In Conclusion … No one knows for certain what caused the Great Vowel Shift, but it’s because of these changes during this period that English has so many strange pronunciations. The Great Vowel Shift was a massive sound change affecting the long vowels of English during the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. Scholars have identified a mechanism for the “The Great English Vowel Shift” as a celebrated instance of what they call a “Chain shift” – a sound change with impacts several sounds one after the other, as a kind of chain reaction. The influx of French “loanwords”Ĭonversely whilst the nobility were beginning to speak English the peasants were having to grapple with an influx of French “loanwords” – no doubt brought in by their noble overlords. Virulent outbreaks of plague, also know as the ‘Black Death’, in the late 14th and early 15th century saw vast swathes of the population perish and as a consequence a redistribution of populations when people from many different regions emigrated to the southeast of England, where it’s thought that their accents were combined to create new pronunciations based on the standard London vernacular of the time. ![]() However several very plausible theories exist that attempt to explain it and as with most things in life the real answer is probably a combination of all of them to varying degrees. It is not known which phonemes changed first during the Great Vowel Shift many scholars believe the high vowels such as /i:/ started the shift, but some suggest that the low vowels. The shift affected the pronunciation of all Middle English long vowels, as well as the sound of some consonants, which became silent. In historical linguistics, a chain shift is a set of sound changes in which the change in pronunciation of one speech sound (typically, a phoneme). ![]() Rather disappointingly we have to say up front that no one is entirely sure what the actual causes of the vowel shift were. The Great Vowel Shift refers to a set of changes in the pronunciation of the English language that began in southern England in 1350 and lasted until the 18th century. Pronunciation before the Great Vowel Shift The main phases identified by scholars are : Old English Middle English Early Modern English Late Modern English and English Today. Of course the language itself has ever been evolving and would have transformed gradually over time so we shouldn’t regard these periods as absolute but see the English language as a spectrum of change, morphing gradually over time. The history of the English language has been neatly divded, by modern scholars, into about 5 distinct periods. But what could have possibly caused this ? The History of English : An Overviewīefore we look at what could have possibly happened to so alter the way vowels were pronounced lets put this in context to what we know of the development of the English language to date. ![]() Something curious happened in the 14th and 15th centuries when, in little over 200 years, the way we spoke English changed very rapidly indeed. The problem arose from something linguistic scholars call ‘The Great Vowel Shift’. These inconsistencies weren’t always there and there was only one way to pronounce each vowel so that before approximately 1300 English pronunciation was much more consistent.
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