The Great Vowel Shift and the Making of Modern English (History Guy)

Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. And we tell stories about everything here on this show, including your story. Send them to OurAmericanStories.com. And we love telling stories about the past. Our next story comes to us from a man who’s simply known as The History Guy. His videos are watched by hundreds of thousands of people of all ages on YouTube. The

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History Guy has also heard here at Our American Stories. The Great Vowel Shift was the single greatest change in the history of the English language, and has now become the official language in over seventy-five countries. As the title of the Great Vowel Shift implies, this shifted the pronunciation of vowels from a softer to a harder sound.

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Here’s The History Guy with the story of the Great Vowel Shift and the making of modern English.

Speaker 2 (01:01):
Recently, we did an episode on catch-up, and of course, today ketchup is mostly made from tomatoes. And that led a viewer to send me a question about the English pronunciation of the word “tomato” and ask me, “Well, which one is correct?” And that is a popular question because of a song written by George and Ira Gershwin for the nineteen thirty-seven Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie, Shall We Dance, with the lyrics, “You say tomato and I

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say tomato. You say potato, and I say potato. Let’s call the whole thing off.” And the song says a lot of things about class and culture. But the real point of the song is that the difference is unimportant. I mean, after all, tomatoes and tomatoes are the same thing. But how “tomato” and “tomato” came to be pronounced differently is an interesting historical question, because history surprisingly affects language.

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And in the history of language, a change that would have changed the pronunciation of the word “tomato” and virtually the whole of the English language stands out as a shining example, the intimate connection between his historical events and the words that described them. The period of the rapid transformation of the pronunciation of English that was called the

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Great Vowel Shift deserves to be remembered. The Great Vowel Shift, or GVS, refers to a period of radical change in how the English language is spoken. The shift roughly occurred in England between the mid-fourteenth century and the eighteenth century, although some argue that it may have started earlier and died later. The term itself was coined by

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Otto Jesperson, a Danish linguist and Anglicist, whose focus at the time was on the history of language. Jesperson described the GVS in his nineteen-oh-nine work, A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles. The GVS represents a transition from Middle English to Modern English, and it mostly affected the so-called long vowels, although it affected some consonants

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as well. And the description of exactly how it occurred is still a matter of scholarly dispute. It didn’t occur evenly over either geography or time. That is to say, that affected Scotland and Northern England and Southern England differently and at different times, and it occurred in bits and starts over a period of centuries. But while other languages have undergone bowel shifts, the significant transformation in how English

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was pronounced over just a few centuries was, well, exceptional. As to the actual pronunciation differences, I’ll largely leave that up to linguist to describe, but the shift significantly affected how words with long vowels were pronounced. The word “bite,” for example, with a long ‘i,’ would have, in the Middle English of Southern England, been pronounced like the word “beat,” whereas “beat” would have been pronounced more like the word “bade,”

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which would have pronounced something like “bot.” And all that means that Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare would have had difficulty having a conversation with each other. While we modern English speakers can read Chaucer’s Middle English, and are usually forced to sometime in high school, Chaucer’s pronunciation would have been almost completely unintelligible to the modern ear. The English of William Shakespeare, after the Great Bowels Shift, on the

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other hand, would be accented but quite understandable. That, of course, leaves the interesting question of how we would know how these words were pronounced differently, since there’s no sound recording from the time. And the question is part of the reason that there’s still disagreement over exactly how the GVS occurred, but it can be divined from clues such as what words poets rhymed or playwrights used as ponds. Chaucer rhymed

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words Shakespeare did not. Chaucer, for example, rhymed the word “daf,” meaning “you can’t hear,” with the word “life,” which was then spelled L-Y-F. Today, the words “life” and “deaf” don’t rhyme, but in Chaucer’s time, they did. They were pronounced “deef” and “leaf.” Another example is how people spelled words in personal correspondence. Elizabeth the First spelled “deep,”

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D-P-E, and “need,” N-I-D. This indicates that by her time, words spelled with ‘ee’ had already shifted pronunciation from the ‘as’ sound of Middle English to the long ‘e’ sound we use in modern English, from “depp” and “ned” to “deep” and “need.” So her use of the spelling of Middle Englis, where ‘I’ was pronounced ‘e,’ indicates the pronunciation

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of early modern English after the Great Vowel Shift, too. There were scholars at the time noting some of the changes, and some even proposed new systems of spelling to represent the changes. Those can help us understand how the changes occurred. But while the question of how the shift occurred is interesting, the question of why is even more perplexing, and there’s even less agreement among scholars about that. But somehow, history

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changed language. What happened in England in the approximately one hundred and sixty years between Jeffrey Chaucer’s death and William Shakespeare’s birth that made it so that two acknowledged masters of the English language could not have understood each other speaking their own version of English? How did history transform language?

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It’s a difficult question to answer. There’s little agreement because scholars can’t even agree on when the Great Bowel Shift began. One of the most significant factors that’s been suggested to explain the rapid shift in language was population. Migration. Seation varied in medieval England, where the typical person never wandered farther afield than a dozen miles from their home areas, developed dialects, essentially regional languages. But events in the fourteenth

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century drove greater migration and especially congregation in the cities, which then brought together people who had different accents and dialects, and the mixing of those changed the language. Part of the reason goes back to Norman rule. After William the Conquer’s victory in ten sixty-six, the rulers of England primarily spoke French, albeit the more country bumpkin Norman French, as opposed to Parisian French. For the following three hundred years,

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the language of the court and government was French, while written language was mainly done in Latin. But some ninety-five percent of the population still spoke English. As the Norman rulers youth English as a low and vulgar tongue, it went unregulated and was mainly a spoken language rather than a written language. Combined with low population mobility, that led to the development of regional dialects, or at least

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a further diversion from dialects of Old English. Some Linguish estimate that a common person in England in the twelfth century would not be able to understand the English language spoken just fifty miles away.

Speaker 1 (07:06):
And you’re listening to The History Guy in a fascinating tale of the transformation of the English language. The story of the Great Vowel Shift continues here on Our American Stories. Folks,

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to the donate button and help us keep the great American stories coming. That’s OurAmericanStories.com. And we continue with Our American Stories and with The History

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Guy and the story of the Great Vowel Shift and the making of modern English. Let’s pick up where we last left off.

Speaker 2 (08:21):
Some linguists estimate that a common person in England in the twelfth century would not be able to understand the English language spoken just fifty miles away. But in the fourteenth century, people moved. The likely cause was the Black Plague. The first known case of the illness in England was a sailor from Gascony in June of thirteen forty-eight. By December, the outbreak was estimated to have killed between forty and

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sixty percent of the population. The impacts of this massive population were profound, changing economics and culture. But could it change a language? The initial reaction to the depopulation of the plague was for people to flee locations with high mortality rates, like London. But an interesting stuf published last year, looking at data from medieval cities, found a surprising result.

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Despite the devastation of the plague and periodic return of the illness, urban populations recovered to pre-plague populations by the sixteenth century. Further research on abandoned rural villages and deforestations suggests that rural populations decreased over the same period and took more than a century more to return to the pre-plague population. The result is counterintuitive. The general

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thought would be that places harder hit by the pandemic would recover more slowly, both because their population was harder head and because people would be reticent to return to high mortality areas. Instead, the data suggests that people moved from low mortality areas in the country to high mortality areas in the city. The conclusion is that factors such as quality of land and human infrastructure, such as roads

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and trade routes, affected migration more than mortality rates. As the population decreased, people moved from more marginal land and land with fewer amenities to areas with better agricultural land and more amenities. The findings support the idea that south East England, including London, saw a significant increase in immigration from the Northern England following the pandemic. This conclusion is

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supported by records that have been accumulated by the Universities of York and Sheffield in England’s Immigrants Database, which attracts immigration to England between thirteen-thirty and fifteen-fifty. In the period following the plague, the resulting labor shortage meant a demand for labor. Thus, conditions and wages were relatively good compared to many places in Europe that attracted immigrants from the rest of the British Isles, Northwest Europe, and

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even farther afield. The research suggests as many as one in every hundred people in medieval England was an immigrant. The result is not just a mixing of English dialects, but of foreign loanwords over much of the period of the Great vowels shift. And loanwords, particularly French loanwords, or another part of the explanation, the Normans brought a huge number of French words into the English language, thousands of them.

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Those French words and pronunciations, of course, would transform language. For example, names for animals—cow, pig, sheep—although pronounced differently in Middle English than Modern English, came from English. But the names for their meat—beef, pork, mutton—were derived from French. Courts of justice were also conducted largely in French, so many Englishmen, while still primarily speaking English,

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also learned French. But why would this mix of languages cause a bowel shift hundreds of years after the Norman conquest? Well, that French used by the court developed into a unique form called Anglo-Norman. The Normans became increasingly Anglicized. Over time, Norman nobles became increasingly likely to speak English as well as French. The loss of Normandy to fill

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the Second of France in twelvel four meant that Norman nobles started becoming more dependent upon their English holdings and divorced from the French court and customs. Increasingly, the people in power were speaking English, but with a heavy French accent, and were speaking a version of French that was highly influenced by English. And the people who were not in power wanted to sound more like the people who were
empower because it was more prestigious. The effect of French

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loanwords on English pronunciation was further impacted by war with the French. The series of conflict that would be called one Hundred Years War began in thirteen thirty-seven. The war itself might have impacted language in a few ways, for example, causing migration based on the recruitment and movement of troops, and the number of Englishmen who spent time on the continent fighting in the wars. But the war also created a resentment towards the French language as the

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language of the enemy. Henry the Fourth, who deposed his nephew Richard the Second in thirteen ninety-nine, was the first English king for whom English was his mother tongue, and he took his oath in English. This new aversion to French, even as the conversion of French speaking nobles to English speaking increased. The use of loanwords may have caused an over correction when the pronunciation of French derived

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words was changed to sound less French. This over correction might explain why a language so influenced by Romance languages ended up being pronounced so differently from them, but this doesn’t really explain why the change was so massive, while some linguists think that that might be explained by something called a chain shift. Roughly speaking, that means that a

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small change might cause a change somewhere else. For example, pronouncing a vowel one way differently might require them that another vowel be pronounced differently, so that the two don’t sound too much alike. Phonological systems tend to naturally seek economy and symmetry. And while it’s not as mechanistic as it sounds, what it means is that a small shift might have driven a chain of shifts that led to

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something large, like the Great Vowel Shift. One result of the Great Vowel Shift is that it partially explains why English is so, well, difficult spreading more or less haphazardly over time. In geography, the Great Vowel Shift did not apply uniformly to all relevant words. For example, the letter combination spelled ‘ea’ was pronounced ‘ah’ in Middle English, “meat”

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was “met.” It went through a phase or was pronounced ‘A’; “meat” would have been “mate.” And then, finally, the long ‘e’ sound it has today, “meat,” along with words like “speak” and “beam.” But some words got stuck along the way. “Met” became “meat,” but “steak,” which originally have been pronounced “steck,” got stuck in the middle at “stake”

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with words like “great.” It didn’t move along to become “steek.” And a few other words took another shift to a diphthong, or combined vowel sound, to make words like “bear” and “swear.” In Middle English, those words would have all rhymed, but in modern English, that same vowel combination is pronounced three different ways. It was roughly over the same period

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that printing in England was standardizing spelling in English. Some of the new standardized spellings missed the effects of the GBS, and thus many words in English are not written as they sound. In Chaucer’s time, the ‘e’ at the end of words would have been pronounced says, would all consonants. Many of those sounds have become silent in smoking language, but the letters were still retained in printing. In other cases,

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word spelling was changed and that obscured the relationship between them and the European languages from which they were derived. There’s more confusion as there’s still many artifacts of Middle English. For example, the word “shier.” Every Britain will tell you that Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, and Bedfordshire are pronounced Buckingham-shire, Oxford-shire, and Bedford-shire.

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The reason is not laziness a dialect; it’s that the pronunciation of those names was set before the Great Vowel Shift, when “Shire” would have been pronounced “shear.” Those names are literally artifacts of England’s past. In speaking of England’s past, William the Conquer’s Doomsday Book, from which we have learned so much about England’s past, is pronounced Doomsday but spelled

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D-O-M-E-S-D-A-Y, Domesday. Not because the Normans couldn’t spell, but because “Dome” was pronounced “doom” before the Great Vowel Shift, and so the Norman king who spoke French left us an artifact of Middle English. One of the most interesting things about the Great Vowel Shift is that it didn’t occur elsewhere on the continent. I mean, all languages are subject

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to some amount of vowel shift, but the French language, for example, hardly changed over the same period, even though the French faced the same plague and the same war. The Great Vowel Shift is an artifact of the uniqueness of English history. Of Norman lords, it spoke a bastardized form of French, and of a language of a population that was considered so old class that it went unregulated,

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only to rise again and have to find its own path. It’s of a language that is permeated by foreign words, whose foreign pronunciations at some points were considered desirable and at other points considered anathema, as the nation found its identity. It represents a period where England went from a backwater vassal of the French to a gre