Old English Unstressed Vowels: Dialects and Diachrony

The primary aim of this thesis has been to investigate the development of unstressed vowels from early Old English and into the late Old English period, and to tie the observed changes to the later merger of unstressed vowels in English to schwa. Texts from the four principal dialect areas of Old English are examined and compared, drawing where possible on previous scholarship. Although it must be noted that the process of reduction in unstressed syllables is an inherited linguistic trait observable in cognate languages, two intralinguistic explanations for the phonological changes seen in Old English are offered in addition to a discussion on the effects of language contact. The thesis finds that unstressed vowels in some pretonic suffixes behave differently from vowels in grammatical endings, and that while front vowels underwent an earlier merger in the northern dialects, the back vowels appear to have merged earlier in the southern areas