Great vowel Shift - wikipedia Great vowel Shift hide This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. ( Learn how and when to remove these template messages ) This article is missing information about a recorded passage of text read in Middle English before the Great Vowel Shift. Please expand the article to include this information. Further details may exist on the talk page. ( September 2016 ) This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. ( January 2011 ) History and description of English pronunciation Historical stages Old English Middle English Modern English General development Overview In Old English In Scots Development of vowels Overview Great Vowel Shift High front Low back High back Diphthongs Pre-L Pre-R Development of consonants Single consonants Clusters Variable features Rhoticity Flapping L - vocalization T - glottalization TH WH Related topics History of English Spelling The Great Vowel Shift was a major series of changes in the pronunciation of the English language that took place primarily between 1350 and the 1600s and 1700s, beginning in southern England, and today having influenced effectively all dialects of English. Through this vowel shift, all Middle English long vowels changed their pronunciation. In addition, some consonant sounds changed as well, particularly those that became silent ; the term Great Vowel Shift is sometimes used to include these consonant changes as well. English spelling was first becoming standardized in the 15th and 16th centuries, and the Great Vowel Shift is responsible for the fact that English spellings now often strongly deviate in their representation of English pronunciations. The Great Vowel Shift was first studied by Otto Jespersen ( 1860 -- 1943 ), a Danish linguist and Anglicist, who coined the term. Contents 1 Causes 2 Overall changes 3 Details 3.1 Middle English vowel system 3.2 Changes 3.3 First phase 3.4 Second phase 3.5 Later mergers 4 Northern English and Scots 5 Exceptions 6 Related consonant changes 7 Spelling 8 See also 9 Notes 10 Sources 10.1 References 10.2 Bibliography 11 External links Causes The causes of the Great Vowel Shift have been a source of intense scholarly debate and as yet there is no firm consensus. The greatest changes occurred during the 15th and 16th centuries. Some scholars have argued that the rapid migration of peoples from northern England to the southeast following the Black Death caused a mixing of accents that forced a change in the standard London vernacular. Others argue that the influx of French loanwords was a major factor in the shift. Yet others assert that because of the increasing prestige of French pronunciations among the middle classes ( perhaps related to the English aristocracy 's switching from French to English around this time ), a process of hypercorrection may have started a shift that unintentionally resulted in vowel pronunciations that were less like French instead of more. An opposing theory states that the wars with France and general anti-French sentiments caused hypercorrection in order to deliberately make English sound less like French. Overall changes This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help : IPA. The main difference between the pronunciation of Middle English in the year 1400 and Modern English ( Received Pronunciation ) is in the value of the long vowels. Long vowels in Middle English had `` continental '' values, much like those in Italian and Standard German, but in standard Modern English, they have entirely different pronunciations. These differing pronunciations of English vowel letters do not stem from the Great Shift as such, but from the fact that English spelling failed to be adapted to the changes. In fact, German had undergone vowel changes quite similar to the Great Shift in a slightly earlier period, but the spelling was changed accordingly ( e.g. Middle High German bīzen → modern German beißen `` to bite '' ). Word Vowel pronunciation Late Middle English before the GVS Modern English after the GVS bite / iː / / aɪ / meet / eː / / iː / meat / ɛː / mate / aː / / eɪ / out / uː / / aʊ / boot / oː / / uː / boat / ɔː / / oʊ / This timeline shows the main vowel changes that occurred between late Middle English in the year 1400 and Received Pronunciation in the mid-20th century by using representative words. The Great Vowel Shift occurred in the lower half of the table, between 1400 and 1600 ~ 1700. The changes that happened after 1700 are not considered part of the Great Vowel Shift. Pronunciation is given in the International Phonetic Alphabet : Details Middle English vowel system This section does not cite any sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. ( May 2017 ) Before the Great Vowel Shift, Middle English in Southern England had seven long vowels, / iː eː ɛː aː ɔː oː uː /. The vowels occurred in the words bite, meet, meat, mate, boat, boot, out and many more. Southern Middle English vowel system front back close / iː / : bite / uː / : out close - mid / eː / : meet / oː / : boot open - mid / ɛː / : meat / ɔː / : boat open / aː / : mate -- The words had very different pronunciations in Middle English from their pronunciations in Modern English. Long i in bite was pronounced as / iː / so Middle English bite sounded like Modern English beet / biːt / ; long e in meet was pronounced as / eː / so Middle English meet sounded similar to Modern English mate / meɪt / ; long a in mate was pronounced as / aː /, with a vowel like Scottish English ah in father ( faːðər ) or General American short o in cot / kät / ; and long o in boot was pronounced as / oː /, similar to modern oa in General American boat / oʊ /. In addition, Middle English had a long / ɛː / in beat, like modern short e in bed but pronounced longer, and a long / ɔː / in boat. Changes After around 1300, the long vowels of Middle English began changing in pronunciation. The two close vowels, / iː uː /, became diphthongs ( vowel breaking ), and the other five, / eː ɛː aː ɔː oː /, underwent an increase in tongue height ( raising ). They occurred over several centuries and can be divided into two phases. The first phase affected the close vowels / iː uː / and the close - mid vowels / eː oː / : / eː oː / were raised to / iː uː /, and / iː uː / became the diphthongs / ei ou / or / əi əu /. The second phase affected the open vowel / aː / and the open - mid vowels / ɛː ɔː / : / aː ɛː ɔː / were raised, in most cases changing to / eː iː oː /. The Great Vowel Shift changed vowels without merger so Middle English before the vowel shift had the same number of vowel phonemes as Early Modern English after the vowel shift. After the Great Vowel Shift, some vowel phonemes began merging. Immediately after the Great Vowel Shift, the vowels of meet and meat were different, but they are merged in Modern English, and both words are pronounced as / miːt /. However, during the 16th and the 17th centuries, there were many different mergers, and some mergers can be seen in individual Modern English words like great, which is pronounced with the vowel / eɪ / as in mate rather than the vowel / iː / as in meat. This is a simplified picture of the changes that happened between late Middle English and today 's English. Pronunciations in 1400, 1500, 1600, and 1900 are shown. To hear recordings of the sounds, click the phonetic symbols. Word Vowel pronunciation Soundfile late ME EModE ModE 1400 1500 1600 1900 bite / iː / / ei / / ɛi / / aɪ / meet / eː / / iː / / iː / meat / ɛː / / eː / / iː / mate / aː / / æː / / ɛː / / eɪ / out / uː / / ou / / ɔu / / aʊ / boot / oː / / uː / / uː / boat / ɔː / / oː / / oʊ / Before labial consonants and also after / j /, / uː / did not shift, and / uː / remains as in soup and room ( its Middle English spelling was roum ). First phase The first phase of the Great Vowel Shift affected the Middle English close - mid vowels / eː oː /, as in beet and boot, and the close vowels / iː uː /, as in bite and out. The close - mid vowels / eː oː / became close / iː uː /, and the close vowels / iː uː / became diphthongs. The first phase was complete in 1500, meaning that by that time, words like beet and boot had lost their Middle English pronunciation, and were pronounced with the same vowels as in Modern English. The words bite and out were pronounced with diphthongs, but not the same diphthongs as in Modern English. First phase of the Great Vowel Shift Word Vowel pronunciation 1400 1550 bite / iː / / ɛi / meet / eː / / iː / out / uː / / ɔu / boot / oː / / uː / Scholars agree that the Middle English close vowels / iː uː / became diphthongs around the year 1500, but disagree about what diphthongs they changed to. According to Lass, the words bite and out after diphthongization were pronounced as / beit / and / out /, similar to American English bait / beɪt / and oat / oʊt /. Later, the diphthongs / ei ou / shifted to / ɛi ɔu /, then / əi əu /, and finally to Modern English / aɪ aʊ /. This sequence of events is supported by the testimony of orthoepists before Hodges in 1644. However, many scholars such as Dobson ( 1968 ), Kökeritz ( 1953 ), and Cercignani ( 1981 ) argue for theoretical reasons that, contrary to what 16th - century witnesses report, the vowels / iː uː / were actually immediately centralized and lowered to / əi əu /. Evidence from northern English and Scots ( see below ) suggests that the close - mid vowels / eː oː / were the first to shift. As the Middle English vowels / eː oː / were raised towards / iː uː /, they forced the original Middle English / iː uː / out of place and caused them to become diphthongs / ei ou /. This type of sound change, in which one vowel 's pronunciation shifts so that it is pronounced like a second vowel, and the second vowel is forced to change its pronunciation, is called a push chain. However, according to professor Jürgen Handke, for some time, there was a phonetic split between words with the vowel / iː / and the diphthong / əi /, in words where the Middle English / iː / shifted to the Modern English / aɪ /. For an example, high was pronounced with the vowel / iː /, and like and my were pronounced with the diphthong / əi /. Therefore, for logical reasons, the close vowels / iː uː / could have diphthongized before the close - mid vowels / eː oː / raised. Otherwise, high would probably rhyme with thee rather than my. This type of chain is called a drag chain. Second phase The second phase of the Great Vowel Shift affected the Middle English open vowel / aː /, as in mate, and the Middle English open - mid vowels / ɛː ɔː /, as in meat and boat. Around 1550, Middle English / aː / was raised to / æː /. Then, after 1600, the new / æː / was raised to / ɛː /, with the Middle English open - mid vowels / ɛː ɔː / raised to close - mid / eː oː /. Second phase of the Great Vowel Shift Word Vowel pronunciation 1400 1550 1640 meat / ɛː / / ɛː / / eː / mate / aː / / aː /, / æː / / ɛː / boat / ɔː / / ɔː / / oː / Later mergers During the first and the second phases of the Great Vowel Shift, long vowels were shifted without merging with other vowels, but after the second phase, several vowels merged. The later changes also involved the Middle English diphthong / ai /, as in day, which had monophthongised to / ɛː /, and merged with Middle English / aː / as in mate or / ɛː / as in meat. During the 16th and 17th centuries, several different pronunciation variants existed among different parts of the population for words like meet, meat, mate, and day. In each pronunciation variant, different pairs or trios of words were merged in pronunciation. Four different pronunciation variants are shown in the table below. The fourth pronunciation variant gave rise to Modern English pronunciation. In Modern English, meet and meat are merged in pronunciation and both have the vowel / iː /, and mate and day are merged with the diphthong / eɪ /, which developed from the 16th - century long vowel / eː /. Second phase of the Great Vowel Shift Word Middle English 16th century pronunciation variants meet / eː / / iː / / iː / / iː / / iː / meat / ɛː / / ɛː / / eː / / eː / day / ai / / ɛː / / eː / mate / aː / / æː / Modern English typically has the meet -- meat merger : both meet and meat are pronounced with the vowel / iː /. Words like great and steak, however, have merged with mate and are pronounced with the vowel / eɪ /, which developed from the / eː / shown in the table above. Northern English and Scots The Great Vowel Shift affected other dialects as well as the standard English of southern England but in different ways. In Northern England, the long back vowels remained unaffected because the long mid back vowel had undergone an earlier shift. Similarly, the Scots language in Scotland had a different vowel system before the Great Vowel Shift, as / oː / had shifted to / øː / in Early Scots. In the Scots equivalent of the Great Vowel Shift, the long vowels / iː /, / eː / and / aː / shifted to / ei /, / iː / and / eː / by the Middle Scots period and / uː / remained unaffected. The first step in the Great Vowel Shift in Northern and Southern English is shown in the table below. The Northern English developments of Middle English / iː, eː / and / oː, uː / were different from Southern English. In particular, the Northern English vowels / iː / in bite, / eː / in feet, and / oː / in boot shifted, while the vowel / uː / in house did not : Word Vowel Middle English Northern Southern bite / iː / / ɛi / / ai / feet / eː / / iː / / iː / house / uː / / uː / / au / boot / oː / / iː / / uː / The vowel systems of Northern and Southern Middle English immediately before the Great Vowel Shift were different in one way. In Northern Middle English, the back close - mid vowel / oː / in boot had already shifted to front / øː / ( a sound change known as fronting ), like the long ö in German hören ( ˈhøːʁən ) ( listen ) `` hear ''. Thus, Southern English had a back close - mid vowel / oː /, but Northern English did not : Southern Middle English vowel system front back close iː uː close - mid eː oː open - mid ɛː ɔː open aː -- Northern Middle English vowel system front back close iː uː close - mid eː, øː -- open - mid ɛː ɔː open aː -- In both Northern and Southern English, the first step of the Great Vowel Shift raised the close - mid vowels to become close. Northern Middle English had two close - mid vowels -- / eː / in feet and / øː / in boot -- which were raised to / iː / and / yː /. Later on, Northern English / yː / changed to / iː /, so that boot has the same vowel as feet. Southern Middle English had two close - mid vowels -- / eː / in feet and / oː / in boot -- which were raised to / iː / and / uː /. In Southern English, the close vowels / iː / in bite and / uː / in house shifted to become diphthongs, but in Northern English, / iː / in bite shifted but / uː / in house did not. If the difference between the Northern and Southern vowel shifts is caused by the vowel systems at the time of the Great Vowel Shift, / uː / did not shift because there was no back mid vowel / oː / in Northern English. In Southern English, shifting of / oː / to / uː / could have caused diphthongisation of original / uː /, but because Northern English had no back close - mid vowel / oː / to shift, the back close vowel / uː / did not diphthongise. Exceptions This section does not cite any sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. ( May 2017 ) Not all words underwent certain phases of the Great Vowel Shift. Examples are father, which failed to become / ɛː /, and broad, which failed to become / oʊ /. The word room, which was spelled as roum in Middle English, retains its Middle English pronunciation. It is an exception to the shifting of / uː / to / aʊ / because it is followed by m, a labial consonant. The class ea did not take the step to / iː / in several words. The presence of / r / in swear and bear caused the vowel quality to be retained but not in the cases of hear and near. Shortening of long vowels at various stages produced further complications : ea is again a good example by shortening commonly before coronal consonants such as d and th, thus : dead, head, threat, wealth etc. ( That is known as the bred -- bread merger. ) The oo was shortened from / uː / to / ʊ /, in many cases before k, d and less commonly t : book, foot, good, etc. Some words subsequently changed from / ʊ / to / ʌ / : blood, flood. Similar but older shortening occurred for some instances of ou : could. Some loanwords, such as soufflé and umlaut, have retained a spelling from their origin language that may seem similar to the previous examples ; but, since they were not a part of English at the time of the Great Vowel Shift, they are not actually exceptions to the shift. Related consonant changes During this same period, there were a number of consonant changes, particularly changes that were in combination with the vowel changes, or cases of silencing of consonants. An often - cited example is the word knight, which in Middle English was pronounced / kni : xt /. The k and the gh were silenced, but additionally the i changed its value to / aɪ /. This vowel shift, of course, was not independent of the consonant shift as it was the combined sound / ix / that actually made the transition to / aɪ /. The following are examples of some of the most common consonant - related shifts that occurred : Word Vowel pronunciation Middle English before the GVS Modern English after the GVS knight / kniːxt / / naɪt / enough ( originally ynough ) / ɪˈnoːx / / ɪˈnʌf / gnaw / gnɑu̯ / / nɔː / Spelling This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. ( December 2017 ) Main article : English orthography The printing press was introduced to England in the 1470s by William Caxton and later Richard Pynson. The adoption and use of the printing press accelerated the process of standardization of English spelling, which continued into the 16th century. The standard spellings were those of Middle English pronunciation, and spelling conventions continued from Old English. However, the Middle English spellings were retained into Modern English while the Great Vowel Shift was taking place, which caused some of the peculiarities of Modern English spelling in relation to vowels. See also Canaanite Shift Chain shift Vowel shift Consonant mutation History of the English language International Phonetic Alphabet Phonological history of English vowels `` The Chaos '' Notes Jump up ^ Centralizing to / ɨi ɨu / and then lowering to / əi əu / argued by Stockwell ( 1961 ). Sources References Jump up ^ Stockwell, Robert ( 2002 ). `` How much shifting actually occurred in the historical English vowel shift ? '' ( PDF ). In Minkova, Donka ; Stockwell, Robert. Studies in the History of the English Language : A Millennial Perspective. Mouton de Gruyter. ISBN 3 - 11 - 017368 - 9. Jump up ^ Wyld, H.C. ( 1957 ) ( 1914 ), A Short History of English Jump up ^ Denham, Kristin ; Lobeck, Anne ( 2009 ), Linguistics for Everyone : An Introduction, Cengage Learning, p. 89 Jump up ^ Labov, William ( 1994 ). Principles of Linguistic Change. Blackwell Publishing. p. 145. ISBN 0 - 631 - 17914 - 3. Jump up ^ Millward, C.M. ; Hayes, Mary ( 2011 ). A Biography of the English Language ( 3rd ed. ). Wadsworth Publishing. p. 250. ISBN 978 - 0495906414. Jump up ^ Nevalainen, Terttu ; Traugott, Elizabeth Closs, eds. ( 2012 ). The Oxford Handbook of the History of English. Oxford University Press. p. 794. ASIN B009UU4P66. Jump up ^ Asya Pereltsvaig ( Aug 3, 2010 ). `` Great Vowel Shift -- part 3 ''. Languages of the World. ^ Jump up to : Lass 2000, p. 72. Jump up ^ Wheeler, L Kip. `` Middle English consonant sounds '' ( PDF ). ^ Jump up to : Lass 2000, pp. 80 -- 83. ^ Jump up to : Lass 2000, pp. 83 -- 85. ^ Jump up to : Görlach 1991, pp. 68 -- 69. Jump up ^ Labov, William ; Ash, Sharon ; Boberg, Charles ( 2006 ). The Atlas of North American English. Berlin : Mouton - de Gruyter. p. 14. ISBN 3 - 11 - 016746 - 8. ^ Jump up to : Lass 2000, pp. 74 -- 77. Jump up ^ Jürgen Handke ( Dec 7, 2012 ). `` PHY117 -- The Great Vowel Shift ''. YouTube. The Virtual Linguistics Campus. Jump up ^ Wales, K ( 2006 ). Northern English : a cultural and social history. Cambridge : Cambridge University. p. 48. Jump up ^ Macafee, Caroline ; Aitken, A.J., A History of Scots to 1700, DOST, 12, pp. lvi -- lix Jump up ^ Olague, Susana Llamas. `` Printers, Orthoepists, and Standardized English ''. CHASS. Retrieved December 30, 2017. Bibliography Baugh, Alfred C. ; Cable, Thomas ( 1993 ). A History of the English Language ( 4 ed. ). Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey : Prentice - Hall. Cable, Thomas ( 1983 ). A Companion to Baugh & Cable 's History of the English Language. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey : Prentice - Hall. Cercignani, Fausto ( 1981 ). Shakespeare 's Works and Elizabethan Pronunciation. Oxford : Clarendon Press. Dillon, George L., `` American English vowels '', Studying Phonetics on the Net Dobson, E.J. ( 1968 ). English Pronunciation 1500 -- 1700 ( 2 vols ) ( 2 ed. ). Oxford : Clarendon Press. ( See vol. 2, 594 -- 713 for discussion of long stressed vowels ) Freeborn, Dennis ( 1992 ). From Old English to Standard English : A Course Book in Language Variation Across Time. Ottawa, Canada : University of Ottawa Press. Görlach, Manfred ( 1991 ). Introduction to Early Modern English. Cambridge University Press. Kökeritz, Helge ( 1953 ). Shakespeare 's Pronunciation. New Haven : Yale University Press. Lass, Roger ( 2000 ). `` Chapter 3 : Phonology and Morphology ''. In Lass, Roger. The Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume III : 1476 -- 1776. Cambridge University Press. pp. 56 -- 186. Millward, Celia ( 1996 ). A Biography of the English Language ( 2 ed. ). Fort Worth : Harcourt Brace. Pyles, Thomas ; Algeo, John ( 1993 ). The Origins and Development of the English Language ( 4 ed. ). Orlando, FL : Harcourt Brace & Co. Rogers, William ' Bill ', A Simplified History of the Phonemes of English, Furman, archived from the original on 2002 - 08 - 03 External links Great Vowel Shift Video lecture Menzer, M., `` What is the Great Vowel Shift ? '', Great Vowel Shift, Furman University ( archive ( 1 ) ) `` The Great Vowel Shift '', Geoffrey Chaucer, Harvard University History of English Proto - Indo - European Proto - Germanic Proto - West - Germanic Anglo - Frisian languages Old English Anglo - Norman language Middle English Early Modern English Modern English hide Phonological history General Old English Vowels Great Vowel Shift low unrounded vowels low back vowels high back vowels high front vowels diphthongs changes before historic / l / changes before historic / r / trisyllabic laxing Consonants rhoticity flapping t - glottalization l - vocalization consonant clusters h - dropping wh th th - fronting ð ( eth ) þ ( thorn ) th - stopping Philology of Germanic languages Language subgroups North East West Elbe Weser - Rhine North Sea Northwest Gotho - Nordic South Reconstructed Proto - Germanic Proto - Germanic grammar Germanic parent language Historical languages North Proto - Norse Old Norse Old Swedish Old Gutnish Norn Greenlandic Norse Old Norwegian Middle Norwegian East Gothic Crimean Gothic Vandalic Burgundian West Old Saxon Middle Low German Old High German Middle High German Frankish Old Dutch Middle Dutch Old Frisian Middle Frisian Old English Middle English Early Scots Middle Scots Lombardic Modern languages Afrikaans Alemannic Cimbrian Danish Dutch English Faroese German Icelandic Limburgish Low German Mennonite Low German Luxembourgish North Frisian Norwegian Saterland Frisian Scots Swedish West Frisian Yiddish Diachronic features Grimm 's law Verner 's law Holtzmann 's law Sievers 's law Kluge 's law Germanic substrate hypothesis West Germanic gemination High German consonant shift Germanic a-mutation Germanic umlaut Germanic spirant law Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law Great Vowel Shift Synchronic features Germanic verb Germanic strong verb Germanic weak verb Preterite - present verb Grammatischer Wechsel Indo - European ablaut Language histories English ( phonology ) Scots ( phonology ) German Dutch Danish Icelandic Swedish Retrieved from `` https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Great_Vowel_Shift&oldid=856848707 '' Categories : History of the English language Language histories Vowel shifts Hidden categories : Articles to be expanded from September 2016 Articles needing additional references from January 2011 All articles needing additional references Articles with multiple maintenance issues All articles with specifically marked weasel - worded phrases Articles with specifically marked weasel - worded phrases from April 2018 Articles needing additional references from May 2017 Articles with hAudio microformats Articles including recorded pronunciations Articles containing German - language text Wikipedia articles needing clarification from December 2015 All articles with unsourced statements Articles with unsourced statements from May 2017 Articles needing additional references from December 2017 Talk Contents About Wikipedia አማርኛ Deutsch Español Esperanto فارسی Français 한국어 Italiano Magyar Nederlands 日本 語 Polski Português Русский Svenska Українська Tiếng Việt 中文 Lingua Franca Nova 10 more Edit links This page was last edited on 27 August 2018, at 22 : 21 ( UTC ). 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Question: when did the great vowel shift take place
Answer: between 1350 and the 1600s and 1700s