THE GREAT VOWEL SHIFT IN THE NORTH OF ENGLAND, AND SOME FORMS IN CHAUCER'S "REEVE'S TALE"
The Northernisms in the speech of certain characters in Chaucer's Reeve's Tale have been frequently commented on by scholars. However, some forms found only in the speeches of these characters in certain early manuscripts of the Tale have been dismissed hitherto as either "quasi-Northern" or as "ghost-forms", the result of scribal or editorial misreading. Recent work on dialectal divergence in the operation of the Great Vowel Shift may be taken to show that these forms are genuine attempts by pre-Shift Southern scribes to reflect a post-Shift Northern pronunciation
Article, 1994