How to pronounce Middle English
A complete guide + audio
I first met Geoffrey Chaucer in my middle school English class. Perhaps it’s to be expected of friendships between 13-year-olds and 656-year-olds, but I felt a certain generation gap between us.
The way he wrote was strange. It was poetry, supposedly, but when I tried to read it out loud, it limped and dragged. He was clearly trying to rhyme, but the rhymes didn’t work. And, frankly, it looked like he could have used a spell checker.
My teacher — yes, Mrs. L — did her best to help me understand my new acquaintance. She told me about the differences in pronunciation between Chaucer’s day and our own, that what looked like mistakes in rhyme were actually just the result of language change. She assured us that, once you got to know him, Chaucer was actually great fun.
But, for me, Chaucer’s language was too much in the uncanny valley: too easy to understand to feel like a foreign language you need to master, too hard to understand to read without training. Old English, which we studied after Chaucer, was so much weirder looking, so utterly incomprehensible, that it was clearly a different language. So Chaucer was soon forgotten in favour of Beowulf.
Most people encounter Chaucer as the representative Middle English author, the way Beowulf represents Old English and Shakespeare Early Modern.
It’s ironic, because Chaucer is most interesting precisely because he’s atypical of the literature of his period. If you read him — when you read him — you’ll realize just how surprisingly modern he feels.
The problem is that there are two ways to read Chaucer, and they produce different experiences. The first is the way I read him in Mrs. L’s class, the way most people first encounter him: modern mouths applied to a 14th-century page.
Read him like that, and you’ll find no rhythm to pin down, no voice worth listening for. That’s the Chaucer who seems a dead curiosity. No wonder most people don’t make it past the first 18 lines of the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales.
But there’s another way, which produces another Chaucer: that’s to read him out loud, in something approximating the sounds Chaucer himself would have made. This is how you bring Chaucer back to life, and he’s a lot more fun living than dead.
This kind of literary necromancy is also less work than you’d expect.
Middle English isn’t truly a foreign language — not entirely. It’s English, of a sort at least, with most of the same spelling conventions. In fact, the English spelling system makes a lot more sense for Middle English than it does for Modern English!
Learning to pronounce Middle English is mostly a matter of figuring out where English has changed since the 14th century, and running those changes in reverse.
Here’s the beginning of Chaucer’s General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, as edited in the Riverside Chaucer, probably the most famous 18 lines of Middle English poetry:
Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages),
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.1
We’ll return to this passage at the end of the article, and your second reading should be close enough to Chaucer’s own that he might recognize it. I’ve recorded audio throughout, so you can listen and repeat as we go.
By the way, what works for Chaucer will work — with a few adjustments here and there — for other Middle English authors. We start with Chaucer because he’s the most famous and the best understood of the Middle English authors. Learn Chaucer’s 14th century London pronunciation first, and you can branch out to other dialects and centuries from there.
Middle English literature in general is criminally underrated, and most people have no idea what they’re missing out on. Once you’ve read some Chaucer, and accustomed yourself to the big differences between Middle and Modern English, it’s surprisingly easy to move on to other authors.
There’s lots of wild and weird stuff to read: an insult contest between birds, a speaking corpse discovered during a construction project, and a Celtic remix of Orpheus’ journey to the underworld all await you once you’ve got comfortable with Chaucer.
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The good news
The good news is that most Middle English pronunciation can be worked out by taking the Modern English form and reversing a few changes.
The conventions of Modern English spelling largely crystallized in the 15th century, around the end of the Middle English period, so Modern English is a reasonable starting point.
For words that didn’t survive, Middle English spelling has its own logic: spelling varied widely, but each spelling usually points to just one or two pronunciations. It’s not nearly as hard as it could be.
Most of the changes between Middle English and Modern English have taken place in the vowels. The consonants, by contrast, have remained largely the same. This means that you can — with some few exceptions — concentrate your attention on the vowels.
There are, however, a few principles to be aware of when pronouncing Middle English that will go a long way towards making your consonants fully Chaucer-approved.
First, there are (nearly) no silent letters. If you see it, say it. The k in knight and the w in write are both fully present in Middle English. There are some exceptions to this rule, but almost everything an author writes is there because it reflected how they pronounced the word. The discrepancy between sound and spelling arises because pronunciation changed after the spelling became fixed.
Say these not-so-silent letters in Middle English along with me: knight, writen ‘to write.’
The no-silent-letters principle also extends to words with ng at the end, such as sing. In most dialects of Modern English, there’s no actual g-sound in sing. The ng sequence writes instead a velar nasal (IPA [ŋ]), that is, a nasal sound made with the tongue touching the soft palate (or velum, hence the name).
Not so in Middle English, when there was a distinct g sound at the end of all these -ng words. Say them along with me:
The second principle is a subset of the first. It concerns a single letter and will only apply to a subset of English speakers, because a large percentage of English speakers already pronounce this letter in a Middle English-compatible way.
The letter is r, and the r-dropping, or non-rhotic, dialects of English (most famously, many dialects spoken in England) are all innovative. Middle English was rhotic. So if you see an r, pronounce it as a consonant r.
As for how exactly it was pronounced in the 14th century, that’s a more difficult question to answer. There is a wide variety of pronunciations of consonantal r in Modern English, but the most common is probably the approximant r — the “typical English r sound” found in most dialects.
Here’s how my rhotic (Canadian) dialect of English pronounces root, pierced, martyr, and flower:
What’s unclear is just when this approximant r developed. It’s not entirely a settled question, but the evidence suggests that English r was a tap or trill until the early modern period, around two centuries after Chaucer’s time. This tap/trill pronunciation still lives on in some English dialects, not to mention in English’s closest cousin, Scots.
Here are the ancestors of those same r-words with the Middle English pronunciation. Say them along with me: roote, perced, martir, flour ‘flower.’
I know many people have trouble making taps and trills, so don’t worry if you can’t do it (yet). As long as you’re pronouncing r as a consonant wherever it occurs, you’ll be capturing the most important difference between Middle and Modern English r.
So much for the easy part. What lies ahead is more interesting territory: the handful of consonants that really are different from their modern descendants, a couple of letters you may not have met before, the complete reorganization of the English vowel system, and, most important of all, the pronunciation rule that makes Chaucer’s poetry click into place.
