thee and thou

[mydogsandme]

Forgive my ignorance but in what period did people stop speaking in Shakepearean English i.e thee, thou,whenst and so on and speak more like we do today? Was it a gradual thing?

[Bravo Girl]

It happened gradually and was different even before Shakespeare's time (what we now call Middle English), not only with pronunciation but also new words coming into the language (from celt to anglo-saxon, jutes, vikings, norman invasion etc).
In some countries (eg France) there are strict rules on what new words can be introduced !
See Melvyn Brags's The Adventure of English.

[dotjhawkes]

Apparently the royalty didn't have posh accents like what they do now, they all talked either scottish, french, german or cockney.

[Narolines]

Whenst???

[Narolines]

I think tha'll find they stll talk to thee a bit like that if tha finds thysen i' Yorkshire.......Sam, pick up thy musket....

[Peter Pedant]

thee and thou dropped out pretty quickly 1680-1700

there is no diary entry in the newspapers:

april 1683 - I see thee and thou look pretty dead luv,

so any dating has to be indirect.

In one of the comedies, around 1680

one of the characters says - 'she says thee and thou so must be up from the country'

Thee persists in religious tracts and almost certainly drops out later in America

[jno]

do Quakers still use thee and thou? They used to but it's a long time since I met one.

[Peter Pedant]

Do you know the play jno - there are references to Quakers and thee and thou in there as well,

- the girl is an heiress and is subject to fortune hunters but in the end it turns out that she has put her fortune in trust,

I think it is also where the young fella has sold everything except a pic of his benefactor (played by Arthur Lowe) and there is a scene where A Lowe in disguise tried to part the fella from his picture with offers of money....

[Narolines]

Maybe the educated classes had stopped using the 2nd person singular or familiar form (thee, thou & thy/thine) by the early 16th century, but it was still very common among the lower orders well into the 19th century, still fairly widespread once you were about 50 miles or more from a major city up to, say, the 1920s, and still persists today in certain areas - as I've suggested, certainly in parts of Yorkshire, where my family comes from, and probably in other areas too.

[mydogsandme]

thanks for all the answers everyone

[Octavius]

Thou had almost gone out of usage entirely in most English dialects by the year 1650. Its use in the Bible and in classical literature like Shakespeare gave thou an air of formality and solemnity. Except where it still survives in some regions of England, this usage has entirely dispelled any air of informal familiarity that might have hung around thou; it is used in solemn ritual occasions, in readings from the King James Bible, in Shakespeare, and in formal literary compositions that seek to evoke the solemn emotions called forth by these antecedents. Since becoming obsolete in most dialects of spoken English, it has nevertheless been used by more recent writers to address exalted beings such as God, a skylark, Achilles, and even The Mighty Thor. In Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Darth Vader, speaking to the Emperor, says, "What is thy bidding, master?" These recent uses of the pronoun suggest something far removed from intimate familiarity or condescension. The Revised Standard Version of the Bible, which first appeared in 1946, retained the pronoun thou exclusively to address God, using you in other places; the New Revised Standard Version (1989) omits thou entirely.
I thou thee, thou traitor!
More here: Thou

[rotey]

Im not sure about any of the dates given - but my grandparents both used thee, thou, thy, thine as late as the 1960s - a habit I picked up and still use.