Dipthongs are blended vowels, strange sounds in which one vowel slides smoothly into another one. In some dialects (like Cockneye dialects in England, or some southern dialects in the United States), words that use a single vowel in other dialects mutate into dipthongs. The Great Vowel Shift also includes Middle English dipthongs. To reconstruct how they sounded, use the following chart. (If you can't make out the lettering on the chart on your computer screen, you can click here for a more legible PDF file that you can print out.) When you are done, click here to move on.

You can review this material in the form of downloadable PDF file. This file contains of all the material we've covered.

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This webpage is adapted from materials Professor James Boren designed for his Chaucer students at the University of Oregon. Any errors in this webpage are the result of my own scribal corruptions rather than a product of the original work. --Kip Wheeler