By Maria Eugenia Tepale Almonte

What is the GVS?

The Great Vowel Shift was a massive sound change affecting the long vowels of English during the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries.

 It raised (and in one case fronted) ME long vowels, causing the high long vowels to become diphthongs, as the mid long vowels became high long vowels and so on;
The Great Vowel Shift was a process limited only to English. The shift affected words of both native ancestry and borrowings from French and Latin

This chart roughly represents the places where the "long vowels" are articulated:
FRONT HIGH /i:/ [Modern "beet"] /e:/ [Modern "bait"] /:/ [Modern "bag"] CENTER . BACK /u:/ [Modern "boot"] /o:/ [Modern "boat"]

MID

. /a:/ [Modern "father"]

LOW

/:/ [Modern
"bought"]

The Great Vowel shift involved a regular movement of the places of articulation:

Position FRONT VOWELS . .

. HIGH MID (CLOSED) LOW (OPEN)

Middle English /i:/ /e:/ /:/ /a:/ /u:/ /o:/ /:/

Modern English ---> /ai/ ---> /i:/ ---> /e:/ (later --> /i:/) ---> /e:/ ---> /au/ ---> /u:/ ---> /o:/

CENTRAL VOWEL LOW BACK VOWELS . . HIGH MID (CLOSED) LOW (OPEN)

The change affects only long, stressed vowels. My /mai/ Only /li:/

Basically, the long vowels shifted upwards; that is, a vowel that used to be pronounced in one place in the mouth would be pronounced in a different place, higher up in the mouth.

Front close

central

back

mid-close

Mid-open
open

Spelling
Old and Middle English were written in the Latin alphabet and the vowels were represented by the letters assigned to the sounds in Latin. Middle English "long e" in Chaucer's "sheep" had the value of Latin "e" By the end of the sixteenth century the "e" in "sheep" sounded like that in Modern English "sheep" or "meet" [IPA /i/]

Cole: Is that thy child? Alice: Yea, hir name is Ann. Cole: A good and holy name. Alice: Soon she will be three years of age. Cole: Will she speke to me? Alice: Yea, she speketh wonder loude.

Why did the GVS happen?