Gone Medieval - How the English Accent Changed Forever

Episode Date: August 13, 2022

Between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, a profound transformation took place in the ways that the English language was spoken and words were pronounced. This “Great Vowel Shift” saw a change in the pronunciation of all Middle English long vowels, resulting in spellings of words that often deviated considerably from how they are pronounced. In this edition of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis talks to Simon Roper - who makes videos about linguistics for YouTube - about the developments that led to the English language changing forever.  The Senior Producer on this episode was Elena Guthrie. It was edited and produced by Rob Weinberg. For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Medieval Mondays newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. Language is an important part of history. During the medieval period, England saw moves from the departing Roman influence and Celtic heritage to Anglo-Saxons, then Viking control, towards Norman French domination, and then an emerging sense of Englishness as the period progressed. But what effect did all of this have on the language that people spoke? How different might it have sounded from today? And indeed, from the beginning of the period to the end. I'm delighted to be joined today by Simon Roper to talk about one of those aspects of change that altered the English language in

this period, known as the Great Vowal Shift. Thank you very much for joining us, Simon. Thanks very much indeed for having me. That's a wonderful subject to talk about, I think. Great to try and understand the sounds of the medieval period. What is the great vowel shift and why is it an important development in language during the medieval period? The Great Valship was a large scale change in the pronunciation of English that happened roughly 600 years ago, although it took quite a long time and it happened at different speeds in different areas, different dialects. So it's difficult to put exact dates on it. But it seems like it had definitely started to happen regionally by 1,300, probably starting around East Anglia. And it had largely

finished in the south-east of England by about 1650. So although it's very hard to comment on specific historical figures accents, the Tudor monarchs were ruling at a time when the vowel system of English was very dynamic because of the great vowel shift. So the way Henry the 7th spoke might have been very different to the way Elizabeth I spoke, for instance. Although again, it's hard to make specific comments about the speech of individual people, unless those people describe their own speech, which a lot of the monarchs unfortunately didn't. And what do we know about the mechanics of how this change happened? Why did it spread around the country and what sort of changes was it making and how was it making them? Middle English had a distinction between short vowels, which

had five of and then long vowels which it had probably seven of. So it was the long vowels that were affected by the vowel shift because the short vowels apart from small quality changes haven't really changed that much. So the middle English vowel in the word kit becomes modern English kit, middle English set becomes modern English set. So there's like slight differences in laxiness and stuff but broadly they sound quite similar. But the seven long vowels were subject to something called a change shift. So in modern languages and we assume in old languages as well, vowel systems tend to be fairly spaced out in acoustic space. So vowels aren't normally too similar to each other just because that would cause confusion.

So a change shift is what happens when the quality of one vowel changes, for example, how high your tongue is when you pronounce it changes. So that changes the acoustic quality of the vowel. And then that causes the vowels around it to change so that they don't end up being too similar to the vowel that's changed in the first place. So you end up with a kind of domino effect where one vowel changes and it causes another vowel to change and it causes another vowel to change. So that seems to be what's happened here. What seems to have happened in Middle English is that all of the long vowels started to take a higher

tongue position. So air became, air became E and so on. And the Middle English vowels, E and O, were at the very top of the vowel space with the tongue very high in the mouth. So they had nowhere higher to go, so they became gliding vowels. So probably something like A and O. To give examples, what in Middle English was, please became, and then that gives modern price. Flaise became fleece, and that gives modern fleece. Mert became mate, and that eventually merged with the fleece vows, so that's why the words fleece and meat now have the same vowel.

Fass became fess, which gives modern face. Gart became gaut, which gives modern goat, and gos became goose, which gives modern goose, and then mooth became moth, which gives modern mouth. Although in certain northern dialects, Mouth stayed pretty much as it was in Middle English, which is why you have Scottish people saying things like Hoose for house. It's really interesting that there are sort of lingering elements of what we

would consider Middle English speech still around the UK that haven't undergone this change so much. I agree. The thing there seems to be that the Northern English vowel system was slightly different to the Southern English vowel system to begin with. So the mechanics of the change, as the change spread from south to north, it hit a vowel system that was structured differently. And so it had a different effect on it. I think in the north, Northern Middle English had fewer back bowels. So that meant that there wasn't as much pressure on the mouth valve to turn into a gliding valve. So it remained moose. And so why do you think language changes and develops like this?

Is it to do with increased travel or a standardisation of spelling? Or are there other factors that drive this change around the country? I think there's two questions. One of which is how does sound change happen in individual people? And then the other of which is how does it then spread once it's happened. I don't know much about how it happens in individual people, but I think it's got something to do with alophony. So in different contexts, a certain sound might be pronounced in different ways.

So, for example, in a word like click, the kha sound at the start of a word is always pronounced kuh. At the end of a word, it can be pronounced kuh or k. So there's that kind of general variation in the way people speak, and sometimes certain sounds become more prominent just through factors that are probably too small for us to really comment on. And then in terms of how sound changes spread, it seems like they very often spread from urban centres outwards. So there are lots of sound changes that seem to have started in London that have now spread throughout most of the country. So an example is non-roticity, which is the tendency not to pronounce the rough sound unless it's followed by a consonant. I'd pronounce it in red, but not in car.

Like I don't say car, I say car. And that change seems to have started in London and it's spread throughout most of England now. The movement of people probably is a big factor in that. It seems as though urban centres are places where people from different areas often end up gathering. So people from rural areas all around London will travel to London for work. Then they'll end up being lots of different diverse vowel systems in a very small space in London. And then that produces variation when children are born into a system like that. And they hear all these different vows systems being used. So that's what kind of produces that kind of variation. And then it slowly spreads outwards into rural areas around. the urban centre. And that's not the only way it happens. Sound changes can happen in rural areas and then make their way out. So the Great Vow shift seems to have started in Lincolnshire and then potentially was transmitted to London by people from Lincolnshire moving to London and then spread out from London in that kind of radiating way after that. So there are lots of different ways it can happen. I think it's often easy to see the urban settlements as these

kind of melting pots where lots of different pronunciations might be thrown together and then they would spread out into the countryside. But there's some suggestion that the opposite was happening as well. So the thing about the melting pot analogy is that there's the pot itself where the variation accumulates, but there's also the ingredients that go into it. People from different parts of the country will be moving to urban centres and interacting with each other and spreading their sound changes around. But very often those sound changes have already happened in a rural dialect where these people are coming from. I use the example of scouse. So one example is what's called TH-stopping, so the tendency to pronounce the th-sound as something

like Teh, so thorn in parts of Ireland is pronounced more like Torren. And that's something that started to happen in Liverpool probably between 100 and 150 years ago because of Irish immigration to Liverpool. So it's something that started in Ireland, came to Liverpool and is now spreading from Liverpool, Liverpool being the kind of thing that's radiating it outwards into rural areas around. So sound changes can happen in a rural area, come to an urban area because people migrate to the urban area and then through processes that aren't fantastically well understood can then radiate outward. So it might be that people in rural areas consider city people to have a more prestige dialect so they start picking up features of that dialect, that kind of thing.

So we tend to think about old English, middle English and the language that we speak today is these three sort of compartments of the development of the English language. But do you think that's maybe too simplistic? Should we be looking at more like a sliding scale of constant change that's going on with the language? Yeah, that's absolutely right. I think often historical linguists will talk about Middle English as being characterised by certain changes that hadn't happened yet in Old English, like, for example, inflectional morphology, becoming simpler and stuff like that. But there's a lot of evidence that that kind of thing had already started to happen in Old English. So in many ways,

is a sliding scale from one to the other. Another thing is that early modern English, as separate from Middle English, is often described as early modern English has the great vowel shift, Middle English didn't have it yet. But of course, the great vowel shift took quite a long time to actually happen. So there's that whole period of time in the middle where individual people probably weren't that conscious that very much was going on linguistically, but there were these big changes happening. These labels are just things that we attach for convenience so that we can talk about them more easily. But when you actually get into the detail of it, it's more of a spectrum. And I suppose the extension of that is to wonder how our language might change over the

next two, four, six hundred years and whether someone in 500 years time would understand that language that we're speaking today or not? Yeah, that's a very good point. Probably in the short term, in the next sort of two or three hundred years, there will be pronunciation changes. A lot of them might just be sound changes that already exist in marginal English dialects nowadays spreading out more. So, for example, it could be the kinds of sound changes that are happening in California, spread out to the rest of the US and then spread to the UK, or something along those lines. The dynamics of that are pretty much impossible to predict, unfortunately, but also probably things like word choices and the exact meanings of words will change as well

in a way that might confuse a time traveller if there was a travel forward two or three hundred years. But yeah, I think it's almost likely that in a thousand years, for example, there'll be something that's difficult to understand, whether it will be completely unrecognisable, I'm not sure. Icelandic and Old Norse, not enormously different in terms of grammar and, They have similar phonologies, but the actual phonetic pronunciation is different based on reconstructions of Old Norse, and that's about a thousand year difference. So it's possible that it could be recognisable, but it's also possible it could be unrecognisable. It's hard to predict. Did you know that some of literature's greatest characters were real people?

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in that people tended to not spell things in a standardized way, particularly in the medieval period, before things were printed very much? So you have an element of sort of phonetic ways of writing down words. Does that help to track the development of the language at all? Yeah, that's absolutely right. It's very useful that they didn't have. a rigid standardised spelling system yet. It's also useful that they had general spelling conventions. One vowel would broadly probably be spelled the same way across a large area because people were learning to spell from each other and they were learning conventions from each other even if they were prescribed standard at that point. So divergences from that

really do suggest that somebody was consistently pronouncing something differently. So relating to the Great Vow Shift specifically, Middle English writers normally wrote vowels using the Roman letters most commonly associated with those vowel sounds across other European languages. So the letter I represented an E sound like it does in French and Spanish. The letter A represented an R sound and so on. Some things seem to have followed French spelling convention, so using OU to represent the wool sound. But in the 1300s and 1400s, you increasingly see divergences from that.

I think the earliest example I'm aware of, which I got from Roger Lasz's Cambridge History of English, is the writing of Robert of Brun from Lincolnshire, who uses OU spellings where you'd expect to see O spellings in Middle English. So, for example, the word that gives us the modern do, which in middle English was pronounced, something like D'Or, might be spelled as if it was pronounced Duh, which is closer to the modern pronunciation. And that's from the very start of the 1300s. And then you get more of the same thing in the 1320s from William of Shoreham and Kent, who did the exact same thing for words where you'd expect, oh, he used OU. So the words talk and blaud were spelt as if they were pronounced talk and blood and that gives us the modern

words took and blood although there's a whole complicated sound change that happened in the 1600s that separated those from each other and then by the 1400s the pasten family who were writing letters to each other in East Anglia are a big source of these not erroneous spellings but non-standard spellings they do this consistently across their letters this extends to a few other vowels So words like Abide, which you'd expect a spelling pretty much like the modern one with an I, and you'd expect that to be pronounced something like Abed in Middle English. The Pasterns write it A-B-E-Y-D, which suggests a diphthongal pronunciation, a more gliding vowel. You can't know the exact pronunciation they were going forward with that spelling,

but maybe something like Abade or Abed. That's a good example to imagine the great vowel shift in modern terms, because one thing people often say to me is these sound changes seem like massive, weird sound changes. I can't imagine them actually happening. So I like to take modern examples where I can to show people that it's more normal than it sounds. So for the change from Abed to Abed, that's phonetically very similar to a change which has happened in Cochney speech, where a word like Seed, in standard English, might be pronounced something like Seed with a slightly more diphthnalized vowel. Examples like that can show us how these sound changes can go almost unnoticed at the time that they're actually happening.

But yes, spelling is a very good way into that kind of thing. And do you think it was ever related to international developments, kind of the development of England as a kingdom? I'm thinking if it was quite pronounced in the 14th and 15th centuries, then you've got the 100 years war sort of starting and this idea of England being much more separate from the continent than it's ever been before. Does that coincide with the change, so getting away from some of the French pronunciations, or is that oversimplifying it? I think social factors like that do often help sound changes to spread. I'm partly thinking, you know, you get things like Beaver Castle, it's written Belvoir beautiful view,

but English people didn't want to pronounce it in a French way or couldn't pronounce it in a French way. So it gets called Beaver Castle as a way to anglicise the language of the ruling classes, if that makes sense. Yes, I think changes that happen as a result of wanting to avoid certain foreign pronunciations tend to be lexically specific. So they'll apply to specific words, like what you're saying, they're like place names that people might want to claim as part of their own local identity. entity, but which have a name that is inappropriately French, or that they feel is inappropriately French. So this tends to happen with individual words, whereas the great vowel shift applied across lexical sets, so it applied to almost all words that had a certain vowel. And this kind of thing tends to be more unconscious than people making deliberate decisions about how to pronounce certain

things. There could definitely have been some element of people who had sound changes that made them sound less French or less posh or less whatever might have been the kinds of people that other people looked up to and therefore they adopted sound changes from them in that way. That could definitely have been a factor. Language doesn't have a memory. So once these changes are made, they can't be reverse engineered or spun backwards because the language doesn't remember where it came from. And so the progression continues unaware of what went on before. Does that make tracking things like language change, almost like a textual version of archaeology. I'm thinking, you know, you get a written text, sort of freezes language at a moment in time. So it's like, you know,

a pot buried in the earth that you can then dig up and look at the way people were using language and spelling things and what might have been their pronunciation. And the further away from those texts we are in time, the less like English it might appear to be to some of us. Is that a reasonable analogy to compare it to sort of archaeology? Yeah, I think that's a very good analogy. A lot of it is to do with taking the spelling evidence, the rhyming evidence from texts and things, and then using what we know about modern language and modern sound change to get the most likely interpretation of what we see in the texts. And that's similar with archaeology as well. We use our knowledge about modern cultures and modern anthropology to interpret archaeological evidence. That's a very good analogy. And that's

very well picked up on the point about sound change, not having memory as well. Yeah, I think that was a really interesting point that you've made, that sort of language will change over time, but it almost immediately forgets what had gone before, so you can't undo it. Do we know why that happens? So if we take the example of something like what's called the meat merger, where the words meat as in to meet someone and meat as in the food, used to be pronounced differently, probably in early middle English, they were meat and meat. And then those vowels merged together, so they both ended up being pronounced meat. So in that situation, once the vowels have merged together into one vowel category, one phoneme,

there's nothing about the words that were originally in the meate group that separates them from the words that were originally in the meet group. So there's no characteristic left that tells people these words were originally pronounced one way and these words were originally pronounced another. So because those characteristics, they're not distinguished by anything anymore. That means that they can't split up along the same lines because there's a lot of the same lines because there's nothing saying which one originally belonged to one category and which one originally belonged to the other. I suppose an exception might be if there's two dialects next to each other,

one has a vowel merger and the other one doesn't. Then the one without the vowel merger might exert influence on the one with the vowel merger and possibly unmerge the vowels because it still has those two categories preserved as separate categories. But within one dialect, normally once things are merged, they're completely merged together so that there's no record of what originally belong to category A and what originally belonged to category B. So if meat and meat went back to being pronounced in slightly different ways, it's unlikely to be a reversal. So back to being the meat and mate, as you said, unless that was an accident, it would probably diverge in some other way or develop in some other different way. Yeah, that's right. Those two vowels could split up again

along different lines to how they originally merged. I think the actual words meet and meat, now that they're pronounced completely identically, they probably wouldn't split up again, because these changes normally along the lines of conditioning the environment that a sound is in. So, for example, the word fleece, you could have a sound change that meant that E turns back into A if it comes before a sur sound. So the word fleece could become flaced, but the word meat could stay as meek because it doesn't have the suss sound in it. So there's that kind of phonological conditioning that could separate E stays E normally, but if there's a set after it, it becomes A or something like that. that. But the actual words meet and meat, because they're now pronounced identically, the sounds in those words are the same as each other, so there's not really any environmental difference that

could cause that split. So they'll probably be pronounced the same pretty much forever now, until maybe one of them is supplanted by a different word like flesh or something, I don't know. But as you say, a split between vowels could happen along different lines to the original merger. It's interesting you mentioned there as well about looking for rhymes. Does that mean that poetry that was written to rhyme is particularly useful as well because you can kind of try to work out the pronunciation that they're aiming for based on a rhyme. Yeah. What that tells us the most about is what vowels were part of the same phonemic category. So one famous example that I think David Crystal pulled out of Shakespeare is the fact that proven love are rhymed in Shakespeare.

So that tells us that the vows in proven love were probably, either that Shakespeare wasn't a very good rhymer or that the vowels in proven love the same for him. I think there's rhyming evidence from other sources that suggests a similar correspondence between ah in certain words and two, in other words. But that on its own doesn't tell us what the quality of the vowels was, whether it was Prub and Love or Prove and Louve or something else entirely. You would get that from other sources. I don't actually know how, I think Crystal reconstructs that as Prub and Love, but I can't actually remember where he gets that from. But yeah, you'd want to look for other sources is to get the actual phonetic quality of the vowel.

And sometimes it's just impossible to do it, unfortunately. That's been very, very interesting. Thank you so much for that, Simon. And do you think this is a process that is continuing all around us that we're completely unaware of, that our language continues to develop? Will there ever be another great vowel shift, do you think? The interesting thing about chain shift

is that they're actually happening fairly often. It's just that they're normally restricted to certain dialects. So Jeff Lindsay recently described an anti-clockwise change shift, that it took place anti-clockwise. around the vowel space that's happened in southeastern English, which is a lot of the reason why modern southeastern British English sounds different to the posh radio presenter speech from the 1950s is because of this change shift. There's one going on in California. There's one that separates Copley English from standard kind of RP English. It's just that most of the time these are

restricted to certain dialects or sociolex. So I think there could easily be a change shift again that spreads throughout the entire language or through most dialects of the language. It might be a bit harder now that the language is so spread across different countries. A change shift that happens in England might not affect Australia or the US. So it might be harder for a shift to happen that affects all dialects of English, but that might then be something that causes a divergence between dialects that makes them harder to understand. So that could be interesting in its own right. And do you think we could sustain a conversation with someone from, say, the 14th or 15th century? Would we be able to get by? The words might sound a little bit different, but do you think when we were

actually speaking them in a sentence to each other, we might be able to pick up what they're trying to say, even if the pronunciation is a bit different. Would it be just like a different accent, I guess, is what I'm asking? That's a good question. I think it would be like a different accent, but like an accent you've never come across before. So you'd have to completely learn all of those correspondences between when they say E, that means I, when they say, ooh, that means al, and stuff like that. So it would take a lot of picking up, working out the correspondences between their speech and yours. But I think you would get to a point

where you could automatically translate it in your head just like you do with the thick Scottish accent or a scouse accent. The word choice and the way they used words to mean things, that might be a bit confusing. But I think the accent you probably pick up if you concentrated reasonably quickly. That's been absolutely fascinating. Thank you so much for joining us, Simon.

Thank you very much indeed for having me on. That's very kind of you. You can join Dr Kat Jarman on Tuesday for another brand new episode. Don't forget to also subscribe wherever you get your podcasts from and tell all your friends and family that you've gone medieval. If you get a spare moment, please do drop us a review or rate us anywhere that you listen to your podcasts, including Spotify now. It does help to find new listeners for the podcast. If you're enjoying this and looking

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