The Great Vowel Shift and the Making of Modern English

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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 History Guy is 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 75 countries. As the title of the great vowel shift implies, this shifted the pronunciation of vowels from a softer to a harder sound.

Here's The History Guy with the story of the great vowel shift and the making of modern English. Recently we did an episode on ketchup 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 1937 Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie Shall We Dance? with the lyrics, you say tomato and I 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. 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 of the intimate connection between historical events and the words that describe them. The period of the rapid transformation of the pronunciation of English that was called the 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 14th century and the 18th century, although some argue that it may have started earlier or ended later. The term itself was coined by Otto Jespersen, a Danish linguist and anglicist, whose focus at the time was on the history of language. Jespersen described the GVS in his 1909 work, A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles. The GVS represents the transition from Middle English to Modern English, and it mostly affected the so-called long vowels, although it affected some consonants as well.

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 it affected Scotland and Northern England and Southern England differently and at different times, and it occurred in fits and starts over a period of centuries. But while other languages have undergone vowel shifts, the significant transformation in how English was pronounced over just a few centuries was, well, exceptional. As to the actual pronunciation differences, I'll largely leave that up to linguists 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, which would have pronounced something like bought, 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 vowel shift, on the 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 pawns. Chaucer rhymed words that Shakespeare did not. Chaucer, for example, rhymed the word deaf, 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 I spelled deep, D-I-P-E, and need in ID. This indicates that by her time, words spelled with E-E had already shifted pronunciation from the E 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 English, where I was pronounced E, indicates the pronunciation of early Modern English after the great vowel shift. Two, there were scholars at the time noting some of the changes, and some even proposed new systems of spelling to represent the changes, and 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. Somehow history changed language.

What happened in England in the approximately 160 years between Geoffrey 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? It's a difficult question to answer, there's little agreement because scholars can't even agree over when the great vowel shift began. One of the most significant factors that's been suggested to explain the rapid shift in language was population migration. Pronunciation varied in medieval England, where the typical person never wandered farther afield than a dozen miles from their home. Areas developed dialects, especially regional languages. But events in the 14th 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 Conqueror's victory in 1066, the rulers of England primarily spoke French, albeit the more country bumpkin Norman French as opposed to Parisian French. For the following 300 years, the language of the court and government was French, while written language was mainly done in Latin. But some 95% of the population still spoke English. As the Norman rulers viewed 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 a further diversion from dialects of old English. Some linguists estimate that a common person in England in the 12th century would not be able to understand the English language spoken just 50 miles away. And you're listening to the history guy and a fascinating tale of the transformation of the English language.

The story of the great vowel shift continues here on Our American Stories. All right, we're all set for the party. I've trimmed the tree, hung the mistletoe and paired all those weird shaped knives and forks with the appropriate cheeses, and I plugged in the partition partition. It's a home cocktail maker that makes over 60 premium cocktails, plus a whole lot of seasonal favorites too.

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All season long, join us for special performances with the brightest stars. Plus festive recipes to whip up the perfect holiday feast and great deals on the hottest toys and gifts for everyone on your list. So join us every morning on NBC to make today your home for the holidays. Folks, if you love the great American stories we tell and love America like we do, we're asking you to become a part of the Our American Stories family. If you agree that America is a good and great country, please make a donation. A monthly gift of $17.76 is fast becoming a favorite option for supporters. Go to OurAmericanStories.com now and go 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 Guy and the story of the great vowel shift and the making of modern English.

Let's pick up where we last left off. Some linguists estimate that a common person in England in the 12th century would not be able to understand the English language spoken just 50 miles away. But in the 14th 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 1348. By December the outbreak was estimated to have killed between 40 and 60 percent of the population. The impacts of this mass depopulation were profound, changing economics and culture, but could it change 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 study published last year looking at data from medieval cities found a surprising result. Despite the devastation of the plague and periodic return of the illness, urban populations recovered to pre-plague populations by the 16th century. Further research on abandoned rural villages and deforestation 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 thought would be that places harder hit by the pandemic would recover more slowly, both because their population was harder hit 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 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 southeast England including London saw a significant increase in immigration from the northern England following the pandemic. This conclusion is supported by records that have been accumulated by the universities of York and Sheffield in England's immigrants database, which tracks immigration to England between 1330 and 1550. 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 even farther afield.

The research suggests that 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 Vowel Shift. And loanwords, particularly French loanwords, are another part of the explanation. The Normans brought a huge number of French words into the English language, thousands of them. 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, also learned French. But why would this mix of languages cause a Vowel Shift hundreds of years after the Norman Conquest? Well the 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 up the second of France in 1204 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 in power because it was more prestigious. The effect of French loanwords on English pronunciation was further impacted by war with the French. The series of conflicts that would be called the Hundred Years War began in 1337. 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 language of the enemy.

Henry IV, who deposed his nephew Richard II in 1399, 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 overcorrection when the pronunciation of French-derived words was changed to sound less French. This overcorrection 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. Well some linguists think that that might be explained by something called a chain shift.

Roughly speaking that means that a small change might cause a change somewhere else. For example, pronouncing a vowel one way differently might require then 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 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 and geography, the great vowel shift did not apply uniformly to all relevant words. For example, the letter combination spelled E-A was pronounced eh in Middle English.

Meat was met. It went through a phase where it was pronounced eh. Meat would have been mate and then finally the long E sound it has today, meet, along with words like speak and beam. But some words got stuck along the way. Met became meet, but steak, which would originally have been pronounced steck, got stuck in the middle at steak with words like great.

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 that printing in England was standardizing spelling in English. Some of the new standardized spellings miss the effects of the G-V-S, 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, as would all consonants. Many of those sounds had become silent in Smokin' language, but the letters were still retained in printing. In other cases 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 shire. Every Briton will tell you that Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Bedfordshire are pronounced Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Bedfordshire.

The reason is not laziness or 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. And speaking of England's past, William the Conqueror's Doomsday book, from which we have learned so much about England's past, is pronounced Doomsday but spelled Domesday, D-O-M-E-S-D-A-Y. 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 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 who spoke a bastardized form of French and of a language of a population that was considered so low class that it went unregulated, 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 great nation in its own right, of a period when the people moved from largely rural to much more urban. It is a language that is as complex as the history of the English people. So what about tomato and tomato? Well, Chaucer likely would have pronounced it tomato, except that tomatoes hadn't been introduced to England in Chaucer's time. Shakespeare would have recognized what a tomato was, but he likely would have pronounced it with the short a and called it a tomato. And in modern English it was pronounced tomato for a very long time. It was nothing but an affectation of 18th century upper-class Englishmen in southern England that turned chance, dance and castle into chance, dance, castle and turned tomato into tomato.

And like the song implies, maybe that difference isn't all that important and we don't really have to call the whole thing off. And great job as always by Greg Hengler for working and collaborating so well with the History Guy. Great job on the production and my goodness, what a tour de force of writing and performance. This is my favorite and there have been so many great ones.

The great vowel shift and the making of modern English here on Our American Stories. This is Tonya Rad from Scrubbing In with Becca Tilly and Tonya Rad. This is what you do when you've just found that statement handbag on eBay and you want to build an entire wardrobe around it. You start selling to keep buying. Yep, on eBay. Over that all black everything phase, list it and buy all the color. Feeling more vintage than ever? It's out with the new and in with the pre-loved.

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