Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Home
  • Home
EnglishFrançais
English Language & Linguistics English Language & Linguistics

Article contents

On the recent history of low vowels in English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2020

RAYMOND HICKEY [Opens in a new window]
RAYMOND HICKEY
Affiliation:
Department of Anglophone Studies, University of Duisburg-Essen, Universitätstr. 2, 45141Essen, Germanyraymond.hickey@uni-due.de
Corresponding
E-mail address:
raymond.hickey@uni-due.de
Get access
Rights & Permissions[Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The development of low vowels in the history of English is one which shows continuous movement, usually upwards along earlier back and later front trajectories. In addition, low vowels have been subject to lengthening processes which have compensated for the loss of earlier instances of long low vowels. Shifts along a horizontal axis, from low front to low back, can also be discerned throughout the history of English. The present study begins by examining the situation in late eighteenth-century English, using the Eighteenth-Century English Phonology Database and the works of various prescriptivist writers, to determine the outset for later developments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It also scrutinises realisations of low vowels in these varieties in order to offer a possible chronology for the overall development of low vowels in the past two centuries.

Keywords

vowel shifts in the history of English development of low vowels lengthening and retraction processes prescriptivist works
Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 24 , Special Issue 3: Studies in Late Modern English historical phonology using the Eighteenth-Century English Phonology Database (ECEP) , September 2020 , pp. 545 - 567
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below.
If you should have access and can't see this content please contact technical support.

References

Bauer, Laurie. 1994. Watching English change: An introduction to the study of linguistic change in standard Englishes in the twentieth century. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Beal, Joan. 1985. Lengthening of a in Tyneside English. In Eaton, Roger, Fischer, Olga, Koopman, Willem & van der Leek, Frederike (eds.), Papers from the 4th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics, April 10–13, 1985, 31–44. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Beal, Joan C. 2003. John Walker: Prescriptivist or linguistic innovator? In Dossena, Marina & Jones, Charles (eds.), Insights into Late Modern English, 83–105. Berlin: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Beal, Joan C. 2004a. English in modern times 1700–1945. London: Arnold.Google Scholar
Beal, Joan C. 2004b. ‘Marks of disgrace’: Attitudes to non-standard pronunciation in eighteenth-century pronouncing dictionaries. In Lass, Roger & Dossena, Marina (eds.), Historical dialectology, 329–49. Bern: Lang.Google Scholar
Beal, Joan C. 2008. English dialects in the North of England: Phonology. In Kortmann, Bernd & Upton, Clive (eds.), Varieties of English, vol. 1: The British Isles, 122–44. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Beal, Joan C. & Condorelli, Marco. 2014. Cut from the same cloth? Variation and change in the cloth lexical set. Token: A Journal of English Linguistics 3, 15–36.Google Scholar
Beal, Joan C. & Sen, Ranjan. 2014. Towards a corpus of eighteenth-century English phonology. In Vandelanotte, Lieven, Davidse, Kristin, Gentens, Caroline & Kimps, Ditte (eds.), Recent advances in corpus linguistics: Developing and exploiting corpora, 31–54. Amsterdam: Brill/Rodopi.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benkő, Loránd & Imre, Samu. 1972. The Hungarian language. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Booij, Geert. 1999. The phonology of Dutch. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Cruttenden, Alan. 2014. Gimson's Pronunciation of English, 8th edn. London: Hodder Education.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dobson, E. J. 1968. English pronunciation 1500–1700, vol.1: Survey of the sources; vol. 2: Phonology, 2nd edn.Oxford: University Press.Google Scholar
Docherty, Gerard. 2010. Phonological innovation in contemporary spoken British English. In Kirkpatrick, Andy (ed.), The Routledge handbook of World Englishes, 59–75. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
ECEP = Eighteenth-Century English Phonology Database. 2015. Compiled by Joan C. Beal, Nuria Yáñez-Bouza, Ranjan Sen & Christine Wallis (The University of Sheffield and Universidade de Vigo). Published by the Digital Humanities Institute, University of Sheffield. www.dhi.ac.uk/projects/ecep/Google Scholar
Elert, Claes C. 1970. Ljud och ord i svenskan [Sound and word in the Swedish language]. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell.Google Scholar
Fry, Dennis. B. 1979. The physics of speech. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hart, John. 1569. An Englishe orthographie. London.Google Scholar
Henton, Caroline. 1983. Changes in the vowels of Received Pronunciation. Journal of Phonetics 11, 353–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hickey, Raymond. 2005. Dublin English: Evolution and change. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hickey, Raymond. 2009. Telling people how to speak: Rhetorical grammars and pronouncing dictionaries. In van Ostade, Ingrid Tieken-Boon & van der Wurff, Wim (eds.), Current issues in Late Modern English, 89–116. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Hickey, Raymond. 2015. The North of England and Northern English. In Hickey, Raymond (ed.), Researching Northern English, 1–24. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hickey, Raymond (ed.). 2017. Listening to the past: Audio records of accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hickey, Raymond. 2018. ‘Yes, that's the best’: Short front vowel lowering in English today. English Today 34(2), 9–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jones, Charles. 2005. English pronunciation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Jones, Daniel. 1918. An outline of English phonetics. Leipzig: Teubner.Google Scholar
Jones, Stephen. 1798. Sheridan improved: A general pronouncing and explanatory dictionary of the English language. London: Vernor and Hood.Google Scholar
Joseph, Brian. 2012. Lexical diffusion and the regular transmission of language change in its sociohistorical context. In Hernández-Compoy, Juan Manuel & Conde-Silvestre, Juan Camilo (eds.), The handbook of historical sociolinguistics, 408–26. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kavitskaya, Darya. 2002. Compensatory lengthening: Phonetics, phonology, diachrony. New York: Garland Press.Google Scholar
Kohler, Klaus. 1995 [1977]. Einführung in die Phonetik des Deutschen, 2nd edn.Berlin: Erich Schmidt.Google Scholar
Lass, Roger. 1976. What kind of vowel was Middle English /a/ and what happened to it? In Roger Lass, English phonology and phonological theory: Synchronic and diachronic studies, 105–29. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Lass, Roger. 1994. Old English: A historical linguistic companion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lass, Roger. 2006. Phonology and morphology. In Hogg, Richard & Denison, David (eds.), A history of the English language, 43–108. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Minkova, Donka. 1982. The environment for open syllable lengthening in Middle English. Folia Linguistica Historica 3, 29–58.Google Scholar
Mugglestone, Lynda. 2003. Talking proper: The rise of accent as social symbol, 2nd edn. Oxford: University Press.Google Scholar
Nares, Robert. 1784. Elements of orthoepy: Containing a distinct view of the whole analogy of the English language so far as it relates to pronunciation, accent, and quantity. London: T. Payne and Son. Revised version published in 1792 as General rules for the pronunciation of the English Language: With complete lists of the exceptions. Repr. Charleston, SC: Nabu Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Phillips, Betty S. 2006. Word frequency and lexical diffusion. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Phillips, Betty S. 2015. Lexical diffusion in historical phonology. In Honeybone, Patrick & Salmons, Joseph C. (eds.), The Oxford handbook of historical phonology, 359–73. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Pollner, Clausdirk. 1976. Robert Nares: ‘Elements of orthoepy’ (1784). Bern: Herbert Lang; Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Pouillon, Véronique. 2018. Eighteenth-century pronouncing dictionaries: Reflecting usage or setting their own standard? In Pillière, Linda, Andrieu, Wilfrid, Kerfelec, Valérie & Lewis, Diana (eds.), Standardising English: Norms and margins in the history of the English language, 106–26. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Sheridan, Thomas. 1781. A rhetorical grammar of the English language calculated solely for the purpose of teaching propriety of pronunciation and justness of delivery, in that tongue. Dublin: Price. Repr. as English Linguistics 1500–1800, no. 146, ed. Alston, Robin C.. Menston: Scolar Press, 1969.Google Scholar
Smart, Benjamin H. 1836. Walker remodelled: A new critical pronouncing dictionary of the English language. London: T. Cadell.Google Scholar
Smith, Jeremy. 2003. The quality of the Middle and Early Modern English short vowels. Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 47, 45–58.Google Scholar
Smith, Jeremy. 2004. Classifying the vowels of Middle English. In Kay, Christian & Smith, Jeremy (eds.), Categorization in the history of English, 221–36. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, William. 1795. An attempt to render the pronunciation of English more easy. London: T. Gillet. Repr. Menston: Scolar Press, 1969.Google Scholar
Stenbrenden, Gjertrud Flermoen. 2016. Long-vowel shifts in English, c. 1050–1700: Evidence from spelling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trapateau, Nicolas. 2020. Lexical diffusion in the making: The lengthening of Middle English /a/ during the eighteenth century and across the diasystem of English. English Language and Linguistics 24(3), 527–43.Google Scholar
Upton, Clive. 2008. Received Pronunciation. In Kortmann, Bernd & Upton, Clive (eds.), Varieties of English, vol. 1: The British Isles, 237–52. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Upton, Clive. 2012. An evolving standard British English pronunciation model. In Hickey, Raymond (ed.), Standards of English: Codified varieties around the world, 55–71. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walker, John. 1791. A critical pronouncing dictionary and expositor of the English language. London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson.Google Scholar
Walker, John. 1797. A critical pronouncing dictionary and expositor of the English language, 2nd edn. London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson.Google Scholar
Walker, John. 1815. A critical pronouncing dictionary and expositor of the English language, 15th edn. London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson. Repr. Menston: The Scolar Press.Google Scholar
Wells, J. C. 1982. Accents of English. 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wiesinger, Peter. 1990. The Central and Southern Bavarian dialects in Bavaria and Austria. In Russ, Charles V. J. (ed.), The dialects of Modern German: A linguistic survey, 438–519. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Yáñez-Bouza, Nuria, Beal, Joan C., Sen, Ranjan & Wallis, Christine. 2018. ‘Proper’ pro-nun-ſha-ſhun in eighteenth-century English: ECEP as a new tool for the study of historical phonology and dialectology. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 33(1), 203–27.Google Scholar

Full text views

Full text views reflects PDF downloads, PDFs sent to Google Drive, Dropbox and Kindle and HTML full text views.

Total number of HTML views: 29
Total number of PDF views: 151 *
View data table for this chart

* Views captured on Cambridge Core between 05th August 2020 - 26th January 2021. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

Hostname: page-component-898fc554b-r79h5 Total loading time: 0.584 Render date: 2021-01-26T06:45:47.018Z Query parameters: { "hasAccess": "0", "openAccess": "0", "isLogged": "0", "lang": "en" } Feature Flags: { "shouldUseShareProductTool": true, "shouldUseHypothesis": true, "isUnsiloEnabled": true, "metricsAbstractViews": false, "figures": false, "newCiteModal": false }

Send article to Kindle

To send this article to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle.

Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

On the recent history of low vowels in English
Available formats
×

Send article to Dropbox

To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your <service> account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox.

On the recent history of low vowels in English
Available formats
×

Send article to Google Drive

To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your <service> account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive.

On the recent history of low vowels in English
Available formats
×
×

Reply to: Submit a response

Your details

Conflicting interests

Do you have any conflicting interests? *