English Pronunciation from Shakespeare to Modern Times

It is a widely accepted fact that languages change over time.  In the 1,550 or so years since the Anglo-Saxons migrated to Britain, English pronunciation has changed radically.

SEE ALSO: Language in Context

If you dumped a group of North American tourists off in Winchester around the year 900, they probably wouldn’t be able to communicate unless they were trained in Old English.  If you asked people in the streets of modern New York or London to identify the language of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (original text), they probably wouldn’t recognize it as English.

Watch the following video to understand why:

Shaping the language and English pronunciation

It is only after the Norman conquest of England that the language begins to look somewhat familiar, although we would still have to strain a bit to make sense of it.  By Shakespeare’s day (1564 – 1616), the English was more or less modern.  Also belonging to this period are the Book of Common Prayer (1549) and the King James Bible (1611), which are relatively easy for any English-speaker to read.  While the English of this period is often referred to (mistakenly) as Old English, it is actually called Early Modern English.

Spelling-pronunciation correspondence

Although Early Modern English looks modern on paper, there have been some changes in English pronunciation since the 16th and 17th centuries.  These include the changes that led to the divergence of the various world Englishes.  While in most cases we are dealing with vowel pronunciation, there have also been some changes in the pronunciation of consonants too.

As a general rule, the earlier the English, the closer the correspondence between pronunciation and spelling.

Origin of troubling homonyms

If you are a student of English, you have probably wondered why beat and beet have the same pronunciation.  They have two different spellings, so they should differ in pronunciation too.  In Early Modern English, they were in fact different.

The ea in beat was pronounced a lot like the a in make, while beet was pronounced as it still is today.  Later, the ea in beat would change, causing the two sounds to merge.

A number of other long vowels have changed since that time.  These include the vowel in name, which sounded more like the e in men.  The ow in how sounded more like the interjection oh, so it would have been pronounced like the Modern English hoe.

Pronunciation of consonants

In Shakespeare’s day, there were also differences in the pronunciation of certain consonants.  For instance, in Modern English, you often find the consonants t, s and c pronounced as if they were spelt sh or ch.  Examples include Christian, Russia, and Dacia, respectively.

In Early Modern English, these consonants would have had their usual pronunciation; that is, the s in Russia would have sounded like s in bus, and the t in Christian would have sounded more like the t in the related word Christ.  Since that time, however, t, s, and c followed by i have been palatalized.  If you want to sound more like Shakespeare, you have to pronounce them as they are spelt.

Shakespeare’s English resembled General American

A final point to remember about the original pronunciation of Shakespeare is that r needs to be pronounced wherever it occurs.  During the 18th century, syllable-final r fell out of use in Southern British English.

Since we often associate Shakespeare with British English, people mistakenly conclude that Shakespeare would have dropped these r’s.  However, these r’s were still used in Early Modern English.

In fact, General American pronunciation could even be closer to Shakespeare than Modern British.

According to Trevor Nunn of the Royal Shakespeare Company (a British company),
“I very much want to do Shakespeare with American actors using their own accents because there is a different energy and a different use of language.  Some people mock this idea, but it is almost certainly true that today’s American accent is closer to the sounds that Shakespeare heard when he was writing.”

Below is the video of Ben Crystal reciting Shakespeare’s sonnet 116 in both its modern and its original form.