This free and easy pronunciation and grammar which are characteristic of fashionable English down to the middle of the eighteenth century is partly due to the intimate relation that existed between the ruling classes who visited their estates in the country and came directly into contact with regional speech. "It is just this constant touch with country pursuits and rustic dialect which distinguished, and still distinguishes, the upper classes from the middle-class dwellers in the town."
We owe a good deal to a phonetician called Cooper, whose Grammatica Anglicana was published in 1685. From him we see that line and loin had the same pronunciation. Ant and aunt, Rome and room, Noah's and nose, Walter and water, doer and door, pulls and pulse, shire and shear—these show us at once how closely the real rustic of to-day gets to the fashionable speech of two hundred years ago. He then gives us pronunciations which he would have his readers avoid as barbarous: ommost for almost, wuts for oats, fut for foot; but it is pleasant to find that Mr Cooper is pleasantly free from that gross and besetting sin of the schoolmaster to describe an ideally "correct" English.
This omission of the "l" (in Walter) is extended by another "phonographer" in 1701 to St Albans, Talbot, falcon, almanac, almost, Falmouth, falter: apparently too, in his time, the au sound which most of us have kept in sausage and because extended then to auburn, auction, audience, august, aunt, austere, daunt, fault, fraud, jaundice, Paul and vault.
William Baker in 1724 gave us in his Rules for True Spelling and Writing English, an instructive list of what he called "words that are commonly pronounced very different from what they are written"! Stomick, spannel, Dannel, venison, medson are noteworthy.
From the middle of the eighteenth century there are signs of a reaction against a laxity in pronunciation, influenced perhaps by Lord Chesterfield and Doctor Johnson.
Johnson, we know, favoured the "regular and solemn" rather than the "cursory and colloquial."
It is to be noticed in passing that all the "reforms" in pronunciation and grammar which have passed into general currency in colloquial English during the last hundred and fifty years have come from below and not from above, in the first instance. This accounts for what some of us look on as the offensive vulgarity of the modern pronunciations of waistcoat, often, forehead, landscape, handkerchief, due to a wish to speak correctly. So our pronunciation of gold, servant, oblige, nature, London, Edward, etc., would in their turn have struck our grandfathers as offensive vulgarisms.
The later eighteenth century and the early nineteenth seem to have favoured a very serious turn of mind. It is really extraordinary to think of the hold which Jane Austen exerts over us when we come to analyse the total absence of brilliance, humour, pointedness or charm of any kind that marks the conversation of her characters. The charm and the genius lie in the author's handling of these second-rate people, but she represents them as they actually were. These are actually the conversations of living people. All the little pomposities and reticences, the polite formulas, the unconscious vulgarisms, the well-bred insincerities of the age are here perfectly displayed. The Bennets, D'Arcy's, Wodehouses, etc., pronounced their words kyard, gyearl, ojus, Injun, comin', goin', and so on. Lady Catherine de Burgh probably said Eddard, tay, chaney, ooman, neigb'rood, lanskip, Lunnon, cheer (chair) and perhaps goold, obleege and sarvant.
Professor Wyld quite rightly waxes indignant over the rise of bogus pronunciations, based purely on the spelling, among persons who were ignorant of the best traditional usage until they obtained currency among the better classes. "It would be desirable," he says, "to run these monstrosities to earth, when it would probably appear that many had their origin among ignorant teachers of pronunciation." "It would be an interesting inquiry," he says in another place, "how far the falling off in the quality of prose style among the generality of writers after the third quarter of the eighteenth century is related to social developments. An East Indian director is said to have told Charles Lamb (of all men!) that the style the Company most appreciated was the humdrum, thus doubtlessly voicing the literary ideals of the rising class of bankers, brokers, and nabobs whose point of view was largely to dominate English taste for several generations."
It is worth remembering that the change in pronunciation of a host of words like heat, meat, eat, ease, sea, speak, cheat, dream, deceit from hate, mate, ate, ase, say and so on is not in the nature of a sound change, but is merely the abandonment of one type of pronunciation, and the adoption of another, a very common phenomenon.