Introducing English Linguistics

Early Modern English.
The transition from Middle to Modern English is
not marked by any specific cultural event but rather by a linguistic event:
the Great Vowel Shift. This shift resulted in vowels either being raised on
the vowel chart (see Table 7.2 in Chapter 7) or becoming diphthongs. One
way that vowels can be classified is according to how high the tongue is
placed in the mouth when the vowel is articulated. What happened
between Middle and Early Modern English is that in certain words, vowels
began to be replaced by vowels pronounced higher in the mouth. For
instance, in Middle English the first vowel in word swete would have been
pronounced /e
I/ (similar to the first vowel in Modern English race).
However, in Modern English, /e
I/ was raised to /i/. Thus, we get the Modern
English pronunciation of sweet. In Middle English, the first vowel in
droghte /u/ would have rhymed with Modern English boot. Because this is
already a high vowel, it could not be raised in Early Modern English.
Instead, it became the diphthong /aυ/, two vowels pronounced simultane-
ously in a syllable and the vowel still present in the Modern English pro-
nunciation of drought.
But while this sound change marks a formal change between Middle
and Modern English, there were a number of other historical events that
clearly contributed to English becoming the language that it currently is:
The Shift from an Oral to a Print Culture: During the Old and Middle English
periods, English was largely a vernacular language: literacy rates were
low, and for most people, the language existed only in its spoken 
form. After Caxton introduced the printing press in England in 1476,
literacy rates increased. Some of the more significant early publications
The development of English
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in English include William Tyndale’s translation of the New
Testament (1525) (an event that led to his being burned at the stake,
since it was considered sacrilegious for the bible to exist in any lan-
guage other than Greek or Latin); the King James Version of the
bible (1611) (the first “legal” translation of the bible); Shakespeare’s
First Folio (1623); and the first English-language newspaper, The Daily
Courant (1702).
The Publication of Dictionaries and Grammars, and the Subsequent
Codification of English: As a language grows in stature, it begins being
codified: dictionaries are written to provide a record of words, their
meanings, and their pronunciations; grammars describe the struc-
ture of a language and often prescribe usage. In the Modern
English period, a number of dictionaries and grammars of English
begin appearing: Samuel Johnson’s dictionary (1755) (the first
major dictionary of English); Noah Webster’s dictionary (1806) (the
first major dictionary of American English); and numerous gram-
mars of English, which begin appearing in the eighteenth century
(e.g. Robert Lowth’s 1762 A Short Introduction to English Grammar).
There were also attempts in the eighteenth century to establish an
“English Academy”: a legislative body similar to the Académie
française (French Academy) that issues proclamations on good and
bad usage. However, attempts to establish an English Academy have
never been successful.
The Colonization of America, its Independence from England, and its Rise as a
Superpower: The colonization of the New World in the seventeenth
century marked the first time that the English language was trans-
planted from England into a new geographical and social context.
Even though the United States eventually gained independence
from England, its colonization marked the beginning of British col-
onization, a process that led, as an earlier section of this chapter
demonstrated, to the transplantation of English all over the world
and the development of many new “Englishes.” More people now
speak American English than British English, and because of its
size, power, and influence, the United States and, consequently,
American English have wielded great power in the world.
While the comparative method involves classifying languages on the
basis of linguistic and non-linguistic evidence, the typological method
relies exclusively on linguistic information and uses this information to
classify languages according to the linguistic characteristics that they
share or do not share. For instance, languages can be classified as having
subject–verb–object word order (SVO), as having subject–object–verb
(SOV), and so forth. Although languages are classified typologically on
the basis of phonological, morphological, and syntactic characteristics
that they share or do not share, much of the research in this area has
been centered on morphology and syntax, and this section explores two