Middle English phonology

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:

The surface sounds of Chaucerian Middle English (whether allophones or phonemes) are shown in the tables below.

1. ^ The exact nature of Middle English r is not known. It may have been an alveolar approximant [ɹ], as in most Modern English accents, an alveolar tap [ɾ], or an alveolar trill [r]. In this article we will use the symbol ⟨r⟩ indiscriminately to stand for this phoneme.

The sounds marked in parentheses in the table above are allophones:

In Old English, [v], [ð], [z] were allophones of /f/, /θ/, /s/, respectively, occurring between vowels or voiced consonants. This led to many alternations e.g. hūs ('house') [huːs] vs. hūses ('of a house') [huːzes]; wīf ('woman') [wiːf] vs. wīfes ('of a woman') [wiːves]. In Middle English, these voiced allophones become phonemes, and are solidly established in Modern English as separate phonemes. The sources of the new phonemic distinctions are:

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