Modern English

• 1. Introduction

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  Modern English is the form of the English language spoken since a sweeping change in pronunciation called the Great Vowel Shift. That shift began in England in the late 14th century and was finished by the 17th century. The works of William Shakespeare and the King James Bible date from the early 17th century. Both are counted as Modern English, or more precisely Early Modern English, sometimes called Elizabethan English. So a listener today and a playwright four centuries ago share the same broad stage of one language. How did a tongue spoken on a single island come to belong to nearly a billion people? How did its words, its sounds, even its alphabet, settle into the shapes we know now? And what quiet changes are still reshaping it? The answers run from a printing press to a dropped letter to the difference between meat and meet.

• 2. A Language Goes Global

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  Through colonization, the British Empire carried English to many regions of the world. Anglo-America, the Indian subcontinent, Africa, Australia and New Zealand all received it. By the late 18th century, the empire's geopolitical dominance had pushed Modern English outward through its colonies. Commerce, science and technology, diplomacy, art, and formal education each played a part. Together they helped English become the first truly global language. In the post-colonial period, some newly created nations faced a delicate problem. They held multiple indigenous languages, and elevating one above the others carried political risk. Several chose to keep Modern English as the official language to sidestep that difficulty. According to the Ethnologue, there are almost one billion speakers of English as a first or second language. Most native speakers live in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Ireland. English, by one description, has more non-native speakers than any other language and is more widely dispersed around the world. It serves as a common language, a lingua franca, of the airlines, of the sea and shipping, of computer technology, and of science.

• 3. Many Englishes

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  American, Australian, and British English sit among a long roster of varieties spoken across the English-speaking world. British English itself contains Anglo-English, Scottish English and Welsh English. The list continues with Canadian, New Zealand, Caribbean, and Hiberno-English, the last of which includes Ulster English. Indian, Sri Lankan, Pakistani, Nigerian, Philippine, Singaporean, and South African English round out the family of dialects. Each name marks a place where English took root and bent to local speech. These dialects are sometimes referred to collectively, a reminder that no single accent owns the language. The differences among them point back to how each region's sounds diverged, a story that begins with a split across the Atlantic.

• 4. The Shifting Sounds

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  The American-British split, dated to the years between 1600 and 1725, divides English phonology into a before and an after. Before it, initial cluster reductions turned pairs like gnat and nat into homophones, and not and knot as well. The meet-meat merger made meat and meet sound alike in most dialects. That same merger left an odd residue, since meat, threat and great now carry three different vowels even though all three words once rhymed. The foot-strut split pulled cut and put apart, so that putt and put are no longer homophones. After the split came its own wave of changes. Non-rhotic accents, which drop the r sound, developed in the English of England, Australasia, and South Africa. Happy-tensing turned the final lax vowel in a word like happy into a tense one, though some dialects skip it. Yod-dropping erased the y-glide in clusters found in words such as chute, rude, blue, chews, and Zeus. The wine-whine merger reduced one sound to another in every national standard variety except Scottish and Irish. In North American and Australasian English, the t and d between vowels soften to a quick alveolar tap. The cot-caught merger folded two vowels into one in some dialects of General American, a change still spreading through living speech.

• 5. Grammar In Motion

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  Whom is losing its footing, giving way to who in most dialects. Singular they, long common in speech, has been climbing into some formal registers. Auxiliary verbs now appear before frequency adverbs in many speakers' habits. Some irregular verbs are being regularized, smoothing toward ordinary patterns. The present subjunctive, the so-called mandative form, has seen a revival. Will is preferred to shall when marking the future in the first person. Do-support has reached the verb have, and multi-word verbs keep multiplying. Informal speech has bred the auxiliaries wanna, gonna, and gotta. The T-V distinction, the old split between thou and ye, has fallen out of use. Contemporary Modern English usually keeps only you, serving in both formal and informal settings. Auxiliary verbs became mandatory in interrogative sentences. Less, rather than fewer, is now used with countable nouns. For comparisons, the syntactic more is preferred over the older -er ending. The Saxon genitive, the apostrophe-s, has extended its reach beyond human referents, a small grammatical creep that mirrors larger ones still under way.

• 6. Letters Lost And Found

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  Printing reshaped the look of written English, drawing heavily on continental printing practices. The letter thorn, written as the symbol that began to be replaced by th as early as Middle English, finally fell into disuse. In Early Modern English printing, thorn was set with the Latin y, which resembled it in blackletter typeface. Its last traces survived in ligatures like ye for thee, yt for that, and yu for thou. Those forms were still seen occasionally in the King James Bible of 1611 and in Shakespeare's folios. The letters i and j, once a single letter, began to be told apart, and so did u and v. This division followed a common development of the Latin alphabet in the period. The result was an alphabet of exactly 26 letters, purely Latin, the same set a reader uses today to spell out every word that came before.