Early Modern English

=== Rhoticity/rhotic vowels ===
The ''r'' sound (the phoneme {{IPAc-en|r}}) was probably always pronounced with following vowel sounds (more in the style of today's [[General American]], [[West Country Accent|West Country English]], [[Hiberno-English|Irish]] accents and Scottish accents, although in the case of the Scottish accent the R is rolled, and less like the pronunciation now usual in most of England.)

Furthermore, at the beginning of the Early Modern English period there were three non-open and non-[[schwa]] short vowels before {{IPA|/r/}} in the [[syllable coda]]: {{IPA|/e/}}, {{IPA|/i/}} and {{IPA|/u/}} (roughly equivalent to modern {{IPA|/ɛ/}}, {{IPA|/ɪ/}} and {{IPA|/ʊ/}}; {{IPA|/ʌ/}} had not yet developed). In London English they gradually merged into a phoneme that became modern {{IPAc-en|ɜr}}. By the time of Shakespeare, the spellings {{angbr|er}}, {{angbr|ear}} and perhaps {{angbr|or}} when they had a short vowel, as in ''clerk'', ''earth'', or ''divert'', had an ''a''-like quality, perhaps about {{IPA-all|ɐɹ|}} or {{IPA-all|äɹ|}}.<ref name="Sonnet"/> With the spelling {{angbr|or}}, the sound may have been backed, more toward {{IPA-all|ɒɹ|}} in words like ''worth'' and ''word''.<ref name="Sonnet"/>

In some pronunciations, words like ''fair'' and ''fear'', with the spellings {{angbr|air}} and {{angbr|ear}}, rhymed with each other, and words with the spelling {{angbr|are}}, such as ''prepare'' and ''compare'', were sometimes pronounced with a more open vowel sound, like the verbs ''are'' and ''scar''. See {{section link|Great Vowel Shift|Later mergers}} for more information.