Middle English phonology is necessarily somewhat speculative, since it is preserved only as a written language. Nevertheless, there is a very large text corpus of Middle English. The dialects of Middle English vary greatly over both time and place, and in contrast with Old English and Modern English, spelling was usually phonetic rather than conventional. Words were generally spelled according to how they sounded to the person writing a text, rather than according to a formalised system that might not accurately represent the way the writer's dialect was pronounced, as Modern English is today.
The Middle English speech of the city of London in the late 14th century (essentially, the speech of Geoffrey Chaucer) is used as the standard Middle English dialect in teaching and when specifying "the" grammar or phonology of Middle English. It is this form that is described below, unless otherwise indicated.
In the rest of the article, abbreviations are used as follows:
Sound inventory
The surface sounds of Chaucerian Middle English (whether allophones or phonemes) are shown in the tables below. Phonemes in bold were added across Middle English, phoneme in italics were removed during the same.
Consonants
1. The exact nature of Middle English r is unknown. This article uses indiscriminately.
Consonant allophones
The sounds marked in parentheses in the table above are allophones: is an allophone of occurring before and For example, ring ('ring') is ; did not occur alone in Middle English, unlike in Modern English. are allophones of in syllable-final position after front and back vowels, respectively. Based on evidence from Old English and Modern English, and apparently had velarised counterparts or allophones and . These occurred after back vowels or the consonant .