What caused the Great Vowel Shift? It was a very large change in pronunciation that happened in England between 1400 and 1700. Nobody knows exactly what caused it.
If you try to read Chaucer’s Canterbury tales, you will be able to string the letters together into words and you can probably understand what quite a few of them mean because you can see their similarities to modern words, but you won’t be pronouncing it correctly. Between the time of Chaucer and Jane Austen, the pronunciation of English had undergone a significant change that is known as the Great Vowel Shift. It had some impact on consonants, but it was generally the pronunciation of the vowels that changed. The short vowel sounds stayed the same, but the long vowels changed. English generally has two ways of pronouncing each vowel. You can have the short version, as in the a in hat, or the long version as in the a in hate.
Here are some examples. The i in mite was pronounced like modern meet. Meat was pronounced like a long version of met. Bout was pronounced like modern boot. Met was pronounced like the Australian met. Wife was pronounced like weef. To was pronounced toe and mouse was pronounced moos. There were many other changes. The changes were brought about because of the place in the mouth where the vowels are pronounced. All of the vowel sounds generally moved upwards in the mouth. You can feel this yourself if you try to say bout and boot, or meet and mite. You can feel your tongue moving upwards and backwards.
How do people know about this change? There are obviously no recordings of people speaking. There are several ways of demonstrating it. One of the easiest is to look at rhyme forms used in early poetry. Chaucer and other writers of early English use words that obviously rhyme to them, but don’t to us. This still continues on with Shakespeare. His English pronunciation was between Chaucer’s and ours, and he still uses words that rhymed for him but don’t know. Proved and loved. In Sonnet 116, he rhymes minds finds, love remove, mark bark, taken shaken, cheeks weeks, come doom, proved loved. Some of these words still rhyme and some don’t. The pronunciation must have changed. It can also be seen by looking at different pronunciations for the same vowels. Child and children for example. The i changes. In old English, the i had the same pronunciation, as it does in the German where the word came from. And it can be proved by looking at the fact that English spelling no longer matches the pronunciation of the words. It can also be proved because a few people wrote about what was happening while it was happening.
Incidentally, the oddness of English spelling owes itself to the invention of the printing press. The printing press was invented in the late 15th century and the great vowel shift had only just started. The printing press standardized spelling because there needed to be one way to spell a word in order to mass print books. The spellings they standardized were those in use at the start of the great vowel shift. If the printing press had been invented four three hundred years later, we would probably have a very different way of spelling our words that would make more sense. By the time the Great Vowel Shift ended, so many books had already been printed and the language was so standardized, there didn’t seem much sense in redoing it.
So, why did it happen? Well, no one knows the reason, but there are several theories. Here are the most popular theories. The first is that it was caused social upheaval. The nobility in England spoke French after the Norman invasion and by the time of the Great Vowel shift, they are moving back to English because England was at war with France. The nobles may have spoken English with a French accent, or they may have purposefully over accented their English to make it different from that spoken by the lower classes. Other people would then have copied them as a fashion. A second theory is that it was down to mass migration. The black death had wiped out nearly half of the population and many people moved to the south of England to escape it, or in search of work. They would have brought their own accents, and the locals may have affected their accent to sound even more local. Then the immigrants might have copied them. A third theory is that there were a lot of French loan words in English and as the nobility had been speaking French and England was now at war with France, there was an effort to sound less French. This could have caused the vowel shift. Whatever caused it, by the end of the 18th century, it had pretty much finished. Which is why through, though, bough, thorough, cough, and enough all sound different. And this is what I learned today.
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Sources
https://karenswallowprior.substack.com/p/sonnet-116-let-me-not-to-the-marriage
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-evidence-for-the-Great-Vowel-Shift
https://facweb.furman.edu/~mmenzer/gvs/what.htm
https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/pages/great-vowel-shift
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift