it that much.
“Ken” was in general use up until the 1800s. Dickens used it in A Christmas Carol: “Little kenned the lamp-lighter that he had any company but Christmas!” But after that, for some reason usage began to decline. By the late 1800s, just about every instance looked like this: “I dinna ken what ye mean, Alec.” That is, they looked like Scottish dialect.
By the early 1900s “ken” had all but disappeared from mainstream English except when it was used to suggest a fictional character or scene in Scotland. It’s still in use there, but by now it’s obsolete everywhere else. It’s still easily understood (maybe because of context) but once it became distinctively associated with one particular place, that became the only way it was used any more. It’s an unusual path for a word to follow — I dinna ken why it happened.
