Great Vowel Shift Totally Explained

The Great Vowel Shift was a major change in the pronunciation of the English language that took place in the south of England between 1200 and 1600. The Great Vowel Shift was first studied by the Danish linguist and Anglicist Otto Jespersen (1860–1943), who coined the term.

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 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 /aː/ (ā) fronted to [æː] and then raised to [ɛː], [eː] and in many dialects diphthongised in Modern English to [eɪ] (as in make). Since Old English ā had mutated to [ɔː] in Middle English, Old English ā doesn't correspond to the Modern English diphthong /eɪ/.
Middle English /ɛː/ raised to [eː] and then to modern English [iː] (as in beak). In a few words beginning with consonant clusters, however, the vowel remained below [iː] as Modern English [eɪ] (as in break).
Middle English /eː/ raised to Modern English [iː] (as in feet).
Middle English /iː/ diphthongised to [ɪi], which was most likely followed by [əɪ] and finally Modern English [aɪ] (as in mice).
Middle English /ɔː/ raised to [oː], and in the eighteenth century this became Modern English [oʊ] or [əʊ] (as in boat).
Middle English /oː/ raised to Modern English [uː] (as in boot).
Middle English /uː/ was diphthongised in most environments to [uʊ], and this was followed by [əʊ], and then Modern English [aʊ] (as in mouse) in the eighteenth century. Before labial consonants, this shift didn't occur, and [uː] remains as in room and droop).

This means that the vowel in the English word make was originally pronounced /a/; the vowel in feet was originally /eː/; the vowel in mice was originally /i/; the vowel in boot was originally /oː/; and the vowel in mouse was originally /u/.
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.

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 South East 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 London.
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 hit the aristocracy too). 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 fifteenth and sixteenth 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 as a consequence of the adoption and use of the printing press which was invented by Gutenberg in Germany around 1440.

In other languages

German, Icelandic, and Dutch also experienced sound changes resembling the first stage of the Great Vowel Shift: long i changed to /ai/ and in Dutch to /ɛi/ (as in Eis and ijs, 'ice'), and long u to /au/ and the Dutch /œy/ (as in Haus and huis, 'house'). This is why in German "ei" is pronounced closer to /ai/ and in Dutch "ij" to /ɛi/; however, otherwise, those languages kept their spellings far more consistent.
   The comparisons between English and the Continental Germanic languages is interesting for a variety of reasons. It's hardly surprising, given the huge differences between the structure of Old English and Old High German vowel phonology, that the "shifting" of long vowels would differ in detail as much as they resemble one another. Thus there's no indication that non-high long vowels in English (for example, all vowels not [i:u:]) 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, original *[o:] is now /ū/, as Proto-Germanic *fōtuz "foot" > German Fuß, but 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 /ū/ of Modern German. The /ō/ of Modern German has a variety of sources, the oldest of which is Proto-Germanic *aw, which smoothed before /t d r χ/ (so rot 'red', Ohr 'ear', Floh 'flea', etc.) Elsewhere the sound was written -ou- in OHG. Similarly original *ay became /ē/ before /r h w/, remaining what was written -ei- elsewhere.
   Then, once again in the 15th or 16th centuries (about the time that /uo/ was becoming /ū/), the long high vowels diphthongised much as in English, except that there were three of them: /ū/ > /au/, /ī/ > /ai/, and /ǖ/ > /öü/. In some German dialects original /ou, ei/ remain distinct from these new diphthongs, but in standard German they fell together as /au/ and /ai/, the latter somewhat eccentrically written -ei- as a rule, a holdover of the days when /ei/ was the only such diphthong. Note: the pronunciation /öü/ of what is written -eu- (or -äu-), as in neu "new" and bräu "brew", is accorded "standard" status, but is regional; in most places the phonetics of the diphthong are /oi/. (This account is very much simplified but accurate as far as it goes.)
   Ideally, the term shift should be reserved for a sequence of interconnected changes, such as the two Germanic consonant shifts rather than used as a practical synonym of "sound change". The diphthongization of the long high vocoids of Middle High German might qualify as a "shift"; the breaking and raising of *ō (and the very rare *ē²) don't really qualify as "shifts", still less their smoothing into modern /ū/ and /ī/.

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