Burnley is of course referring to the Great Vowel Shift. However, as he observes, linguistic innovations were already taking place prior to the arrival of the Norman French. In terms of phonology, both vowels and consonants were undergoing change in the late Old English (OE) period. These features are examined below together with the Middle English (ME) forms from which Yorkshire vowels and diphthongs are ultimately derived.

The Great Vowel Shift: the term used to refer to the changes, occurring at the end of the Middle English period, which affected the pronunciation of the seven English long vowels. For example, the Middle English sound [:] became [e:] and subsequently modern [i:]

Vowels

Long vowels
Table 1 summarizes the position regarding the English long vowels where changes began to take place in the OE period. It will be noted that, apart from , and , the majority of these vowels maintained their characteristics into the ME period.

Table 1

Old English			Middle English
Vowel	Example words	Approximate realization	Vowel	Approximate realization
	(stone)	[a:] as in father		[:] * as in law
	(feet)	[e:] as in German zehn		[] as in German zehn
	(ride)	[i:] as in tree		[] as in tree
	(food)	[o:] as in German wo		[] as in German wo
	(house)	[u:] as in chew		[] as in chew
	(hide)	[y:] as in German Bühne		[] as in tree
	(sleep)	[a:] as in a lengthened form of hat		[:] as in French faire
* remained as north of the Humber

Short vowels
The English short vowels were also the subject of change. Burnley (2000) notes, among other things, that during this period short vowels began to be lengthened before certain consonant groups (e.g. ld, rd, rl, rn, mb, nd and ng). For example, Anglian cald became cld and later, through rounding of the vowel, modern cold. Conversely, long vowels shortened before two-consonant clusters (other than the above). Thus gdspell ("gospel") became godspell. However, as observed by Pyles and Algeo (1993), the lengthening mentioned above was often not self-sustaining and, at the close of the ME period, occurred only in o and i before mb, in u and i before nd, and in general before ld. However, these were not the only circumstances that has an effect on vowel length.

Middle English Open Syllable Lengthening (MEOSL)
According to Smith (1996), this phenomenon occurred much later than the developments described above and commonly involved the short vowels a, e and o. These vowels were lengthened when they occurred in the stressed open syllable of a disyllabic word. For example:

Table 2

Stressed syllable	Old English	Middle English	Contemporary English
Open	fa-ran	f-ren	go
	ba-can	b-ken	bake
Closed	þan-cian	than-ken	thank

It should be noted that, in English, when a single consonant falls between two vowels it is normally associated with the second syllable. However, when two consonants occur, the first is linked to the first syllable and the second with the final one.

Smith (1996) claims that MEOSL happened sooner and was more advanced in the North because of the earlier erosion of inflectional endings (see Loss of Inflections). Further information about the quantitative changes in late OE vowels can be obtained from: Smith 1996: 96 et seq; Campbell, 1959: 120-2; Hogg 1992a: 210-14.

Consonants

In comparison to vowels, claim Pyles and Algeo (1993: 143), English consonants have displayed a relative constancy throughout the history of the language. For example, they note that Old English b, c (realized as either [k] or [t]), d, f (values [f] and [v]), h (realized as both [h] and [x]), k, l , m, p, r, s, t, þ, w and x (i.e. [ks]) remained the same in Middle English. However, the OE character became ME "yogh" (though the latter had only two values, [y] and [x], as opposed to three (see OE Phonology). This is not to say that the consonants were entirely unaffected as there were a number of important innovations. For example:

• As a result of French word borrowings with initial letters v and later z (i.e. such as veal, virtue, zeal, zodiac) these sounds appeared word initially where they had not formerly occurred in OE.

• Word initial [] in words normally unstressed (e.g. this, that, they) became voiced to [ð].

• Following the loss of word-final -e (see Loss of Inflections) [v], [z] and [ð] began to appear in word-final position (e.g. give, lose, bathe).

In OE, voiced fricatives had simply been allophones of the voiceless ones but, in the transition to Middle English, they became true phonemes. Smith (1996) illustrates this process of phonemicisation using [s] and [z]. In Old English the distribution of these phonemes was allophonic and there is a consensus of opinion that /s/ was used in word-final position whilst /z/ was employed intervocalically. Thus, for example, the Old English forms of "house" (noun) and "house" (verb) were respectively hs [hu:s] and hsian [hu:zian]. Following inflectional erosion during the ME period, a new minimal pair [hu:s] and [hu:z] was formed and /s/ became differentiated phonemically from /z/.

Allophone: term used to describe any variant of a single phoneme. For example, in English, <a> is nasalized (realized as []) before a nasal consonant, such as <n> or <m> but pronounced as [a] elsewhere. [] is therefore an allophone of [a].

The derivation of Yorkshire vowels

The following table details the origins of Yorkshire vowels and is based on Wakelin's (1977) analysis of Northern speech sounds. (Using your mouse to point to any item shown in red type will result in the appearance of a message box containing additional information.) The first column headed "RP realization" contains the phonetic symbols for the sounds (underlined in the example words) as they are realized in British Standard English. The symbols in red represent the pronunciation in Yorkshire dialect. Northern dialect refers to NER speech whilst WR dialect falls within the North Midlands dialect area (see Traditional Dialect Areas in the Phonology section).

RP realization		Northern	North Midland	Wakelin's comments and page reference
	cow, down, house.			<ME : dialect of the Humber retains the undiphthongized form of this vowel (88).
	ground, pound			<ME : northern dialects show no evidence of lengthening to OE and thus becoming diphthongized before /nd/ like the rest of the country. The southern boundary of as in ground (SED IV.4.1) moves diagonally from the mouth of the Humber through the WR whereas the in pound (SED VII.8.2-4) practically follows the southern boundary of Yorkshire with the exception of the three southern SED localities 32-4 (90).
	fool, goose, spoon,		in the WR	< ME : these dialectal sounds are now being replaced by ones nearer to RP' (88-89).
	bone, road, stone			North and East Yorkshire forms can be , , and (<ME ) whereas South and West Yorkshire forms can be , , etc. (<ME ) (89).
	coal, coat, hole.			<ME lengthened: is used in the south of the WR (89)
	eat, meat, speak.	or		< ME lengthened.
	blind, find, climb			< ME : as with ground and pound the southern limit of is located in the North Midlands. However the boundary fluctuates and isoglosses for both sounds form a broad belt (90).
	long, wrong			<ME -ang / -ong. The former is located north of the Humber, the latter to the south.

: the sound in the RP realization of fool. The Northerm realizations of cow, down and house rhyme respectively with shoe, moon and lose.

: the sound in the RP realization of wood. The Northern realization of ground and pound rhymes with German bund.

: the sound in the RP realization of fear. The Northern realization of fool, goose and spoon is therefore on the lines of "fee-el", "gee-es" and "spee-en".

: the sound in the RP realization of put it (without the intervening t). WR pronunciation of fool, spoon, and goose is something like "foo-il", "goo-is" and "spoo-in".

: the sound in the RP realization of lure. North Midland pronunciation of bone, road and stone is therefore on the lines of "boo-en", "roo-ed" and "stoo-en".

: the sound in the RP realization of meander.Hence bone, road and stone can be realized as "bee-an"," ree-ad" and "stee-an".

: the sound in the RP realization of may-apple. Bone, stone and road are thus realized something like "bay-an", "stay-an" and "ray-ad".

: the sound in the RP realization of graduand. Bone, road and stone are accordingly realized something like "boo-an", "roo-ad" and stoo-an"

: the sound in eight. The realization of eat, meat, etc in North Midlands is something like "eight", "meight" etc.

: the sound in the RP realization of pit. The Northern pronunciations of blind and find therefore rhyme with "sinned", and climb rhymes with "limb".

: pronunciation is similar to that of RP but articulation occurs further forward in the mouth.

: the sound in the RP realization of cat. Long and wrong are therefore pronounced as "lang" and "wrang" in Northern dialect.

: the sound in the RP realization of boy. Coal, coat and hole are therefore pronounced something like "coil", "coit" and "hoil".

Sources

Barber, C. (1993) The English language: a historical introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Burnley, D. (2000) The History of the English Language: a source book, Second Edition, London: Longman.

Campbell, A. (1959) Old English Grammar, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Hogg, R. (1992a) A Grammar of Old English, Vol 1: Phonology, Oxford:Blackwell.

Pyles, T. and Algeo, J. (1993) The Origins and Development of the English Language, Fourth Edition, London: Harcourt Brace.

Smith, J. (1996), An historical study of English: function, form and change, London:Routledge.

Wakelin, M.F. (1977) English Dialects: An Introduction, Revised Edition, London: The Athlone Press.