The Evolution of English Pronunciation from the Shakespearean Era to the Present: A Historical Phonological Analysis

Abstract

The English language has undergone profound phonological transformation since the Elizabethan period, when William Shakespeare composed his dramatic and poetic works in a variety of Early Modern English that would be largely unintelligible to contemporary speakers in its original pronunciation. This article examines the major stages of English phonological evolution from the late sixteenth century to the present day, with particular attention to the completion of the Great Vowel Shift, the development of Received Pronunciation, the divergence of American and British varieties, and the emergence of contemporary accent levelling and new dialect formation. Drawing on historical phonology, dialectology, and variationist sociolinguistics, the study traces the systematic sound changes that transformed Early Modern English phonology into the diverse range of accents and dialects attested in present-day English. The analysis focuses on four major phonological processes: vowel shifting and chain shifts, consonant changes including rhoticity and /h/-dropping, prosodic changes in stress and rhythm, and the sociolinguistic mechanisms driving ongoing change. The article argues that English pronunciation has never been static and that understanding its historical trajectory is essential for both linguistic theory and the broader cultural understanding of the English-speaking world.