RESOURCES

HISTORICAL EVENTS

The books and websites listed below are useful resources for finding out more about the social, political and cultural events that have impacted on the development of the English language (though since these are general history books and websites, none discuss these events in terms of their relevance to the English language – that’s your job!). Bear in mind that when writing academic essays it is best to stick to published sources such as books and journal articles, rather than relying on websites. The websites referred to in this section simply provide supplementary information to help shape your understanding. Use them to get a general idea of the topic and then follow up with more critical reading of academic sources.

BOOKS

Davies, N. (2000) The Isles: A History. Basingstoke: Papermac.
Jones, M. A. (1995) The Limits of Liberty: American History 1607-1992. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jackson, A. (2013) The British Empire: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

WEBSITES

History of Britain

History of England

History of Scotland

History of Wales

History of Ireland

History of the USA

ESSAY QUESTIONS

The questions below will help you to focus your understanding of particular aspects of the history of English.

1. Why do historians of English tend to divide the stages of the language's development into Old, Middle and Early Modern English? What distinguishes these different forms of the language from each other?
2. How did Old English differ from Modern English? Can you explain this with reference to both grammar and vocabulary?
3. What factors caused Old English to develop into Middle English and in what ways did the language change?
4. What effect has religion had on the development of English over time?
5. Choose ten place names local to where you come from and, using an etymological dictionary, find out what these names mean and how they have developed over time. What do the place names you have chosen tell you about the settlement of these areas over time?
6. How and why did a standard form of English develop? When did this occur and what changes did the language undergo during the process of standardisation?
7. What were the initial causes of the global spread of English and how did these affect the linguistic development of the language?
8. What were the major external causes of the development of American English?
9. In what ways did the English language develop during the twentieth century? Try to consider linguistic development at more than one linguistic level.
10. Based on what you know about the development of English from its earliest inception, can you speculate on how the English language might develop in the future? What kinds of changes might we expect to see and what factors affect the extent to which you can make such predictions?

FLASHCARDS

TEXTS AND IMAGES

Below are links to primary sources and images referred to in the book.

A1.1 The Isles before English
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

A1.3 The arrival of the Anglo-Saxons
Ecclesiastical History of the English People

A3.2 From Old English to Middle English
Domesday Book

A4.2 The translation of the Bible into English
Wycliffe’s Bible
Tyndale’s Bible
John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments
The Great Bible
King James Bible

A5.1 Dialects and emerging standards
The Canterbury Tales

A5.3 Dictionaries and grammars
A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue
A Table Alphabeticall
Johnson’s Dictionary

A7.2 The Oxford English Dictionary
Oxford English Dictionary

B: A developing language
The Ruthwell Cross
The Franks Casket

B2.2 Old English dialectal differences
Cædmon’s Hymn

B5 Writing in Early Modern English
Orlando Furioso

B5.1 Orthography in Early Modern English
The Paston Letters

C1.5 An Old English riddle
The Exeter Book

C3.2 The Canterbury Tales
The Canterbury Tales

C4.1 A Table Alphabeticall
A Table Alphabeticall

C6.2 The politics of spelling
Webster’s Dictionary

D1 Vocabulary and meaning in Old English
Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary

D2 Changes in grammatical gender
A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English

D3 Medieval multilingualism
The Paston Letters

D5 The development of a written standard
Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English
Piers Plowman
Confessio Amantis
The Canterbury Tales

D7 Studying recent change in English
Diachronic Corpus of Present‐Day Spoken English

SUPPLEMENTARY READINGS

Below is a list of the readings from Section D of the first edition of History of English: A Resource Book for Students (Routledge 2008). All are still relevant and make useful supplementary reading.

D1
Mitchell, B. (1995) An Invitation to Old English and Anglo-Saxon England. Oxford: Blackwell. (pp. 25-30).

D2
Crowley, J. P. (1986) ‘The study of Old English dialects’, English Studies 67: 97–104.

D3
Kibbee, D. (1991) For to Speke Frenche Trewely. The French Language in England, 1000-1600: Its Status, Description and Instruction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins (pp. 8-11, 186-8).

D4
Leith, D. (1983) A Social History of English. London: Routledge (pp. 145-9).
Aitchison, J. (2001) Language Change: Progress or Decay? 3rd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (pp. 183-93).

D5
Baugh, A. C. and Cable, T. (2002) A History of the English Language. 5th edition. London: Prentice Hall (pp. 280-7).

D6
Mencken, H. L. (1967) The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States. One volume abridged edition. New York: Alfred A. Knopf (pp. 136-42).

D7
Leech, G. and Smith, N. (2006) ‘Recent grammatical change in written English 1961-1992: some preliminary findings of a comparison of American with British English, in Renouf, A. and Kehoe, A. (eds) The Changing Face of Corpus Linguistics, pp. 185-204. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

D8
Graddol, D. (1997) The Future of English? London: British Council (pp. 60-1).