This means using raised vowel sounds.įor instance, try saying the word blue in a Scottish accent. In the Middle Ages, the English spoke with vowel sounds similar to those used by Scottish speakers today. This is actually a Middle English accent. Reading Chaucer or Langland, medieval scholars often put on what seems to be a Scottish accent. These factors all contributed to The Great Vowel Shift.
People disliked the French, and so French words and sounds were no longer prestigious. From 1066 until 1362, French and Latin had been the language of power, while English was the vernacular. It happened that this massive shift in social and economic structure coincided with an anti-French vibe which seized the nation after the French left. In order to differentiate themselves from the working classes, aspiring speakers would feign a posh accent. One way of upping your prestige was to speak as if you were posher than you really were. Suddenly, they could become more respected more prestigious. Over the years, the gaps between the classes became more and more blurred a scale of class rather than specific categories was being created. The death of 50% of the population changed this, with people in higher demand creating the ability to demand more pay. In fact, the changes were still taking place two hundred years later, during the Age of Reason (another melodramatic name).īefore the plague, there was no middle class: simply the working class and the aristocratic. It took a long time for the effects of the plague on language to become apparent. Reading medieval poetry, such as Langland or Chaucer, we sometimes see references to the plague in particular, labour shortages and the result of these. I simply described the effects the plague had on the United Kingdom (which were rather momentous). I didn’t actually speak about language though. In Class, Language and Style Shifting – Part 1, I spoke about the plague. A form needs to be around for a long time for the whole of a speech community to use it. Linguistic changes rarely happen quickly, because people’s language tends to stabilise when they’re in their early twenties, meaning that today’s 80 year-olds use the norms of language of 60 years ago. I think The Great Vowel Shift is a wonderful example of this.Ĭontrary to what the name suggests, The Great Vowel Shift did not occur over night, but over a number of decades. Linguists in the past had a bit of a knack for giving linguistic phenomena dramatic names.
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