What Shakespeare's English Sounded Like - and how we know

Botched rhymes, buried puns and a staged accent that sounds more Victorian than Elizabethan. No more! Use linguistic sleuthing to dig up the surprisingly different sound of the bard's Early Modern English.

~ Briefly, and without spoilers ~

I'm embarrassed to admit that this is the first time I ever really got into Shakespeare. There's a personal story here, which I'll quickly share in the video.

The idea of reconstructing his pronunciation intrigued me. As I started making trips to the library and downloading old grammars, I just found the questions piling on. I did find some answers for you.

It starts with his odd spelling - well, the spelling he inherited. Chaucer's medieval spelling was followed by modern sound changes, including the start of the Great Vowel Shift. The introduction of Caxton's printing press and the spelling debates put Early Modern English in a state of flux by Shakespeare's time. They also left our first trail of evidence.

Other evidence comes from rhythm, rhymes and - more reluctantly - puns. Many of these don't work the same way anymore, from the rhymes like "sea" and "prey" to the rhythm of "housewifery".

Modern dialects add another layer of evidence, at times preserving features that standard English accents, notably RP, have lost.

The sound of his language is also shaped by his grammar. His use of "thou" and his third-person "-th" vs "-s" verb endings always stand out to English speakers. Finally, though data-crunchers challenge his legendary status as king of all the words, we consider how innovative he was in the way he used words.

We end with a note on linguist David Crystal's Original Pronunciation ("OP") experiment at the reconstructed Globe Theatre, and some thoughts on what studying Shakespeare's sounds as a different pronunciation system says about him and about us.

~ Credits ~

Narration, art and animation by Josh from NativLang. Some of the music, too.

Sources for claims and for imgs, sfx, fonts and music:

[koontakentaylor]

I believe I was less confused not knowing what Shakespeare sounded like.

[hiphopdood]

Travel around the UK a bit and you’ll still hear some of these pronunciations in the regional accents.

[tidebleach]

Normal people: Mom I'm hungry!!

Shakespear: Let it be known to the birth giver that thy stomach consist of emptiness.

[ganmerlad]

There's another video where two men do pieces of Shakespeare in the original accent/pronunciation and show how it completely changes the rhyming and often makes for puns and double entendres you wouldn't hear at all with modern accents. For instance "from hour to hour we rot and rot" (from As You Like It) with the correct accent ALSO sounds like "from whore to whore we rut and rut" and both fit perfectly with the rest of the dialogue. Very clever.

Shakespeare obviously loved wordplay but you can't hear most of it now, *especially* not with the upper-class English accent that most people seem to think is the way Shakespeare should be done.

[ipetmycats]

Everyone's saying he sounds Irish, Jamaican, Welsh or even Dutch when we CLEARLY all know what he really is...
He's obviously a pirate.

[James-siet]

He sounds like he's a mix between a drunk Irish man and a drunk Scottish man

[itsmecp]

"thou hast" = you have
sounds like the German "Du hast" which means "you have". Mind-blowing.

[debrawhite]

My mother grew up in a holler in southeast Kentucky and she swears that her grandmother spoke partly Elizabethan English, so isolated in the mountains were they. She would say "dee" for "die", "yarb" for "herb", money was "puss" ("purse?"). She was mocked by certain family members, and it wasn't until my mother went away to college that she realized that her grandmother was still speaking the English she had heard her parents and grandparents speak. Our family came to America from England in the early 1600s.

[talknight]

Recipe for Modern English:

1) mix together Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, Old High German and Norman French.
2) pour into cultural soup mix
3) gradually add in a 2:1 mixture of Latin and Greek
4) allow to simmer for about half a millennium while occasionally stirring the vowels
5) spoon out the spelling but leave the pronunciation to simmer for a couple more centuries
6) serve with a dictionary...

:D

[ianrogerburton]

I always remember our English teacher back in the 70s saying that English has changed so much since the Baird´s time that most of his jokes, innuendos and hidden meanings are entirely lost on today´s audiences. In other words, while today´s audiences like to think they are being culturally with it as they quietly watch the masterpieces being acted out, Elizabethan audiences would have been either laughing their heads off or drowning in their tears.

[IronianKnight]

I didn't realize that studying shakespearian pronunciation would equip me to improvise in Pirate

[tinyalie]

I spek no frensch

Sounds like fuccin meme language


No step on snek

[brunodeprez]

In my home dialect (kind of Flemish) we still say 'eyren' (written as eieren) for eggs. I find that kind of cool

[natfoote]

Our Shakespeare class was fortunate in that our professor got his jollies by explaining every, single dirty joke in the plays.

[everynamewastakenomg]

We still pronounce “says” as “sez” in North West England

[brockfang]

I just found out that my joke pronunciation of reasons as raisins was never a joke. I don't know whether to feel vindicated or angry about being lied to

[neferpitou]

It's also important to remember that no one ever actually talked like the characters in Shakespeare: in rhyme and iambic pentameter.

[chubbieminami]

I went to the Shakespeare's theatre actors' reading (not acting) session of Shakespeare. They all read their part of Shakespeare with so much grace, but when they all started discussing what things meant, their understanding was similar level to mine. I thought they all understood very well because they read it so beautifully.

[michaelshaw]

Just in England, British English is very diverse. Americans always think of RP (how the Queen speaks) or London "chav" ("innit bruv?"). But there are dozens of accents. Some sound Scottish, some even sound similar to this Shakespearean.

[SuperBararo]

That old English is so Frisian, my goodness.