Old English Pages - Barrett Translations

Purpose This page is intended as a short and easy guide for people interested in the pronunciation of Old English (OE), or Anglo-Saxon, as it is also known. Because Old English is a dead language and tape recorders were not available, the actual pronunciation used is unknown. I wrote this page out of frustration with a side-by-side OE/Modern English text of Beowulf that I bought specifically because it had a pronunciation guide. After buying the book, I noticed that the examples in the guide were written for people with a different dialect from mine. For me, four of the pronunciations indicated were identical, making the guide practically useless. This page is intended as a general guide so that people interested in reading Old English can learn to approximate what OE might have sounded like, while trying to keep things as simple as possible. Thus, this is intended merely as a general-purpose guide, not a definitive or theoretical work.

History About 1500 years ago, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes invaded what we now know as England. They came from Northern Europe. The language that developed there is named for the Angles, English.

English from its formation in the fifth century until the great influx of French due to the successful Norman Invasion in the eleventh century is known as Old English or Anglo-Saxon.

Guessing Pronunciation Although nobody actually knows how Old English was pronounced, good guesses can be made to a degree. For one thing, unlike the spelling in Modern English (approximately Shakespeare forward), the writers of Old English had no established spelling to worry about, so they wrote words how they were pronounced. Pronunciation can also be guessed at by studying regular changes in spelling and pronunciation over the centuries, and patterns by which words were borrowed from other languages.

Representing Pronunciation In order to talk about how Old English was pronounced, a set of symbols are needed to accurately describe the pronunciations. English speakers pronounce words differently according to where they are from, so writing that something is pronounced like "a" as in "Mary" is useless (unless you speak the same dialect as the author). What is needed is a set of symbols that can be used to demonstrate how Old English spelling was pronounced.

The IPA

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a good tool for writing about pronunciation. Each IPA symbol has a set pronunciation. More convenient than the IPA is The sounds of English and the International Phonetic Alphabet and A Sound Reference to the IPA, which offer clickable charts with sounds.

Note on Short and Long Vowels Native speakers of English often study short and long vowels when learning to read. Schoolchildren might learn, for example, that "a" as in "ape" is long and "a" as in "apple" is short. Although useful for learning English, this usage of short and long is different from what is meant by long and short in Old English. In Old English, a short vowel is simply one that has a short duration, and similarly, a long vowel is one that has a longer duration. In Old English, long vowels have a straight line (a macron) over them; in IPA, a colon is used after the vowel. An example of a long vowel in Modern English is the "a" in "farmer" as when pronounced by someone who does not use an "r" sound. The vowel "a" is lengthened (something like "faamuh", perhaps), similar to what a long vowel might have been like in OE.

Example of a long "a" in OE: ā
Example of a long "a" in IPA: a:

You should see the letter "a" with a line over it for the OE symbol. If not, your browser might not support Unicode, a method for displaying special characters. It might be useful to update your browser or refer to your browser's help to obtain extended Unicode characters. In any case, a graphic is provided on the pronunciation page for browsers who cannot displays such symbols.

Pronunciation Pages

Simple vowel page – for those just interested in a quick guide to get by
Detailed vowel page – for those wanting a more complete survey of the vowel sounds
Consonants – several changes have occurred since OE that make consonants critical as well

Links As a portal to other sites plus lots of useful information on OE, please see Syd Allen -- Beowulf and Old English / Anglo Saxon.