The English language is about 1500 years old, but that doesn’t mean you could go back to 500 A.D. and converse with someone in England. In fact, you might as well travel to a country where no one speaks English for how far modern English would get you back then.
To demonstrate how English has evolved over the centuries, filmmaker and dialect coach Simon Roper offers a seamless monologue in which he changes his dialect from pre-literary Old English to modern-day English. Along the top of the screen, a ticker moves along a timeline showing the era in which the dialect was spoken.
Listen and see how many words you can pick out from each century:
Roper initially recites the monologue with no subtitles, then repeats it with detailed transcriptions and notes so viewers can see what he was actually saying before most of the words became recognizable.
The Great Vowel Shift that changed the English language
Did you notice that the transition to recognizable English happened somewhere between 1400 and the mid 1500s? There must be a reason for that, right? Linguists have different theories, but a big one is what’s known as The Great Vowel Shift.
Between 1400 and 1700 (approximately), the way vowels are pronounced in English evolved. One of the biggest differences between the Middle English that Chaucer used and the English we speak today is the pronunciation of long vowels. For instance, back in the 14th century, “sheep” was pronounced more like “shape.”
In fact, here’s a demonstration of how drastically different vowels sounded back then:
MITE was pronounced like “meet”
MEET was pronounced like “mate”
MEAT was pronounced like “met”
MATE was pronounced “mah-teh”
Seems confusing, right? But funny enough, at the time, English spelling and phonetics were actually much more consistent than they are now.
So what caused this The Great Vowel Shift?
The plague and the printing press played prominent roles
As Curriculum Bytes explains, a “linguistic perfect storm” of historical forces created the shift. It started with the plague.
When the Black Death swept through Europe in the mid-1300s, killing nearly half of the population, it triggered a wave of migration. In England, rural folks who’d survived the pandemic moved to London in search of opportunities. The mixing of all of these rural dialects meant a new London accent emerged, which included new vowel pronunciations. Using those pronunciations signaled to others that you were moving up in the world, becoming the “fashionable” way to speak.
As this change was occuring, another historical change hit. William Caxton brought the first printing press to England in 1476, and with it came a need to standardize spelling. With the popular London dialect in full swing, Caxton had to choose how to spell out vowel sounds that were changing quickly. So, basically, English spelling got frozen in time while vowel sounds continued to evolve.
No wonder English spelling makes little sense today
People often notice that some of Shakespeare’s rhymes seem ‘broken’ because they don’t rhyme to the modern ear. But that’s because he was writing at a time when English pronunciations had not settled yet. He wrote as The Great Vowel Shift was happening, so the rhyming couplets sounded different to his audience at the time than they sound to us. “Loved” and “proved” were perfect rhymes back then, as were “loins” and “lines.”
And, of course, it’s not like English pronunciation shifts happened overnight or at the same pace or in the same way all over England. Language evolves over time, and while it may have felt fast in the video with the timeline ticker, the changes actually happened much more gradually. In some places, the changes were much less dramatic, too, which is part of why there are so many different kinds of English accents in the U.K. and Ireland today.
Of course, that doesn’t make it any easier for people who are learning English as a second language to get used to our spelling and pronunciation inconsistencies. But at least there’s a real explanation for it.
