English Pronunciation through the Ages

Raymond Hickey, WS 2019/20

Department of Anglophone Studies
1
University of Duisburg and Essen
 Pronunciation
- what it is and how we acquire it -

2
The goal of this seminar is to
introduce students to the history of
English pronunciation both in the
Britain Isles (England, Scotland,
Wales and Ireland) and around the
world since the colonial period (after
1600).
The way one pronounces one’s
native variety of a language is a
quintessential part of one’s identity
and hence the examination of how
varieties are spoken is key to our
understanding of speakers’ linguistic
behaviour.
3
How and what we say

Most of the time when we speak

we think not of how to say
something (e.g. pronounce the
words or arrange a sentence) but
rather of what we want to say
(the meaning of an utterance).

4
What we can understand

Within our native language we have an extraordinary ability to

grasp what is being said to us or around us. We can understand
men and women, children and adults, speakers of our own
variety of language and those of different dialects.

We can furthermore adjust for tone

of voice and rate of delivery, all of
this in real time while effortlessly
following the meaning of what is
being said.

5
 When speaking we make unconscious
decisions about how to pronounce sounds

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 Variation in Pronunciation
There are very slight differences in the way in which speakers
pronounce their language. The differences merge into each other
across time and space. Nonetheless, one can recognise regions where
certain features are concentrated; clusters of features are then
identified as varieties of a language. In today‘s world linguistic variation
in cities is particulary significant and an important trigger for language
change.

9
How do we acquire the pronunciation of
our native language?

10
 Infants and young children are exposed to a
continuous phonetic stream and must make sense
of this by working out the systemic structure which
underlines this stream of sounds .

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 The phonetic stream and mental
phonological representations

N.B: Phonetics deals with actual sounds, phonology is the

sound system of a language and we have a mental map of
this system in our brains for our native language. 12
 A closer look at
sound production

The tongue moves

horizontally and vertically to
produce sounds. In addition
the lips may be rounded (for
back vowels) or unrounded
(for front vowels).
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14
The vowels of a particular language are always a
subset of possible sounds (here: Modern English)

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 The basis for phonology

The mental representation of sounds

as phonological units is the basis for all
languages. These building blocks
(phonemes) are the elements from
which to construct units (words). 17
 The basis for phonology

Children generate phonological

knowledge by segmenting the
phonetic stream they hear
around them, then abstracting
the segments they recognise
and assigning these to systemic
units on a mental level.
This allows children to create
new sentences with the sounds
which others recognise as part
of their native language.

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 Variation, interpretation and language change

In the first few years of life

children analyse the phonetic
stream they hear around them.
Variation in this stream can
cause the children to interpret
sounds differently from the way
their parents did this in the
preceding generation. Along with
changes determined by socio-
linguistic factors in later life, this
is a major source of change in a
language.

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What are the pathways of language change?

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 When we grow older we can alter our
pronunciation in order to (i) accommodate to
others or (ii) to dissociate from others

Accommodation Dissociation
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 How is language change transmitted?
By face to face contact between speakers.

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The historical background to English

23
 The
Germanic
languages
today

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The source areas
of Germanic tribes
who came to
England in the
middle of the 5th
century AD.

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26
 Dialects of Old English

West Saxon (south of the River Thames)

Kentish (in the are of present-day Kent)
Mercian (in the central and eastern part of England)
Northumbrian (north of the River Humber)
Scots (in the lowland area of present-day Scotland)

Because of common linguistic features, Merician,

Northumbrian and possibly Scots are often grouped
together as Anglian.
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The dialects
of Old
English

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 England
during the
Viking period

Invasions start at the end of

late 8th century, first
plunderings, later
settlement in Scotland and
the north of England

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30
 The Danelaw

During the Viking period the

territory of England was
divided into a Scandinavian
and a West Saxon sphere of
influence. The former was
known as the Danelaw. In
this region the greatest
influence of the Vikings on
the Old English was felt.
Many Scandinavian
placeanames are attested in
the north of England.

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Open page
of Beowulf
manuscript

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On the right you see the opening
lines of Beowulf. Click on the
speaker symbols below to hear
sections of the text spoken in what
we assume was the West Saxon
pronunciation of Old English.

First section

Second section

Third section

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 England at the
time of the
Norman Invasion
(1066)

William the Conqueror 34

The Battle of Hastings (Sussex) in 1066

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36
 Middle English

After the invasion of England by the Normans in 1066, the West

Saxon 'standard', which was waning anyway due to natural
language change, was dealt a death blow. Norman French became
the language of the English court and clergy. English sank to the
level of a patois (an unwritten dialect). With the loss of England for
the French in 1204 English gradually emerged as a literary language
again. For the development of the later standard it is important to
note (1) that it was London which was now the centre of the
country and (2) that printing was introduced into England in the late
15th century (1476 by Caxton). This latter fact contributed more
than any single factor to the standardisation of English. It is obvious
that for the production of printing fonts a standard form of the
language must be agreed upon.
This applied above all to spelling, an area of English which was
quite chaotic in the pre-printing days of the Middle English period.

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Middle
English
dialect
areas

38
 The dialects of Middle English
The dialectal position of Middle English is basically a continuation of
that of Old English. The most important extralinguistic fact for the
development of the Middle English dialects is that the capital of the
country was moved from Winchester (in the Old English period) to
London by William the Conqueror in his attempt to diminish the
political influence of the native English.

NORTHERN
This dialect is the continuation of the Northumbrian variant of Old
English. Note that by Middle English times English had spread to
(Lowland) Scotland and indeed led to a certain literary tradition
developing there at the end of the Middle English period which has
been continued up to the present time (with certain breaks,
admittedly).
Characteristics. Velar stops are retained (i.e. not palatalised) as
can be seen in word pairs like rigg/ridge; kirk/church.

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 The dialects of Middle English
KENTISH
This is the most direct continuation of an Old English dialect and has more or less the
same geographical distribution.
Characteristics. The two most notable features of Kentish are (1) the existence of
/e:/ for Middle English /i:/ and (2) so-called "initial softening" which caused fricatives in
word-initial position to be pronounced voiced as in vat, vane and vixen (female fox).

SOUTHERN
West Saxon is the forerunner of this dialect of Middle English. Note that the area
covered in the Middle English period is greater than in the Old English period as
inroads were made into Celtic-speaking Cornwall. This area becomes linguistically
uninteresting in the Middle English period. It shares some features of both Kentish
and West Midland dialects.

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 The dialects of Middle English
WEST MIDLAND
This is the most conservative of the dialect areas in the Middle
English period and is fairly well-documented in literary works. It is
the western half of the Old English dialect area Mercia.
Characteristics. The retention of the Old English rounded vowels
/y:/ and /ø:/ which in the East had been unrounded to /i:/ and /e:/
respectively.

EAST MIDLAND
This is the dialect out of which the later standard developed. To be
precise the standard arose out of the London dialect of the late
Middle English period. Note that the London dialect naturally
developed into what is called Cockney today while the standard
became less and less characteristic of a certain area and finally
(after the 19th century) became the sociolect which is termed
Received Pronunciation.
Characteristics. In general those of the late embryonic Middle
English standard.

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 Some figures from Chaucer‘s Canterbury Tales

Geoffrey Chaucer
(1340-1399)

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The opening lines
of the Canterbury
Tales by Geoffrey
Chaucer read by an
actor in an accent
which is assumed
to be that used at
Chaucer‘s time
(late 14th century).

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The invention of printing

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The introduction of printing to England

Printing was introduced to

England in 1476 by William
Caxton. This led to an
increasing regularisation of
orthography and morphology.

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Major linguistic developments at
the outset of the Early Modern
Period

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 The Great Vowel Shift

The major change to affect the sound system of Middle English is

that which resulted in a re-alignment of the system of long vowels
and diphthongs which is traditionally known as the Great Vowel
Shift. Essentially long vowels are raised one level and the two high
vowels are diphthongised. The shift took several centuries to
complete and is still continuing in Cockney (popular London
speech). The shift of short /u/ to a lower vowel as in present-day
southern English but, which began in the mid 17th century, is not
part of the vowel shift.

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The chronology of recent sound changes

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 Tudor
England
(16th
century)

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 Contemporary writers of Shakespeare

Christopher Marlowe Ben Jonson Edmund Spenser

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57
 Title page of the
Authorized Version of the
Bible, the so-called King
James Bible
(1611)

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The question of a standard for English

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16th and 17th century authors concerned with standard pronunciation

John Hart (d. 1574) in An orthographie of English (1569) offers a

reformed spelling of English so that ‘the rude countrie Englishman’ can
speak the language ‘as the best sort use to speak it’.

George Puttenham (d. 1590) in The arte of English poesie comments

that ‘After a speach is fully fashioned to the common vnderstanding, &
accepted by consent of a whole countrey & nation, it is called a
language’. He then proceeds to mention that he regards the prime form of
this language as ‘the vsuall speach of the Court and that of London and
the shires lying about London within lx. myles and not much aboue’

About a century later, Christopher Cooper in his Grammatica linguae

anglicanae (1685) stated that he regarded London speech as ‘the best
dialect’, the ‘most pure and correct’, but he was quite liberal towards
variation: ‘Everyone pronounceth them (words) as himself pleases’.

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The Augustan age

The early to mid 18th century was a period during which satire flourished
in England (and Ireland). The main authors are Joseph Addison (1672-
1719), John Dryden (1631-1700), Alexander Pope (1688-1744), Sir
Richard Steele (1672-1729) and the Irish writer Jonathan Swift (1667-
1745), the latter being particularly concerned with questions of language
and entertaining generally conservative views on language change. The
term Augustan is derived from the comparison of this age to that of the
Roman Emperor Augustus under whose reign Horace, Ovid and Virgil
flourished, authors who the latter-day English writers also admired.

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62
The rise of lexicography in the 18th century

The middle of the 18th century sees the rise of the novel (initially in
epistolary form) and the publication of the first major lexicographical
work, the monolingual dictionary Dictionary of the English language
(1755) by Samuel Johnson which was a model for all future
lexicographers. (Johnson drew on the dictionaries of Nathaniel Bailey -
such as the Universal etymological English dictionary (1721), with some
40,000 entries, and the Dictionarium Brittanicum (1730) - for the word list
he used in his own).

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 Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
English writer and lexicographer. Johnson was a major
critic and scholar who was known both for his brilliant
conversation and the quality of his writing. As a man of
letters his influence on literature in his day and later
periods was considerable. His significance for linguistics
lies in the fact that he compiled the first major
monolingual dictionary of English, his Dictionary of the
English language (1755), which was a model for all future
lexicographers.

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 The legacy of Samuel Johnson
Johnson’s dictionary became the standard work of
English lexicography because of its range, objectivity and
use of quotations from major authors to back up
definitions given. It was not until over a century later that it
was superseded by the dictionary which was to become
the Oxford English Dictionary.

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Prescriptivism in England

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 English in 18th century Britain

The rise of prescriptivism and the development of the standard of

English in 18th-century Britain: Dictionaries, grammars and works on
elocution (the art of public speaking, later of accepted pronunciation)
appeared in the second half of the 18th century. They were intended to
fix the public usage of English. Some of these works are shown in the
following table and more information on four of the major authors is
given below.

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 Robert Lowth (1710-1787)

Author of a normative
grammar A Short Introduction
to English Grammar (1762)
which achieved great
popularity for the manner in
which it made
recommendations for
grammatical usage,
something which was
interpreted as very
prescriptive, even though this
may not have been intended
as such. Lowth was professor
of poetry in Oxford and later
bishop of Oxford and of
London (as of 1777). 70
Sheridan, Thomas (1719-1788) Irish writer,
born in Dublin and educated in London and
Dublin. He was first an actor and is the author
of a farce The Brave Irishman; or Captain
O’Blunder (1743; published 1754).
Later he became a travelling expert on
elocution. Sheridan produced A Course of
Lectures on Elocution (1762), A Rhetorical
Grammar of the English language (1788) and
A General Dictionary of the English Language
(1780) in which he gives guidelines for the
correct use of English.

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Sheridan was firmly rooted
in the ‘complaint tradition’ of
English writing and
lamented the state of British
education in his day.
But he was also a
manipulator who generated
linguistic insecurity among
his readers then offered
relief in his many
prescriptive regulations.
This type of strategy can be
found among prescriptivists
to this very day.

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73
Sheridan A General Dictionary of the English Language (1780)

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75
Walker, John (1732-1807)
A Londoner and prescriptive
author of the late 18th
century, best known for his
Critical pronouncing
dictionary (1791) which
enjoyed great popularity in
its day.

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Just as Samuel Johnson had
saught patronage for his dictionary
from Lord Chesterfield (Philip
Dormer Stanhope, 1694-1773),
Walker appealed to the famous
actor David Garrick (1717-1779) for
similar support for his dictionary.
Both authors did this by dedicating
the plan for their respective
dictionaries to their would-be
patrons.

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 The legacy of Sheridan and Walker

Did the strictures of Walker or Sheridan influence the later pronunciation of

non-local British English? The answer to this question must be ‘no’. In
some cases Walker, as opposed to Sheridan, favoured a form which was
later to become default in English, e.g. merchant for marchant. But this did
not happen because of Walker’s opinion on the matter.

In many respects, Walker was swimming against the tide of language

change. His insistence on maintaining regular patterns of pronunciation
across the language (his ‘analogy’) and, above all, his view that the spoken
word should be close to the written word, meant that he favoured archaic
pronunciations. His view that syllable-final /r/ should be pronounced was
already conservative in his day. In many of his statements he does,
however, accept change although he might not have agreed with it.

The legacy of both Sheridan and Walker should be seen in more general
terms. Even if their individual recommendations were not accepted by
standard speakers of British English, both were responsible for furthering
general notions of prescriptivism. And certainly both contributed in no small
way to the perennial concern with pronunciation which characterises
British society to this day.
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The English concern with
pronunciation

Pronunciation in English is a yardstick of one‘s

language. More than European countries, the
English judge the standardness of someone’s
speech by its phonetics.
The ideal which arose during the 18th century and
established itself in the 19th century was that
one’s speech was not to betray where one came
from, i.e. regional accents were frowned upon.

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 Self-appointed authorities on
English

Henry Watson Fowler (1858-1933) was

an English lexicographer whose
principal work is A Dictionary of
Modern English Usage (1926; later
revised by Sir Ernest Gowers in 1965).
This is a loosely structured
commentary on English usage and
style. Together with his brother he also
wrote The King’s English (1906).

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English in
the 19th
century

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 Henry Sweet (1845-1912) Walter William Skeat (1835-1912)

major English philologist of the 19th major English lexicographer of the

century 19th century

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19th century to the present

More than in any other European country England is marked by

an emphasis on standard pronunciation. The type of
pronounciation known today as Received Pronunciation (after
Daniel Jones) or under other less precise epithets such as The
Queen’s English, Oxford English, BBC English, etc. is a sociolect
of English, that is, it is the variety of English spoken by the
educated middle classes, irrespective of what part of England
they may live in. In the nineteenth century and into this century
as well, this accent of English was that fostered by the so-called
public schools (private, fee-paying schools) which were the
domain of the middle class. It is also the variety which foreigners
are exposed to when they learn ‘British English’.

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 The codification of
Received Pronunciation

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 Daniel Jones (1881-1967)
major English phonetician of the 20th
century

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 The Oxford
English Dictionary

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A New English Dictionary on
Historical Principles

A proposal was made by Richard Trench in 1857 to the

Philological Society to design a new dictionary which would
serve as a definitive work on the vocabulary of English with
complete historical coverage. The Scotsman James Murray
(1837-1915) became the main editor (see inset on right).
The first letter was published as a volume in 1888 and all
the 12 vols were completed in 1928. A thirteenth
supplement volume came out in 1933 (after which it was
called the Oxford English Dictionary published by Oxford
University Press. The twenty-volume second edition
appeared in 1989 (this is also available electronically).
Work on a much expanded third edition is underway at
present.

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James Murray (1837-1915),
main editor of the Oxford
English Dictionary

92
Various book versions
of the Oxford English
Dictionary

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Electronic versions of
the Oxford English
Dictionary

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The Dialects of English

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 Dialects of English

The dialects of present-day English can be seen as the continuation of

the dialect areas which established themselves in the Old English period.
The dialectal division of the narrower region of England into 1) a northern,
2) a central and 3) a (subdivided) southern region has been retained to
the present-day. The linguistic study of the dialects of English goes back
to the 19th century when, as an offspin of Indo-European studies,
research into (rural) dialects of the major European languages was
considerably developed. The first prominent figure in English dialectology
is Alexander Ellis (mid-19th century), followed somewhat later by Joseph
Wright (late 19th and early 20th century). The former published a study of
English dialects and the latter a still used grammar of English dialects at
the beginning of the present century. It was not until the Survey of English
Dialects, first under the auspices of Eugen Dieth and later of Harald
Orton, that such intensive study of (rural) dialects was carried out (the
results appeared in a series of publications in the 1950's and 1960's).

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 Dialects of English (continued)

Dialect features
The main divide between north and south can be drawn by using the
pronunciation of the word but. Either it has a /u/ sound (in the north)
or the lowered and unrounded realisation typical of Received
Pronunciation in the centre and south. An additional isogloss is the
use of a dark /l/ in the south versus a clear /l/ in the north. The south
can be divided by the use of syllable-final /r/ which is to be found in
the south western dialects but not in those of the south east. The
latter show 'initial softening' as in single, father, think with the voiced
initial sounds /z-, v-, 'eth'/ respectively.

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English dialects
(present-day)

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 Varieties of English around the World

Dark blue regions: English as a first language

Light blue regions: English as a second language
105
 Regions of the Anglophone World
Students should be aware of the main regions / countries
of the English-speaking (anglophone) world. As part of the
course, we will be looking different accents of English
across these regions, how they arose and the variation
within the regions today. So acquaint yourselves with the
regions of the anglophone world.

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Spread of English in colonial period

107
Division of the anglophone world by hemisphere

108
Division of the anglophone world by region

109
Dialect regions of the United States

110
Dialect regions of Canada

111
Anglophone locations in the Caribbean

112
Groups of anglophone pidgins and creoles

113
English in present-day Africa

114
English in South Asia and South-East Asia

115
English in the south-west Pacific region

116
English in Hawaii (including Hawaiian Pidgin)

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