HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF ENGLISH DIALECTS
Abstract
A similar concern for durability and respectability underlay the new preoccupation with orthography. Early spelling reformers, especially printers, sought to replace the largely idiosyncratic practices that had sufficed in the preprinting era with a common system that seemed to them to be related to the sound system in a more consistent way. A complex process that led to an altered distribution of all the long vowels of English, known to philologists as the Great Vowel Shift, began in the latter part of the Middle English period. For instance, language is a social phenomenon that has been created and refined by the whole society, not by a particular group, in the course of the historical development of human society. At the same time, language is not the product of one period, of any socio-economic society, but the history of society as a whole.