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Welcome to the History of English Podcast, a podcast about the history of the English language.

This is Episode 159, Elizabethan Voices.

In this episode, we're going to turn our attention to the sound of Elizabethan English.

Beginning in the late 1560s, several scholars in England attempted to describe the way words were pronounced in English.

They even developed an early phonetic alphabet to represent the sounds of the language.

Those works allow modern linguists to trace the evolution of English pronunciation in the early modern period.

So this time, we'll explore what those sources tell us about the changing nature of the language in Elizabethan England.

But before we begin, let me remind you that the website for the podcast is historyofenglishpodcast.com.

And you can sign up to support the podcast and get bonus episodes at patreon.com slash historyofenglish.

One other quick note before we begin, this episode is about sounds and sound changes within English.

And we're going to be covering quite a bit of information.

If you find these types of discussions to be a little overwhelming, I just wanted to remind you that a transcript of the episode is available on the website under Episode 159.

So if you prefer, you can read along with the episode.

Or if you don't want to hear me talk, you can just read it at your own convenience.

But I just wanted to let you know that that option is available.

Now last time, we looked at how the English government embraced the plantation concept as a way to expand its presence in Ireland and as a way to secure a foothold in the New World.

And I noted that one of the early advocates of the plantation strategy was a spelling reformer named Sir Thomas Smith.

Smith thought that English spellings needed an overhaul because they didn't reflect the way words were actually pronounced.

Smith's spelling reforms were composed in Latin in 1568.

But in the following year, another English scholar named John Hart composed an extensive work on spelling reform in English.

His work was called an orthography.

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