Henry Luong
To many of us reading this, I believe this question must have sprung into your mind at least once: why is English spoken so differently from the way we write it? Me, I had this question in my first class of English 14 years ago.
| The words in the lesson | What the teacher told us to repeat | What I repeated | What I assumed them to sound like |
| A | /eɪ/ | /eɪ/ | /a:/ (as in my mother-tongue) |
| Apple | /æpl/ | /æpl/ | /eɪplə/ or /a:plə/ |
| An | /ən/ | /ən/ | /eɪn/ or /æn/ |
| Hair | /heə/ | /heə/ | /ha:ɪr/ |
| Bar | /ba:/ | /ba:/ | /ba:/ (at this point, I gave up guessing and just repeated) |
As you can see from the illustration above, the same letter “a” in English can be pronounced in 5 different ways, which really discouraged my eagerness to learn English at that time to be honest. In my mother-tongue Vietnamese, words are pronounced the way they are written according to the alphabet, so I did try to ask the teacher about this confusing phenomenon. Instead of receiving an explanation, I was told to memorize their pronunciation because she did not know either. Not until 15 years later did I accidentally find the answer from this course on Educational Sociolinguistics. Therefore, I wrote this post in the hope that I could share the story about “The Great Vowel Shift” (GVS), a 300-year period that has contributed considerably to our modern-day pronunciation of English.
To many of us who have ever wondered about the mismatch between English spelling and its pronunciation, the Great Vowel Shift (GTS) would be the exact answer to this question. Before this period, “vowels were pronounced much as the same (written) letter would be in Italian: name was something like nahm, beat like bait, moon like moan” (Van Herk, 2012, p. 61). Now let us reflect on those Shakespeare works you learned or might have heard of, it will make more sense since his poems actually rhyme in the original pronunciation, like blood and moon, or love and prove, wars and stars. Therefore, I strongly believe that being aware of the GTS will enable teachers (especially in language arts) to convey the true essence of such classical works, which will according make the students appreciate them.
After reading this, some may feel enlightened and empowered enough, but I believe some are yet to be satisfied and want to know about the actual reasons behind the GVS (including me). Well, here are the four most convincing causes to the changes in English pronunciation that are widely shared by the scholars (including Van Herk). Interestingly, the first three causes are closely related to each other since they are all rooted from the complex relationship of Britain and France. Historically, the French victory marked the culmination of the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453), which resulted into the hatred against French language among the English. As a sign of increasing nationalism, the English people intentionally altered certain pronunciation features to sound less similar to their French neighbors (which really convinced me since in French, words are pronounced the way they are written, unlike English). In addition, the middle class did want to distinguish themselves from the working class (most of whom were peasants at that time), so they purposefully modify their speech, which is often referred to as “hypercorrection”. Another objective historical reason that also plays a significant role in this language change is migration, mostly due to The Black Death and The Norman Conquest. Besides those historical reasons, the invention of printing press machine in the 15th century also had inhibited the evolution of English spelling significantly, which indirectly contributed to the stabilisation of most words’ representations. However, literacy was not the common way for information exchange back then, with most of the population still preferred oral communication. As a result, English pronunciation still witnessed a steady evolution progress, while its spelling had ceased to change ever since.
How about you, are you convinced of the aforementioned reasons behind the Great Vowel Shift? Your opinions will be equally valued since nobody has absolute confidence in claiming them to be the exclusive and actual ones, but rather most plausible hypotheses.
References
Van Herk, G. (2012). What is sociolinguistics? (Vol. 6). John Wiley & Sons.
