The Great Vowel Shift

Some other examples of the GVS are the ME ‘stone’, which in OE was pronounced /st :n/ or /stoon/.  Here again the ‘oo’ sound that is made in the back of the throat was brought forward so that it is pronounced /stone/ in ME.  Because of my smattering of knowledge of Swedish I can see an interesting point, and that is the pronounciation of the OE ‘stoon’ is similar in vowel sound to the ‘å’ sound in that language.  One doesn’t need a PhD in Historical Linguistics to note that there are many Swedish influences in OE.

So now if you are ever at a party and someone mentions the Great Vowel Shift of the English language, you can give them a good twenty minute dissertation on the matter. The whole GVS event is still called a big mystery, and no one seems to know why the language shifted the way it did.  I tend to postulate that because English has always been an eclectic language that maybe the GVS was the beginning of the evolution of English as the most dynamic language on the earth today.  I am an Australian and at times I have to have students here in the South repeat themselves so I can understand their brand of English.  Five years ago, one of my Linguistics professors, an American, insisted that in ten years American English will be the Standard English.  Of course this brought an uproar from we students in Australia, but now that I live in USA also, I admit he may have been correct.