The Great Vowel Shift and the Making of Modern English

On this episode of Our American Stories, “The Great Vowel Shift” was the single greatest change in the history of the English language that has now become the official language in over 75 countries. Here’s the History Guy with the story of “The Great Vowel Shift” and the making of modern English.

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Episode Transcript

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 our American Stories dot 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

(00:32):
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.

(00:53):
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 Catchup 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 Fetister and Ginger Rogers movie Shall
We Dance with the lyrics you say tomato and I

(01:22):
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,

(01:47):
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

(02:08):
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

(02:30):
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

(02:50):
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 and how English

(03:13):
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 eye 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,

(03:36):
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

(03:57):
other hand, would be accented but quite understand. 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

(04:18):
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 yf. 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,

(04:41):
dpe and need in ID. 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

(05:03):
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. 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

(05:26):
changed language. What happened in England and 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?

(05:46):
It's a difficult question to answer. There's little agreement because
scholars can't even agree or 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

(06:09):
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 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,

(06:32):
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

(06:54):
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,

(07:29):
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(07:50):
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American stories coming. That's our American Stories dot Com. And
we continue with our American stories and with the History

(08:13):
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 killed between forty and

(08:43):
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.

(09:04):
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

(09:25):
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

(09:46):
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

(10:06):
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

(10:28):
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.

(10:51):
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,

(11:11):
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

(11:31):
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

(11:55):
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

(12:16):
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

(12:38):
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

(12:58):
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

(13:19):
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

(13:42):
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

(14:03):
with words like great didn't move along to become steek,
and a few other words took another shift to a
dipthong 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

(14:25):
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,

(14:46):
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 Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Bedfordshire.

(15:08):
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

(15:30):
Domesday Domeesday, 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

(15:52):
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,

(16:13):
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

(16:34):
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 that tomato, except that tomatoes hadn't been introduced

(16:54):
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 eighteenth
century upper class englishmen in southern England that turned chance,

(17:16):
dance and castle into chalms, dolls and 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.

Speaker 1 (17:32):
And great job is always Greg Hangler for working and
collaborating so well with a history guy. A great job
on the production, and my goodness, what a touri 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.