Page 35 - 4952

that would split the differences between various dialects in
England, with the London dialect (spoken by Chaucer, among

many others) eventually winning out, but adopting many of the
pronunciations of the other dialects.

Others argue that it was not so much immigration but social
mobility that changed the language. After the Black Death there

was such a labor shortage, the argument goes, that many more

people were able to move into the middle and even the upper
class. These people had other, class-based ways of talking, and

in the process of modifying their own speech, also ended up

causing the modifications of previously existing standard
speech. The result was a new pronunciation for everyone.

A related possibility is to interpret the Shift as a form of
hypercorrection [ai], an attempt to seem more English at a time

when England was at war, on and off, with France. English
speakers, it is thought, would make every effort to sound less

continental, and a new vowel system would do just that.

Unfortunately for this hypothesis [ai], linguists seem to
have found just as much evidence that the pronunciation shift

could be an attempt to sound more French, as French was still
associated with the upper classes: So all those newly rich

families changed their pronunciation in order to sound as if they
had always been rich.

Finally, some scholars argue that the arrival of the printing

press at the end of the fifteenth century worked to lock in a
particular pronunciation (that most familiar to the printers in

London) and then disseminate it throughout England. The

problem with this theory is that early printers were anything but
consistent in spelling; they even deliberately spelled words two

different ways in the same line in order to get the spacing right.
And although London English was the favorite of printers, one

needs only to compare Chaucer’s London English with the
English printed in the middle of the sixteenth century to know

33