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History and description of
English pronunciation
Historical stages
Old English
Middle English
General development
In Old English
In Scots
Development of vowels
A
Close back
Close front
Diphthongs
Great Vowel Shift
Open back
Pre-L
Pre-R
Development of consonants
Single consonants
Clusters
Variable features
Cot–caught merger
Drawl
Flapping
H-dropping
L-vocalization
NG
R
Rhoticity
T-glottalization
TH
WH
Related topics
History of English
Spelling
v
t
e
This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.
Middle English phonology is necessarily somewhat speculative, since it is preserved only as a written language. Nevertheless, there is a very large text corpus of Middle English. The dialects of Middle English vary greatly over both time and place, and in contrast with Old English and Modern English, spelling was usually phonetic rather than conventional. Words were generally spelled according to how they sounded to the person writing a text, rather than according to a formalised system that might not accurately represent the way the writer's dialect was pronounced, as Modern English is today.
The Middle English speech of the city of London in the late 14th century (essentially, the speech of Geoffrey Chaucer) is used as the standard Middle English dialect in teaching and when specifying "the" grammar or phonology of Middle English. It is this form that is described below, unless otherwise indicated.
In the rest of the article, abbreviations are used as follows:
PIE = Proto-Indo-European
OE = Old English
PreOE = Pre-Old English
ME = Middle English
EME = Early Middle English
LME = Late Middle English
LLME = very late Middle English (post-Chaucer)
NE = Modern English
ENE = Early Modern English
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