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great vowel shift

Effect

The values of the long vowels form the main difference between the pronunciation of Middle English and Modern English, and the Great Vowel Shift is one of the historical events marking the separation of Middle and Modern English. Originally, these vowels had "continental" values much like those remaining in Italian and liturgical Latin. However, during the Great Vowel Shift, the two highest long vowels became diphthongs, and the other five underwent an increase in tongue height with one of them coming to the front.

The principal changes (with the vowels shown in IPA) are roughly as follows.
However, exceptions occur, the transitions were not always complete, and there were sometimes accompanying changes in orthography:

Middle English (ā) fronted to and then raised to , and in many dialects diphthongised in Modern English to (as in make). Since Old English ā had mutated to in Middle English, Old English ā does not correspond to the Modern English diphthong .

Middle English raised to and then to modern English (as in beak).

Middle English raised to Modern English (as in feet).

Middle English diphthongised to , which was most likely followed by and finally Modern English (as in mice).

Middle English raised to , and in the eighteenth century this became Modern English or (as in boat).

Middle English raised to Modern English (as in boot).

Middle English was diphthongised in most environments to , and this was followed by , and then Modern English (as in mouse) in the eighteenth century. Before labial consonants, this shift did not occur, and remains as in room and droop).

This means that the vowel in the English word date was in Middle English pronounced (similar to modern dart); the vowel in feet was (similar to modern fate); the vowel in wipe was (similar to modern weep); the vowel in boot was (similar to modern boat); and the vowel in house was (similar to modern whose).

The effects of the shift were not entirely uniform, and differences in degree of vowel shifting can sometimes be detected in regional dialects both in written and spoken English, for example in the speech of much of Scotland.

Exceptions

Not all words underwent certain phases of the Great Vowel Shift. ea in particular did not take the step to in several words, such as great, break, steak, swear and bear. Other examples are father, which failed to become / ea, and broad, which failed to become .

Shortening of long vowels at various stages produced further complications. ea is again a good example, shortening commonly before coronal consonants such as d and th, thus: dead, head, threat, wealth etc. (This is known as the bred-bread merger.) oo was shortened from to in many cases before k, d and less commonly t, thus book, foot, good etc. Some cases occurred before the change of to : blood, flood. Similar, yet older shortening occurred for some instances of ou: country, could.

Note that some loanwords such as soufflé and Umlaut have retained a spelling from their origin language which 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 actual exceptions to the shift.

History

The surprising speed and the exact cause of the shift are continuing mysteries in linguistics and cultural history, but some theories attach the cause to the mass immigration to the south east of England after the Black Death, where the difference in accents led to certain groups modifying their speech to allow for a standard pronunciation of vowel sounds. The different dialects and the rise of a standardised middle class in London led to changes in pronunciation, which continued to spread out from that city.

The sudden social mobility after the Black Death may have caused the shift, with people from lower levels in society moving to higher levels (the pandemic also hit the aristocracy). Another explanation highlights the language of the ruling class; the medieval aristocracy had spoken French, but by the early fifteenth century, they were using English. This may have caused a change to the "prestige accent" of English, either by making pronunciation more French in style, or by changing it in some other way, perhaps by hypercorrection to something thought to be "more English" (England was at war with France for much of this period). Another influence may have been the great political and social upheavals of the fifteenth century, which were largely contemporaneous with the Great Vowel Shift.

Because English spelling was becoming standardised in the 15th and 16th centuries, the Great Vowel Shift is responsible for many of the peculiarities of English spelling. Spellings that made sense according to Middle English pronunciation were retained in Modern English because of the adoption and use of the printing press, which was invented by Johannes Gutenberg in Germany around 1440, and introduced to England in the 1470s by William Caxton and later Richard Pynson.

Other languages

German and Dutch also experienced sound changes resembling the first stage of the Great Vowel Shift. In German, in the 15th or 16th centuries, long changed to , (as in Eis, 'ice') and long to (as in Haus, 'house'). In Dutch the former became (ijs), and the latter had earlier become , which became (huis). In German there also was a separate which became , via an intermediate similar to the Dutch.

German has, like English, also shifted common Germanic to , as in Proto-Germanic *fōtuz 'foot' > German Fuß (as well as the rare secondary to ). This similarity however turns out to be superficial on closer inspection. Given the huge differences between the structures of Old English and Old High German vowel phonology, this is hardly surprising. There is no indication that English long vowels other than did anything but just move up in tongue-body position (there is no hint, for example, of the diphthongal features of Modern bee, bay, bone in any of the orthoepic pronunciation manuals of the 17th and 18th centuries). In German, the process was totally different, as well as much earlier than the English developments: already in the very earliest Old High German texts (9th cent.) the vowel in question is consistently written -uo-. That is, it had "broken" into a nucleus with a centering glide. This complex nucleus "smoothed" as the term has it in Middle High German, becoming the of Modern German around the same time as the long high vowels diphthongized. The of Modern German has a variety of sources, the oldest of which is Proto-Germanic *aw, which smoothed before (so rot 'red', Ohr 'ear', Floh 'flea', etc.) Elsewhere the sound was written -ou- in OHG. Similarly original *ai became before , remaining what was written -ei- elsewhere.
In some German dialects original remain distinct from these new diphthongs, but in standard German they fell together with the newly created and respectively. The latter is still somewhat eccentrically written -ei- as a rule, a holdover of the days when was the only such diphthong. Otherwise, German spelling has been kept far more consistent than the spelling of English.