The Great Vowel Movement

Today on the Subcast there's a brief explainer on the Great Vowel Shift, the most significant change in English since the Norman Invasion.  We're beginning to move into Modern English!

Transcript

Hi, folks, and welcome to another brief episode of the Classic English Literature Subcast. I’d like to take a few minutes to talk to you about the most transformative event in the English language since the Norman Invasion: the Great Vowel Shift.

Have you ever wondered why people who speak the same language often sound so different?  Like, why someone from Boston sounds so much different than someone from Belfast sounds so much different than someone from Binkolo?  Well, to overgeneralize a bit, it has to do mostly with vowel sounds.  That’s where accents come from.  You see, most English speakers pronounce their consonants the same way: a “B” is buh for just about everyone.  An “N” is nnn for just about everyone.  That’s because consonant sounds have a pretty fixed position in the mouth.  A “B” sound can really only be made with the lips, and “N” only with the nose pitching in, a “T” only with the teeth.  So consonants usually tend to stay pretty stable, though I will point out some exceptions in a few minutes.

But vowel sounds are made in the middle of the oral cavity and rely on where a speaker places and how they position the tongue.  Do a little exercise: make a “U” sound, and you notice that it comes from the back of your throat.  Move up a little bit, and you’re making an “O” sound.  “bout the middle of the mouth you get “Ah.”  Move forward again and you get “Eh” and finally, right at the very front of the mouth: “Ih.”  As you move the vowels forward, you might notice that your tongue changes its shape too.  None of these are concrete movements – some speakers may make an “A” sound a little further back than another speaker.  As a result, the letter “A” in the word “car” gets something of an “ah” sound in southern New England but an “aw” sound a few hundred miles away in southern New Jersey.  Cah and cor. And, long as we’re right here, you might have noticed that the letter “R” in those words gets a different pronunciation – even though it’s a consonant!

Ah, you think you’ve caught me.  But while we think of R as a consonant from our elementary school lessons, it really behaves more like a vowel since it kind of lives in the middle of the mouth, too.  Linguists refer to letters like R and L as semivowels or approximants, though some dispute the different categorizations.  Accents that drop an “R” at the end of a word like “cah” are called “non-rhotic.”  Accents that don’t are rhotic.  So, since there’s no really precise location, vowel sounds can slip around in the mouth, and that’s – very oversimplified – how you get accents.

Thanks, McDonough.  Why should I know this in a podcast about English literature?

I’m glad you asked, imaginary skeptical interlocutor.  We’re at a point in the podcast where the English language begins to undergo a profound change in its pronunciation.  As I said, we call it the Great Vowel Shift.  Beginning in the 15th century (maybe a bit earlier), the pronunciation of English vowels moved forward one position in the mouth.  Why did this happen?  No one really knows. It may have to do with population migrations following the cataclysm of the Black Death and/or the influence of French in various ways.  Some argue war with France forced a shift while others, contrarily, believe the continuing prestige of French among the middle and upper classes led to a hyperconscious English pronunciation that aped French, which pronounced long vowels further forward in the mouth.  How did it happen?  Well, some say it happened all at once, what linguists call a chain shift, in which all the vowels got up, took a step forward, and sat down again.  Others think that the shift took much longer, even over a period of centuries, and involved the movement of only a couple of vowels at any given time.

However and whyever it happened, it’s the reason that Chaucer sounds so much different than Shakespeare, it’s what changed Middle English into early Modern English. So, for example, the word spelled b-i-t-e was pronounced in Chaucer’s time something like “beeta.”  But a hundred years later, it gets closer to our “bite,” though there may have been some diphthongization along the way (that basically means that a single vowel letter has kind of two blended vowel sounds – so maybe “biate”).  Same thing with MidE “wyf” and ModE “wife.”  And “hoose” to “house.”

Of course, there were other sound changes that distinguish MidE from ModE: Chaucer rolled his Rs and pronounced initial silent letters in words like “k-now” and “g-naw” for our know and gnaw.  And Chaucer made the nominal ending -ion two syllables where we pronounce it as one.  We say “nation,” not “nacion.”  These kinds of changes pretty clearly have to do with efficiency; it simply takes too much work to trill r’s or to pronounce velar sounds (k and g are made at the back of the throat when the tongue touches the velum or soft palate) before nasal consonants.  Like, have you ever been corrected by a blue-nosed elementary teacher for saying “walking” without enunciating the final g?  Walkin’?  Well, everybody says some version of walkin’ because it’s too inefficient to make the switch from the nasal sound to the velar – they’re too far apart in your head, so inevitably that g just kind of glides away.

OK, McDonough.  How do we know that pronunciation changed?  Are you listening to 600 year old mixtapes?

Oh, no, of course not!  They didn’t have mixtapes back then, silly imaginary skeptical interlocutor.  We can tell because spelling was largely phonetic for most of English’s history.  Sporadic efforts at standardizing spelling had been attempted as far back as the 13th century, but without a critical mass of texts to reinforce the standard, idiosyncratic spellings persisted.  Not until the printing press in the late 1400s did we have the technology to create a stabilizing volume of texts with the same spelling.   The advent of movable type and the printing press promoted literacy, and literacy tends to fix spelling in place.  So, to use the instance I mentioned above, without standardized spelling, I would probably spell the three-letter word for an automobile “c-a-h” because I am originally from Rhode Island and that region features a non-rhotic (r-dropping) dialect.  But my buddy from New Jersey would spell it “c-o-r” because he speaks with a rhotic accent.   So, given that most people spelled things the way they pronounced them, we can track the shift in sounds, in some cases, by shifts in spelling.  

And here’s where literature becomes particularly handy.  We can see how words were said by checking the rhyme schemes in poetry.  We know, for example, that Chaucer rhymed the words blood, food, and good, using probably a long “o” sound, like blode, fode, and gode.  After the vowel shift, we note that Shakespeare rhymed the same words, but this time with an “ooh” sound: foood, bloood, and goood.  Of course, nowadays, none of these words rhyme in standard pronunciation.

The Great Vowel Shift was not a one-time event, of course.  As I just noted, pronunciations continue to evolve all the time, based on geographical region, social prestige, degrees of  standardization, and media exposure.  I wanted to give this short, basic explainer to you now because in upcoming episodes of the podcast, you will notice that the texts are starting to sound more modern, closer to our own English speech, and less foreign or exotic than it has done in our previous episodes, in which we’ve had to rely on translations.

So, just wanted you to know that.  Thanks so much for listening to the Classic English Literature Subcast.  Please remember to like, follow, subscribe, and, if you’re able, donate so that we can keep this little engine running.  Look for the CELP on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and now TikTok.  Tell all your friends about the great fun we have!  Till next time, just roll with the changes!