How to Talk Like Shakespeare

Accents in all languages have changed over the centuries. So what did English sound like in Shakespeare's day? Was it like the "Queen's English" and BBC accent of today? No, it wasn't, according to linguistics expert David Crystal:

[@RadioactivFly]

You can definitely tell from that how the modern American accent was formed. The British started colonizing America around Shakespeare's time.

[@pffilms2522]

@@robinhooduk8255 new york is more Italian. Boston is irish.

[@charlesxavier9485]

@@pffilms2522 southern US is more like the UK well more like southern England actually

[@pffilms2522]

@@charlesxavier9485 agreed.

[@valteraugusto6617]

Something similar occured in Brazil:the way we speak portuguese today is the same way the portuguese spoke portuguese in the 1500's.

[@SunofYork]

@@valteraugusto6617 That seems to be rule...that the colonies keep the original while the home land moves on.... eg Iceland has the old Norse .... These Americans say things like "should of went" (Should have gone), and I can't decide whether that is old English or just sloppy/uneducated speech

[@Drobium77]

In modern Warwickshire accent, there's still alot left. Trouble is that the accent and dialect is dead in the south of the county. So we still say 'watta' for water , 'uvver' for over, 'umm' for home, 'war' for were, 'sen' for self , 'guw' for go. I'd go and ask some local folk to read it in as thick an accent as they can put on, it might give a better clue.

[@MackNcD]

There’s a certain magic that seems to live in an accent itself, that tells you something of the magic in the lives of those whose utterances conveyed soul.

[@sharonsmith480]

this is a great help for all English teachers across the globe.

[@silver6380]

Sounds like Hagrid.

[@Sednas]

"You spelt the way you spoke" if only we did that today, would remove all confusion about pronunciation, ever.

[@philroberts7238]

No it wouldn't. Fifty different accents would mean fifty different spellings. I love the diversity in the way English is spoken across the world, but some standardisation is necessary for the written word to be understood by all of us. Imagine if all sounds we utter had to be transcribed into the International Phonetic Alphabet, for example - it would certainly be accurate, but it would also lead to a nightmare of miscommunication! (Spelling reform, btw, is something different, but that is another can of worms that would have to be opened with extreme caution.)

[@arunendumukherjee3480]

Incredible Professor

[@desmorgens3120]

I like this video. It tells us how to solve pronunciation problems in a genious and clever way by searching information from various written old texts from the same years as the pronunciation problems being solved.

[@SophiexStars]

Im watching this along time later for my english class, its pretty cool that you can learn old english, its like a whole new language for me

[@Apeing510]

This is an older form of English, but it isn't Old English. Old English is before 1100 AD, Shakespeare is Early Modern English.

[@greymatter7775]

3:10

[@monowavy]

splendid.

[@e.s.blofeld1775]

mmm salmon sword and fire.

[@guruuDev]

It sounds to me like what I've heard of regional dialects in England today.

[@willrichardson519]

It's rather like the rural, preindustrial southern and western English accent

[@MackNcD]

It sounds quite a bit older and more from the fairy tale world view era, but if you had to equate it to something, certainly. I’ve not heard every dialect from England, just the most famous.

[@gmelean]

I have noticed some similarities between Shakespeare's time English pronunciation (OP) and Spanish pronunciation. Examples: 1) The rolled r's. 2) The pronunciation of the word "war" as if it were pronounced by a Spanish speaker who doesn't know the current English pronunciation. 3) The pronunciation of words ending in -ion like "creation", "portion" or "section", similar to Spanish words "creación", "porción" and "sección".

[@wanda6483]

I would say english is more similar to german, as it's a Germanic language.

[@gmelean]

+Wanda Ricca. Sure. What I said is there were some similarities between English and Spanish that don't exist today, perhaps because of the influence of Latin in European languages at the time.

[@hOiKiPOiKiE]

+Wanda Ricca For me it's quite funny. See, my native language is flemish (older form of Dutch, still used in Belgium) and the way David Crystal pronounces the words is the same way I pronounced the words when I first came into contact with those words.

[@MultiSciGeek]

1) Yes they could have pronounced the Rs like that and it's quite likely if you compare some modern English accents. 2) His reconstructed pronunciation of 'wars' could easily be wrong, since he only gave one evidence for it and it works both way - he just picked one. 3) Don't forget that those words come from "French" and it was in some people's interests to try keep the original pronunciation. English is more of a Germanic language but it got a lot of influence from the Normans and French. French and Spanish both developed from the same language, and the further back you go the more similar they are... kind of.

[@TheMaru666]

MultiSciGeek He,s not saying that Spanish has any relation with English . One thing that makes English pronunciation hard for spanish speakers is that it doesn, t match the spelling , and the weird vocal sounds . That pronunciation matches better the spelling and is more logical in some words for spanish speakers because without any knowlidge about English phonetics, any spanish person will say tha a in war like the a in star, and in another audio about OP, they said sleep pronouncing the the ee like in pet but longer , exactly rhe same as a spanish person would pronounce two e, one next to other . I don, t know the reasons

[@darklen14]

Im high af

[@mshafer1021]

The residents of Tangier Island, Virginia sound like what Englishmen of the 1600's would have sounded like

[@leornendeealdenglisc]

Before shakespeare's time, r in England was always rolled.

[@theo.archive]

+Leornende Eald Englisc by rolled means trill, which is not so in most dialects of english even in Shakespeare time. R were all present but with numerous phonetic values most not trill.

[@soslothful]

Did you know "Hamlet" has been translated in to Klingon?

[@JudgeJulieLit]

May it never be translated, stickfigure dumbed down and numbed into Esperanto nor Orwellian Newspeak. So much of the glory of the dynamically evolving English of Chaucer's trecento and later Elizabethan writers was that they (Chaucer after ambassadorship to Italy; and Tudor writers as after study and translation of Augustan ancient Latin and later Italian Renaissance poets, orators and historians) creatively "Englysshed," macaronically adapted into and alongside native "plain English" many "aureate," gilt Latinisms. This inter alia amplified for English speakers and writers the palette of Germanic versus Latinate pronunciations and spellings.

[@thejoin4687]

@@JudgeJulieLit That's a no, then?

[@loach711]

Stars Wars

[@KevinDunning108]

Interesting lecture! Having studied both baroque singing as well as Indian dhrupad (both relative to Shakespeare, in time), your lessons on the carried "R" are of note to me; the pronunciation of War and Star both connote an understanding of 'Kharraj', or the meditations below the relevant tonic. ("Good Carriage" (Kharraj) being essential to righteous ascension in the long, arduous dhrupad alap. The chakras ("Stars" of the body in pranayam and sacred singing) being hopefully counterpoint to War, in display. As you also are indicating, the objective display of these words from the self displays the base self; of a clear light, or no. Shakespeare is gamut, waiting for us to saunter its garden paths. To study world classical art forms is to be able to approach the dance of Shakespeare's poetic timbre and cadence. I am recording the Shakespearean sonnets right now during the 2020 pandemic, in the light of my studies of sacred singing. Please do feel free to enjoy them, and find benefit in them.

[@receivedSE]

English is a by-product of Low German dialects. The Angles and the Saxons were the ancestors of the British people. The two German tribes lived in North Germany before "die Völkerwanderung", namely before the great migrations of the Germanic tribes crossing the Channel. The Angles and the Saxons spoke Low German, in which all r's have been pronounced with alveolar trill r. Initially, these two tribes started to move on foot and came across with the Frisians in Friesland, The Netherlands. The Frisians are a Germanic tribe, too. They have been pronouncing all r's with alveolar trill r. The Angles and the Saxons stayed in Friesland for about one hundred years, got married with Frisian women, and their children and grandchildren continued their plan to go to England, crossing the Channel. Later, the Jutes living in Denmark followed them to England directly by their own sea-vehicles. In England, these three Germanic tribes spoke Low German dialects, collectively called "Anglo-Saxon" or Old English. They must have pronounced all r's with alveolar trill r for several hundreds of years...perhaps until Middle English period (1066-1550 AD) before the postalveolar approximant r [ɹ] appeared in Modern English (1550-now). Thus, I would say that the historically original pronunciation of English r is an alveolar trill [r], with the alveolar tap [ɾ] as a common allophone. This happens to original pronunciation of Dutch and (High) German: alveolar trill. Some RP speakers in old films pronounced the alveolar trill r in medial position as "very" in "Thank you very much". Shakespeare must have done so when he was alive. This is what a man from Indonesia think about the way of Shakespeare spoke.

[@bedstuyrover]

When he speaks of elizabethan English i hear Ronnie Barker playing the country character in sketches from the Two Ronnies.

[@francisfigueroa7668]

David Crystal one of the special guests on the King Charles's proclamation yesterday.

[@joanthemad5894]

did they talk like that in the 18th century too?

[@pen64]

joan the mad Likely not. Do we speak Today as people did in the 19th Century? Spoken language evolves constantly.

[@alexismcloughlin5383]

It's got a Irish/ Piratey thing going on.

[@MrSchizoid405]

His pronunciation feels subdued to me.

[@skytra_flyer6046]

OP xD

[@MultiSciGeek]

Considering this sounds a lot like some Irish accent, could 'stars' have been pronounced to rhyme with our modern 'wars'?

[@anaussie213]

OHM-968692 so like the modern word “stores”. Unlikely seeing as the word store existed in the 13th century and star comes from the Middle English sterre (so when it was changed to star spelling actually somewhat matched pronunciation).

[@MackNcD]

@@anaussie213 it’s quite a puzzle. Imagine being able to go back to that time and hear it… speaking was so much more pertinent then, methinks. Not that it’s been rendered useless now, we just have more mediums and more entertainment ourselves. Back then a kind of… conversational make believe or creativity, was entertainment.

[@wezzuh2482]

It seems unlikely, since there are virtually no instances of rhymes in that dicretion. Shakespeare never rhymes war with more or with shore, but he does rhyme it with bar.

[@mcmimba1808]

how art thee, and also op mean not what thou says, it means overpowered

[@jamesestrella5911]

*sayest, *meaneth

[@louisvictor3473]

How art thou*

[@jakejive7760]

I'm American and can't see a relation between the two pronunciations. What am I missing lol?

[@nathanashmore2131]

Jake Jive You can see why British English and American English are now different. The reason we pronounce hard r’s is due to English having originally been rhotic, and this rhoticism was still very common during the colonial period. The British invented a new posh accent after the American Revolution when ties between the two nations was dissolved. We kept our rhoticism and they didn’t, particularly in the south of England. Of course, much of the pronunciation here in America doesn’t sound like it did since there’s been several hundred years for the language to evolve over such a huge area. But really, if you mix particularly hard American accents like in the South with a little bit of accents in Ireland, Scotland, and the West Country, you’ll get something similar to this accent.

[@anaussie213]

Nathan Ashmore actually if you look at regional English, Irish and Scottish accents you’ll get the closest. Some random American accents sound somewhat similar but still far more distant than actual, non RP influenced British accents. If a RP speaking Brit simply reads Shakespeare rhotically and pronounces er word endings with an Argh instead of an Ah sound he will sound far more “Shakespearean” than an American English version, as the naturally RP speaking crystals demonstrate. This is in part because the RP accent, despite its non rhotic shift, is a direct evolution of Shakespeare’s accent (south east London). Whereas America was settled by all and sundry in comparison, and it’s accent thusly influenced.

[@uiscepreston]

@@anaussie213 RP is not a more direct evolution of Shakespeare's accent. English in the British Isles underwent a couple of massive wholesale Vowel Shifts that the English carried to the New World did not. The oldest dialects of the New World are a far more accurate representation of what was spoken at the time of Shakespeare - which also happened to coincide with the British colonization of the North America.

[@Fashion_People360]

I think Irish and Scotish people kind of sound like this.

[@receivedSE]

SINGULAR nom. thou gen. thy, thine (before vowels) dat. thee acc. thee poss. pron. thine reflex./emph. thyself PLURAL nom. ye gen. your dat. you acc. you poss. pron. yours reflex./emph. yourselves SINGULAR nom. I gen. my, mine (before vowels) dat. me acc. me poss. pron. mine reflex./emph. myself Note. In Early Modern English, objective pronouns are used for reflexive use, e.g. Now I lay me down to sleep.

[@blackmanjohn9]

I will say Assonance and the Bath Trap split.. Shakespeare was not allowed assonance?? Or did he invent it?

[@Albukhshi]

He invented neither. Assonance is found in Old French poetry, for example. the Bath-Trap split is late 18th century.

[@faramund9865]

What modern day English tongue is closest to this?

[@glenwhiteheart458]

Surely Shakespeare spoke with a Stratford accent ?

[@willrichardson519]

Warwickshire...

[@philroberts7238]

@@willrichardson519 But he was an actor and he worked in London, then as now a melting pot of peoples and accents. Actors, then as now, can modify their speech as required. They were at least as aware as we are today of the class and regional differences of accent and frequently made great play of those differences. Professor Crystal's OP version of Shakespeare is in a sense the RP of the day, the standard accent from which other accents would have to a greater or lesser extent deviated, according to the character being portrayed.

[@willrichardson519]

@@philroberts7238 in the Victorian era, regional accents in Parliament were common and not an issue. Given tgat Warwick was a midkand town accent and modern English was a conscious fusion of the east midlands and London commercial accents, I don't think Will would've needed much of a code shift.

[@philroberts7238]

@@willrichardson519 No, probably not. But I bet he could turn his hand to a few outlandish accents if required. There is a huge difference in the expressive register of the various social classes in his plays and getting those nuances right would have been, if anything, even more important then than it is today. I'm sure that life at court, for example, would have created its own special speech environment - especially after a new king from Scotland arrived on the scene! As far as the 19th Century goes, I would guess that the "toffs" accent would have started to become an actual thing once the children of the aristocracy and the gentry started being shoved into boarding schools rather than being privately tutored at home. Dickens was particularly attuned to all the class differences of his day, of course, even though the cockney speech as he rendered it was obviously quite different from the London street speech of today - quite different even from the 20th Century film portrayals of cockney geezers.

[@quabledistocficklepo3597]

I want to hear someone beside the Crystals expound on this subject. They might be right, but I'd like to hear other opinions. Aren't there any? Where are they, then?

[@BaroqueKeyboardist]

Academic researchers aren't exactly known for reaching out to the community to share their findings with the public; what the Crystals are doing is quite rare. I haven't looked much into the matter myself, but it seems that this "original pronunciation" has been known for a very long time (after all, it's obvious that many rhymes in Shakespeare don't work in modern English) and that much research has already been done on it (but you'll have to look for it yourself). It's only because the Crystals have started to apply it in practice that people have begun to take a recent interest in it.

[@quabledistocficklepo3597]

Well, you never know until other experts in the field join in. I remember when that guy came out with the theory that dinosaurs were warm blooded. Now, I'm certainly no expert in that field, but it seems to me that he is still the only one saying that. The same, maybe, with the Crystals. I just want to hear what others say, simple as that. If they don't have wide support, I have to be skeptical.Incidentally, I'm also interested in Chaucer's pronunciation.

[@BaroqueKeyboardist]

Like I've said, it looks like a lot of research has already been done on this matter by other researchers for decades (for instance, look at Helge Kökeritz's "Shakespeare’s Pronunciation", published in 1953), but you'll have to look for it yourself. Much of it is published in scholarly journals, which are often hidden behind paywalls. If you have a subscription through your school, you may be able to access them. The only reason why it seems like the Crystals are the only ones promoting this pronunciation is because they are the most vocal about it.

[@quabledistocficklepo3597]

BaroqueKeyboardist, That makes sense; in fact, it's what I thought. I couldn't believe that the Crystals were the first to have an interest in the subject. I'm certainly no scholar, but I've always wondered. I guess it's time for a trip through Google.

[@BaroqueKeyboardist]

It seems that Helge Kökeritz also published a "Guide to Chaucer's Pronunciation", but the way, though I'm sure more recent scholarship has been done on the matter.

[@s.g.3042]

Sounds rather nordic / Sean Bean / Beatles / welsh / kerry county irish to me...

[@Michellefabness]

David Crystal is daddy

[@galrjkldd]

I have to say, that sounds like an Irish accent.

[@galrjkldd]

funny enough, that seems to be the opinion of southern mountain accents, that they were actually speaking with a british accent from long ago.

[@zenpiper]

Dowland is not pronounced DOWland, but DOEland.

[@majkus]

Well, 'down' in OP is much more like the Canadian sound heard in 'house', which could be heard as 'doe-land'. "Semper Dowland semper dolens" is close enough for the pun.

[@Lytton333]

Al speculation, I'm afraid..

[@JediDave44]

Lytton333 reconstruction, not speculation.

[@theo.archive]

+Lytton333 Well-founded one, which comes in term, fact so you called speculation

[@philroberts7238]

Speculation to some extent, perhaps, but linguistic researchers have been able to deduce a huge amount about the development of English through the ages. The same goes for all the other Germanic languages. And not just the Germanic ones, of course The whole idea of the Proto Indo-European family of languages is also perhaps, according to you, mere speculation. You'd be very wrong, I'm afraid....

[@khadaradam6601]

The best ones that can truly speak shakespear's accen are indians. Frankly speaking