Chaucer’s Language

Abstract

All living languages are in a constant state of change, so it is hardly surprising that Chaucer’s English, now six hundred years old, is rather different from our own. Sometimes the rate of change in language speeds up under the influence of outside events, and two such times of exceptional change are recognised in the history of English, resulting in three periods, known as Old English (c. 700 to c. 1150), Middle English (c. 1150 to c. 1500), and Modern English (c. 1500 to the present). It was the overthrow of the Anglo-Saxons by the Normans which brought about the change from Old to Middle English. The factors which led to the end of Middle English are less easy to summarise, but include social change, increased communication, and the spread of printing. There were also changes at this time to which no definite cause can be ascribed; one such was the sound change known as the Great Vowel Shift, whereby all the long vowels of Middle English, which were formerly pronounced rather like vowels of French or Italian, began to be ‘raised’, that is, pronounced with the tongue in a much higher position in the mouth. This was a very far-reaching change and accounts more than anything for the difference in sound between Chaucer’s English and our own. And in addition general tendencies towards change in English have continued to take place from Chaucer’s time to the present, such as the ongoing weakening and loss of unstressed syllables which has resulted in the weakening and loss of many of the old inflexional endings (those grammatically-significant terminations of words, such as -en and -eth, which have been steadily disappearing right up to the present day).