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The Early Modern English (EModE) period, conventionally dated from around 1500 to 1700 (some scholars extend it to 1750), is when English transformed from a language of enormous dialectal variation into one approaching a recognisable standard. It is the age of Shakespeare and the King James Bible, of the first English dictionaries and grammars, of the Renaissance flood of Latin and Greek learning, and of intense debate about what English should be and whether it could be "fixed". For AQA A-Level English Language, this period is pivotal because it illuminates the twin processes of standardisation (the social process by which one variety becomes the agreed norm) and codification (the recording of that norm in dictionaries and grammars) that produced the written English we use today. Keeping those two terms distinct, and using them precisely, is one of the surest ways to signal control of the topic.
A guiding idea for the whole lesson: the forces at work here pull in opposite directions. On one side, print, the rise of London English and the appearance of dictionaries all push English towards uniformity and fixity. On the other, the Great Vowel Shift, Renaissance borrowing and Shakespeare's restless coinage are driving rapid change and expansion. The Early Modern period is the moment when English is simultaneously being pinned down on the page and transformed in the mouth — and the tension between those two movements is the most fertile material the period offers for an evaluative essay.
The Great Vowel Shift (GVS) was a systematic change in the pronunciation of long vowels that occurred between approximately 1400 and 1700, fundamentally altering the sound system of English.
The GVS is the single most important phonological change in the history of English. During the shift, the long vowels (not the short ones) all moved their place of articulation upward in the mouth — the tongue rising a step for each vowel — and the two vowels that were already at the top of the mouth, /iː/ and /uː/, had nowhere higher to go and so "broke" into the diphthongs /aɪ/ and /aʊ/. The short vowels were largely unaffected, which is why pairs like divine / divinity and crime / criminal show a vowel alternation: the first member had a long vowel that shifted, the second a short vowel that did not.
| ME Pronunciation | Modern Pronunciation | Example Word |
|---|---|---|
| /iː/ (as in French si) | /aɪ/ | time, wife, life |
| /uː/ (as in French nous) | /aʊ/ | house, mouse, out |
| /eː/ (close to French é) | /iː/ | meet, see, feet |
| /oː/ (close to French eau) | /uː/ | moon, food, boot |
| /ɛː/ (open e) | /iː/ | meat, beat, sea |
| /ɔː/ (open o) | /oʊ/ | boat, goat, road |
| /aː/ (long a) | /eɪ/ | name, make, take |
The GVS answers one of the most frequently asked questions about English: why doesn't English spelling match its pronunciation? The answer is a matter of historical timing. Spelling was being fixed by printing from the late fifteenth century onward, just as the long vowels were beginning to shift; pronunciation then went on changing through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries while the spellings stayed put. The result is that Modern English spelling often records a Middle English pronunciation that no longer exists. We spell name with a final e because that e was once pronounced; we keep the vowel-letter of meet because it once said /eː/, not /iː/. The mismatch between spelling and sound that frustrates every learner of English is, in effect, a fossilised photograph of how the language sounded around 1400. This is the single most important practical consequence of the GVS, and a guaranteed source of marks whenever a question touches on spelling.
The causes of the GVS remain debated among historical linguists. Proposed explanations include:
You are not expected to adjudicate between these; you are expected to know that several competing explanations exist and that the question remains open.
Otto Jespersen (1860–1943), the Danish linguist who coined the term "Great Vowel Shift" and described it systematically, remains the key figure associated with this change. The honest exam position is that no single explanation is agreed: the GVS is one of the great unsolved puzzles of historical linguistics. This is not a weakness in your answer but a strength — being able to say that the mechanism (long vowels raising in a chain) is well established while the cause remains contested shows a mature grasp of how historical linguistics actually works. Avoid asserting any one theory as fact; present them as competing hypotheses.
William Caxton's introduction of the printing press in 1476 (discussed in the previous lesson) set in motion a process of standardisation that accelerated throughout the EModE period. The mechanism is worth stating precisely, because it is frequently examined. Print created powerful pressures towards uniformity that manuscript culture never had: a printer setting thousands of identical copies had a strong practical incentive to settle on one spelling of each word; the London-based print trade reproduced and broadcast the London variety nationwide; and the growing market of readers came to expect a familiar, consistent written form. None of this happened overnight — early printers, Caxton included, were inconsistent — but the cumulative tendency of print was unmistakably towards a fixed, capital-centred written standard.
Early printed books showed considerable spelling variation — even within a single text, the same word might be spelled differently. Gradually, printers' conventions became more consistent. Key developments included:
| Date | Development |
|---|---|
| 1476 | Caxton's press established; spelling highly variable |
| Early 1500s | Printers begin adopting more consistent conventions |
| 1582 | Richard Mulcaster's Elementarie — the first systematic attempt to establish English spelling rules |
| Late 1500s–1600s | Spelling largely stabilised, though some variation persists |
Richard Mulcaster (c. 1531–1611), headmaster of Merchant Taylors' School and teacher of the poet Edmund Spenser, argued in The First Part of the Elementarie (1582) for a systematic, principled approach to spelling, balancing reason, custom and sound. He compiled a list of recommended spellings for several thousand common words and, importantly, argued against radical phonetic spelling reform — accepting that custom and familiarity should temper logic. Mulcaster matters for two reasons: he is an early, named advocate of deliberate codification, and his moderate, custom-respecting stance anticipates the position that dictionary-makers such as Johnson would later adopt.
A vital conceptual point sits underneath all of this. Standardisation is not something that happens to speech; it is overwhelmingly a phenomenon of the written language. Throughout the Early Modern period and beyond, people went on speaking in a rich variety of regional accents and dialects; what was being standardised was the form of English on the page. Confusing a standard written form with a uniform spoken one is a common error — and avoiding it lets you make the sophisticated observation that "Standard English" has always been a written variety with no single correct pronunciation attached.
William Shakespeare (1564–1616) is often cited as the greatest innovator in the history of the English language, credited with coining approximately 1,700 words and phrases still in use today.
A crucial caution is needed here, and stating it is itself worth marks. The figure of "1,700 words" really counts the words for which Shakespeare's plays provide the earliest surviving written record, which is not at all the same as words he personally invented. Because his texts are so well studied and so early, they naturally catch the first written sighting of many words that were probably already circulating in speech. The honest, examiner-pleasing formulation is therefore that Shakespeare's works first attest a great many words, and that he was a brilliant exploiter and populariser of the word-formation resources of EModE — not a lone genius who conjured the vocabulary from nothing. With that caveat in place, his linguistic creativity remains genuinely remarkable. His innovations work through the standard processes of word formation, which is exactly why he is such useful exam material — analysing how he made words demonstrates linguistic method, not just literary appreciation:
| Process | Examples |
|---|---|
| Conversion (changing word class) | elbow (noun → verb), champion (noun → verb), lonely (noun → adjective) |
| Affixation | uncomfortable (un- + comfort + -able), dishearten (dis- + heart + -en) |
| Compounding | eyeball, bedroom, birthplace, bloodstained |
| Semantic shift | generous (originally "of noble birth" → "giving freely") |
Shakespeare frequently exploited the grammatical flexibility of EModE, using words in unexpected grammatical categories. In King Lear, he writes "He childed as I fathered" — using nouns as verbs. This kind of creative conversion was more common in EModE than in Modern English because grammatical rules were not yet codified.
Assassination, bedazzle, circumstantial, cold-blooded, dauntless, eventful, fashionable, generous, gloomy, laughable, lonely, majestic, obscene, radiance, swagger, undress, worthless, zany.
The inkhorn controversy was a debate in the 16th century about whether English should borrow learned words from Latin and Greek (termed "inkhorn terms" because they were associated with scholars' ink) or should rely on its native Germanic resources.
The rapid expansion of learning during the Renaissance created a need for new vocabulary to express new concepts. Writers and scholars responded in three ways:
| Position | Advocates | Argument |
|---|---|---|
| Neologisers (pro-borrowing) | Thomas Elyot, George Pettie | English needed to borrow from Latin and Greek to become a language of learning and culture |
| Purists (anti-borrowing) | John Cheke, Ralph Lever | English should use its own resources; Latin borrowings were pretentious and obscure |
| Moderates | Thomas More, Richard Mulcaster | Some borrowing was necessary, but excess should be avoided |
Sir John Cheke (1514–1557) famously wrote: "I am of this opinion that our own tung shold be written cleane and pure, unmixt and unmangeled with borowing of other tunges." He proposed native alternatives: crossed for "crucified," mooned for "lunatic," gainrising for "resurrection."
Many inkhorn terms survived and are now utterly unremarkable: education, celebrate, encyclopedia, democracy, explain, temperature, expectation, mundane. Others were rejected and have vanished: adminiculation (aid), deruncinate (to weed), fatigate (to tire), expede, suppeditate. The fact that we now find some of these laughable while others are everyday words illustrates a deeper truth about language change: the "market" of usage, not any single authority, ultimately decides which neologisms survive. Words that filled a genuine gap and proved useful were retained; ostentatious synonyms for existing English words were discarded.
The inkhorn controversy is gold-standard exam material for any question about attitudes to language change, because it shows that the argument between linguistic purism (defend the native stock; resist borrowing) and linguistic liberalism (borrow freely to enrich the language) is not a modern invention but a recurring feature of English from at least the sixteenth century. You can draw a direct line from Cheke's anti-borrowing purism to twenty-first-century complaints about Americanisms or text-speak: the underlying anxiety — that the language is being corrupted by alien influence — is strikingly constant across five hundred years. Spotting that continuity is a high-level evaluative move.
Setting aside the controversy, the scale of EModE borrowing was genuinely transformative. The rediscovery of classical learning and the translation of Greek and Latin texts created a need for vocabulary in fields that English had barely possessed before, and the language met that need overwhelmingly by importing — and adapting — classical words:
| Field | Examples of Latin/Greek borrowings |
|---|---|
| Science & medicine | skeleton, larynx, virus, species, radius, capsule, equilibrium |
| Learning & rhetoric | encyclopedia, syllabus, thesis, climax, dogma, lexicon |
| Abstract & moral | enthusiasm, conscience, education, expectation, vacuum |
Whereas the medieval French borrowings had clustered around power (law, government, war), these Renaissance borrowings cluster around knowledge (science, scholarship, abstraction). The contrast is itself analytically useful: each great wave of borrowing leaves a fingerprint that reveals what kind of contact produced it — military and political conquest in the case of French, intellectual revival in the case of Renaissance Latin. Reading borrowing as a record of cultural priorities, rather than a neutral list, is exactly the analytical habit the higher bands reward.
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