16th May 2011 The Great Vowel Shift

A week or so ago, a friend mentioned to me about the Great Vowel Shift which is when a lot of the vowel sounds changed in English. My immediate reaction was, "How do we know? We can't hear what they sounded like. Was it just a spelling reform or an actual pronunciation change?" There was nothing for it but to wait until I could ask Google for some answers, although I did find a reference in a book on the English language [7] which led me to a more successful search term.

What is the Great Vowel Shift?

The Great Vowel Shift is the name given to the change in long vowels from Middle English to Modern English which occurred from about 1450 to 1750. The long vowels changed as the position of the tongue when pronouncing them moved to different, higher place in the mouth. Others became diphthongs which are vowels which are pronounced by moving the mouth so two vowel sounds are combined in one syllable.

It occurred in the south of England around London and gradually spread, and is still spreading today as local dialects become gradually changed and a more 'standard' version of English spoken.

Before the shift, vowels were similar to continental vowel sounds. Today, they remain in dialects in the north of England and Scotland. An example of this is the monophthong pronunciation of the word house in Scottish dialects as something like hoose[1,7]. A monophthong, the opposite to diphthong, and is a pure vowel sound, without movement of the mouth for the duration of the vowel.
An applet at The Great Vowel Shift - See and Hear the GVS gives an audio demonstration of how the vowels changed.

Examples of Vowel Changes

Consider the words mite, meet, meat and mate.

Word	Middle English Pronunciation
mite	similar to today's meet; like 'mit' but with a lengthened i.
mate	like mat but with a lengthened a.

Some people would pronounce meet and meat with the same vowel sound, others would pronounce meat and mite alike. Some would pronounce all three differently.

How do we know about it?

Of course we know about it because scholars of the day wrote about it. In particular, an othoepist John Hart [11] wrote about the pronunciation of English. An analysis of his work by Otto Jespersen was published in 1907, [2]. Another person who wrote about English spelling and pronunciation was the English mathematician, John Wallis.  He believed that you could not describe English in English and thus wrote his book, Grammatica linguae Anglicanae, in Latin, [8, 9, 10].

What are the consequences?

The Great Vowel Shift changed the pronunciation in the South of England, but left the rest of the country from the north of the Rivers Humber and Ribble retaining some of the old pronunciation which has led to a north-south division of accents.

Furthermore, at the beginning of the Great Vowel Shift, the printing press was invented. This gave greater accessibility to the written word.  A consequence of this was that spellings started to become commonly used and thus were retained. Spellings that made sense before the shift, that is, in Middle English, no longer made sense with the new pronunciation.

Thank you Great Vowel Shift and printing press for making spelling even more difficult than it would have been otherwise!

1.  BBC, h2g2, The Great Vowel Shift
2.  John Hart's pronunciation of English (1569-1570) - Otto Jespersen  full text available in various formats
3. Wikipedia: diphthongs
4. Wikipedia: monophthong
5. Wikipedia: Great Vowel Shift
6. The Great Vowel Shift - See and Hear the GVS
7. D. Graddol, D. Leith, J. Swann, English: history, diversity and change 1996, The Open University, London.  p152.
8. Tim William Machan, English in the Middle Ages, OUP
9. Wikipedia: John Wallis
10. everything2: Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae
11. Wikipedia: John Hart