The Great Vowel Shift

The Great Vowel Shift

The transition from Middle English to Early Modern English was marked by a major change in the pronunciation of the vowels from about 1350 to 1700. This change, termed the Great Vowel Shift, consisted of a shift in the articulation of vowels with respect to the position assumed by the tongue and the lips.

The period

The beginning of the Middle English Period coincides with the Battle of Hastings in 1066, when William, duke of Normandy (after the battle known as William the Conqueror), defeated the English and King Herald the II. After the conquest, England’s social and political structures underwent drastic changes, such as an almost complete replacement of the English aristocracy by a Norman aristocracy. Above all, the political and social aspects of the Norman Conquest had an enormous impact on the English language.

The Early Modern English period, which coincides with the ascendency of Henry the VIII to the throne in 1509, is the first during which English speakers take a serious look at their language. The end of the Early Modern English period is marked by the completion of the Great Vowel Shift and the beginning of the scientific age, around 1700.

The stages

The term Great Vowel Shift was coined by the Danish linguist Otto Jespersen. It affected the pronunciation of almost all vowels, most distinctively, however, the long monophthongs. This shift began in the XIV century and took until the XVIII century to fully develop.

Before the Great Vowel Shift, Middle English in Southern England had seven long vowels or monophthongs, as summarised in the table below.

This was the starting point. The Great Vowel Shift can be characterized as a chain shift. A chain shift is a type of phonetic change where several phonemes change along a scale. The GVS was a shift with a general drift upwards. It can be seen as a multi-stage process where the stages overlap, and they do not occur in all dialects simultaneously. It was not a uniform process, but a series of local developments over time with the result that vowels were either raised or became diphthongs.

Stage one

Stage one probably set the entire sound shift in motion. It involved two individual changes: the raising and diphthongization of /i:/ to /əi/; and the raising and diphthongization of /u:/ to /əu/. So, the two high vowels became diphthongs.

In the works by John Hart (English Pronunciation Dictionary, 1570) this stage of the GVS was well documented. Words like advertised, high, exercise were pronounced with a high front vowel [i:]; whereas words such as I, like, write, desire involved the diphthong [əi]. Furthermore, in words spelled with a –y, mostly as a suffix, Hart drew a similar distinction: adverbs ending on –ly involved [e:], while words such as my, why, by were pronounced with the diphthong [əi]. Middle English words that involved long [o:] were more consistently changed into words with Early Modern English diphthong, [əu].

Stage two

When e: and o:, the two high vowels, had become diphthongs, their high vowel position became free. Thus, the mid-high vowels, e: and oː (as in /gre:n/ or /fo:d/) were raised to i: and u: (becoming /gri:n and /fu:d/), and filled that gap.

Consequently, Middle English words like meet, speak, or see realised with [e:], now involved [i:]. Similarly, Middle English loose and moon that involved [o:] were realised with long [u:] in Early Modern English.

It is not clear though, whether the raising of e: and o: occurred after stage one or parallel to it. As a consequence, there is also disagreement about the kind of chain shift. Is it a drag chain, where stage one occurred first and then stage two was dragged to follow; or is it a push chain, where stage two and one may have happened simultaneously?

Stage three

Stage three classifies the fronting of Middle English’s central vowel /a:/ (as in /’ma:kən/) to mid-low /ɛ:/. /’ma:kən/ became first /’mæ:kən/ and eventually became /’mɛ:k/.

According to John Hart’s suggestions concerning the pronunciation of English in the sixteenth century, this information was preserved.