Research trends
Early scholarship on the history of English
Early stages of English
New overviews of the history of English
Sociolinguistics and language change
Social networks and language change
New sources for the history of English
Domain-specific forms of English
Historical syntax
Grammaticalisation and lexicalisation
Vocabulary
Historical pragmatics
Development of the standard
Late modern English period
Transportation of English overseas
Language contact
References
Although this website is primarily intended as an introduction to the history of English for students, it is nonetheless useful to give some indication of what the current research trends in this field are like. Some students may be interested in looking more closely at a particular aspect of the history of English and so tips about who is who in certain sub-areas could be useful. The information below is intended as a guide and not an exhaustive description of present-day research. Still, the outline of key areas should convey some idea of what is of interest to scholars in the field today.
In recent years there has been an expansion in the data base for historical analyses of English, above all due to the increasing availability of comprehensive corpora of primary data. In addition, there has been a questioning of assumptions and standard wisdoms in the field which has led to new avenues of research opening up. Two works which offer much useful information in this respect are (i) Nevalainen and Traugott (eds, 2012) and (ii) Brinton and Bergs (eds, 2012).
The first decade of the 2000s has also seen many overviews of the history of English, in handbook form, i.e. as collections of dedicated chapters in edited volumes, see Hogg and Denison (eds, 2006), van Kemenade and Los (eds, 2006), Momma and Matto (eds, 2007), Mugglestone (ed., 2006). There have also been monograph treatments of the subject, often geared towards a largely student audience, e.g. Barber, Beal and Shaw (2009), Brinton and Arnovick (2005), Culpeper (2005) and van Gelderen (2006). Collections with contributions on various aspects of language change, usually with English data, have appeared with a certain regularity, see Hickey (ed) (2002, 2003). Jones and Singh (2005) is a monograph on the subject. The Germanic and/or Indo-European background to English is treated in Clackson (2007), Fortson (2004), Harbert (2006) and Ringe (2006).
The foundation for research into the history of English was laid by scholars in the early 19th century who were concerned with reconstructing the proto-language for the Indo-European language family. The techniques they developed came to be applied to individual languages in this group and by the latter half of the 19th century researchers had begun to systematically describe the development of English from its beginnings after the arrival of the first Germanic settlers in England in the mid 5th century. The best known author working on the history of English in England at this time was Henry Sweet (1845-1912) who in 1874 published a History of English sounds and later a grammar and text selection for Old English (then termed Anglo-Saxon).
By far the most productive scholars were those on the continent. The Austrian Karl Luick, who worked in Vienna in the late 19th and early 20th century, produced a monumental Historische Grammatik der englischen Sprache [Historical grammar of the English language] (1914-1940) which has remained a classic in its genre as has A modern English grammar on historical principles (7 vols., 1909-49) by the great Danish scholar Otto Jespersen (1860-1943).
The larger the body of scholarly work became the greater the specialisation which became apparent. Studies of historical English which appeared in the early to mid 20th century were often restricted to a period, e.g. Alisdair Campbell Old English Grammar (1959), Ferdinand Mossé A handbook of Middle English (translated from the French original Manuel du moyen anglais, 1953) or Eric J. Dobson’s English pronunciation 1500-1700 (1968). Nonetheless, many overviews of the language continued to appear and some of these have been repeatedly revised and reprinted, testifying to their continuing popularity, e.g. Albert C. Baugh, and Thomas Cable A history of the English language. 5th edition, 2002, Thomas Pyles and John Algeo The origins and development of the English language. 4th edition, 1993 or Barbara Strang A history of English, 1970 (original edition). In this context one should mention the monumental overview of historical syntax offered in Visser (1963-73).
The history of English is normally divided into three or four broad periods: (i) Old English, (ii) Middle English, (iii) Early Modern English and (iv) Late Modern English which is now recognised as a separate period as well. There are books which are dedicated to one of these periods, see Hogg (2002), Baker (2003), Hough and Corbett (2006), Marsden (ed., 2004), McCully and Hilles (2005), Mitchell and Robinson (2006) and Smith (2009) for Old English. Consult Taavitsainen, Nevalainen, Pahta and Rissanen (eds, 2000), Smith and Horobin (2002), Ritt and Schendl (eds, 2005) for Middle English and Treharne (2003) for both Old and Middle English.
The term ‘Middle Ages’ occurs in some titles and can normally be taken to refer to the Middle English period (1100-1500), cf. Machan (2003) as an example, though this period of European history is taken to have begun before the 12th century.
Other publications refer to ‘early English’ which is usually a portmanteau for several periods, see Fischer, van Kemenade, Koopman and van der Wurff (2001), Smith (2005), Allen (2008), Denison, Bermúdez-Otero, McCully and Moore (eds, 2011).
Nevalainen (2006) is an introduction to Early Modern English while Tieken-Boon van Ostade (2009) is one for Late Modern English as is Beal (2004), although for the latter the name of this period does not occur in the title.
There are also thematic volumes for the history of English, e.g. Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Tottie and van der Wurff (eds, 1999) on negation in the history of English or Denison (1993) which deals explicitly with syntactic developments. Claridge (2004) is a similarly thematic volume which deals with developments in the early modern period.
In the 1980s and 1990s a number of studies of the history of English appeared which strove to apply the insights of modern linguistics to this subject. The main work here is the many-volume Cambridge History of the English Language (general editor Richard Hogg). Single volume studies often with innovative approaches are Richard Bailey (1991), Norman Blake (1996), Barbara Fennell (1998), Roger Lass (1987, 1994), Jeremy Smith (1996). More compact textbooks have also appeared, e.g. Culpeper (2005). For overviews of individual periods, consult the previous section.
The turn of the millennium has seen several new studies of which one could mention the single-volume treatments of the history of English by Laurel Brinton and Leslie Arnovick (2005), Elly van Gelderen (2006), and the edited volumes by Lynda Mugglestone (ed., 2006) as well as Richard Hogg and David Denison (eds, 2006). Further, single-volume paperback overviews have also appeared, see Barber, Beal and Shaw (2009) and Crystal (2004). In a more popular vein one has surveys like Bragg (2003) and McCrum et al. (2002).
Collections of articles giving overviews of aspects of English and its history have also appeared or will do so shortly, see Aarts and McMahon (eds, 2006), van Kemenade and Los (eds, 2006), Momma and Matto (2007) as well as Nevalainen and Traugott (eds, 2012) and Brinton and Bergs (eds, 2012).
Many studies on late modern English appeared in the 1990s reflecting a concern with the centuries immediately preceding modern English. Of these studies one could mention the new edition of Charles Barber (1976) in 1997 and the more recent Richard Bailey (1996) as well as Manfred Görlach (1991, 1999, 2001), Terttu Nevalainen (2004) and Joan Beal (2004). Norman Blake (2002) and Jonathan Hope (2003) are specific studies of Shakespeare’s grammar; Crystal (2005) and Folkerth (2002) deal with the pronunciation of Shakespeare’s plays.
The 1990s also saw two large one volume guides to the English language with McArthur (1992) and Crystal (1995), the former with a broad brief and the latter with a specific emphasis on the history of the language. It also saw the introduction of a journal specifically dealing with the analysis of the English language, often from a diachronic perspective: English Language and Linguistics, 1997- (Cambridge University Press).
The development of sociolinguistics in the 20th century is due primarily to the pioneering work of William Labov who in the 1960s carried out seminal studies (above all, that published as Labov 1966) which provided a methodological framework for sociolinguistic investigations since. Labov has increasingly been concerned with the application of insights from sociolinguistics to the history of English (see Labov 1981) and many linguists have followed this same path, much to the benefit of scholarship in the field.
The insights from sociolinguistics have been applied to the history of English, in an early study by Suzanne Romaine (1982) and later in such works as Terttu Nevalainen and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg (2003). The latter study uses a corpus of historical personal correspondence as its basis. This data type has been increasingly the subject of investigations, see the full-length study in Susan Fitzmaurice (2002) and the volume edited by Terttu Nevalainen and Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen (2004). See also the contributions in J. K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill and Natalie Schilling-Estes (eds, 2002).
An important extension of sociolinguistic principles took place in the work of James and Lesley Milroy who applied the notion of network (from sociology) to linguistics, first in synchronic investigations, later in diachronic (historical) ones. Networks are the connections which individuals have with others in their social surroundings. These connections are maintained, usually in low-income communities by the use of vernacular linguistic norms, generally in sharp contrast to the standard of the language in question, a form which is found supraregionally and used by speakers who do not share a mutual social network to anything like the same extent.
There has been a general switchover for the data on which historical investigations are based from printed records to digitally prepared data (often with such printed records as their source). The advantage of using electronic data is that much larger amounts of material can be scanned for particular features and so, in principle, offer a sounder basis on which to make statements about change in the history of the language. Such sets of data are known as corpora (plural of corpus, ‘body of data’). Many have been compiled since the early 1990s and their number is increasing every year. Originally associated with certain universities, such as that in Helsinki for the history of English, corpora are now produced throughout the world. These corpora often contain data hitherto unavailable to the academic public, e.g. the records of the court at the Old Bailey which have been compiled into a corpus at the University of Sheffield.
See the dedicated module Sources for the history of English for more details and for a list of many presently available corpora. See also the large-scale publication Karen P. Corrigan, Hermann Moisl and Joan Beal (eds, 2007).
Many scholarly publications on aspects of the history of English in recent years deal with specific topics, i.e. they draw their data from particular domains. The insights to be gained from domain-specific investigations are important for the language as a whole, see Dossena and Taavitsainen (eds, 2006), as they often throw light on developmental issues which are only partly visible, if at all, in other data, e.g. in fictional literature. A well-documented domain of writing is that of personal letters. These are frequently those of a specific family whose members corresponded amongst themselves over several years, if not generations. Bergs (2005) is a representative publication in this respect while Fitzmaurice (2002) is a good introduction to this domain.
Other domains are that of science and medicine, see Taavitsainen and Pahta (eds, 2004), or business and official correspondence, see Dossena and Fitzmaurice (eds, 2006) or that of print media, generally newspapers, see Brownlees (ed., 2006).
Another sphere of interest here is that of spoken language represented in textual records, see the detailed study by Culpeper and Kytö (2010).
The study of syntax has occupied a central position in linguistics since the mid 20th century, not least because of the great strides made in linguistic theory since the introduction of generative grammar in the late 1950s by Noam Chomsky. Many linguists have applied the insights of syntactic theory to the study of the history of English, not necessarily by strictly applying a current model of generative grammar but by working within a theoretically-aware framework in which they have sought to reach linguistically significant generalisations about language change in English.
This field has been served well by general surveys such as those by David Denison (1993), Olga Fischer et al. (2001) and Susan Pintzuk, George Tsoulas and Anthony Warner (eds, 2001). Studies of particular sections of English syntax can be found in Cynthia Allen (1999, 2008) and Anthony Warner (1993). A handbook with articles covering most aspects of the historical grammar of English is available as Ans van Kemenade and Bettylou Los (eds) 2006.
A particular type of language change is grammaticalisation where lexical elements lose their concrete meanings and more and more adopt a grammatical function in a language. Lexicalisation is the mirror image of this, i.e. it deals with the shift from grammatical to lexical status for certain words which accrue specific, independent meanings.
Grammaticalisation has been studied with reference to a wide variety of languages, e.g. many African languages. The history of English has been examined from this perspective above all by Elizabeth Traugott, initially in such studies as Traugott (1989), later in book-length treatments such as Paul Hopper and Elizabeth Closs Traugott (2003, 2nd edition), Elizabeth Closs Traugott and Richard B. Dasher (2002), Laurel Brinton and Elizabeth Closs Traugott (2005). Other treatments in a similar vein are available, e.g. Olga Fischer, Anette Rosenbach and Dieter Stein (2000).
The interface between vocabulary and grammar has been dealt with in the previous section. Other publications of recent date deal with the interaction of vocabulary with phonology, e.g. Robert Stockwell and Donka Minkova (2001), or that of vocabulary and lexicography, e.g. Hüllen (1999). In addition, a number of publications have looked at the structure of English vocabulary, frequently with a consideration of the historical background, e.g. Geoffrey Hughes (2000), Heidi Harley (2003). The two books by Kate Burridge (2004, 2005) are concerned with disputes surrounding the lexicon, especially vernacular vocabulary. The store of words found in varieties throughout the anglophone world is the topic of Stephen Gramley (2001) and is also dealt with in Tom McArthur (2002).
A full third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary – the single most reliable source of diachronic information on English vocabulary – is being prepared by Oxford University Press. There is a dedicated website which includes updates on words which have already been processed in advance of the publication of the third edition: www.oed.com
A recent overview of etymology is available in Durkin (2009).
Among the new orientations in historical linguistics of the past two decades is that of historical pragmatics to which a journal is now dedicated: Historical Pragmatics, 2000- (Amsterdam: John Benjamins). Through the publication of this journal the linguists Andreas Jucker and Irma Taatvisainen have been especially instrumental in disseminating insights from this field.
Overview articles can be found in Traugott (2000) and Traugott (2004). Among the books dealing with this topic are Brinton (1996), Jucker (ed., 1995), Jucker and Taavitsainen (eds, 2008) and Fitzmaurice and Taavitsainen (eds, 2007); see also Taavitsainen and Jucker (eds, 2003) and McEnery (2005) for studies of specific subjects in this field.
The data for nearly all the investigations listed above derive in the main from the English language as attested in England. There has been criticism of this fact by several linguists who see in the concentration on England, a covert prescriptivism as if the history of English was the domain of English English. Discussion of such attitudes are to be found in James and Lesley Milroy (1991) and, by the provision of contrasting scenarios, in Richard Watts and Peter Trudgill (eds) (2001). The issue of standards – deliberately set in the plural – is a central theme in Tony Bex and Richard J. Watts (eds) (1999) and in Linn and McLelland (eds, 2002). The historical background to the rise of standard English in England and the attendant increase in prescriptivism is treated in such books as Cheshire and Stein (eds, 1997), Tony Crowley (1989, 1991) and Mugglestone (2003, 2nd edition), Wright (ed., 2000), see also Hickey (ed., 2010). Rosina Lippi-Green (1997) looks at similar subject matter within the American context.
In the past ten years of so, increasing attention has been paid to the late modern English period (1700 to 1900). Although the linguistic changes in this period may seem slight compared to the Old and Middle English periods, there were nonetheless significant changes which led to a clearer profile emerging for standards forms of southern British English. Full-length studies of the period can be found in Beal (2004) and in Jones (2002, 2005) (the latter for pronunciation). Sociolinguistic issues of the 18th century are dealt with in many books, e.g. Mugglestone (2003, 2nd edition) and Görlach (2001). Here it is the development of a British standard of English and reactions to this which form the focus. Grammar-writing has been receiving special attention in this context, see the contributions in Tieken-Boon van Ostade (ed.) 2008. Other volumes which deal with key issues of the late modern period are Dossena and Jones (eds, 2003), Perez-Guerra et al (eds, 2007) as well as Tieken-Boon van Ostade and van der Wurff (eds, 2009). These are volumes of proceedings from the Late Modern English conference series. See also the volumes by Fitzmaurice (ed., 2000) and Hickey (ed., 2010), both on eighteenth-century English. English in the nineteenth-century is the topic of Bailey (1996), Görlach (1999) as well as Kytö, Rydén and Smitterberg (eds, 2006) and Smitterberg (2005). Developments in the twentieth century are the topic of Mair (2006).
The development of overseas varieties of English and their relationship to regional dialects of British, Irish and Scottish English is a further branch of the history of the English language which has been examined in depth recently, see the volumes on English overseas (Burchfield, ed. 1994) and on English in North America (Algeo, ed., 2001) in the Cambridge History of the English Language. See also the contributions in Hickey (ed., 2004) and the views put forward in Trudgill (2004). Issues concerning English in a global context has been served well by many book-length publications and there are quality journals dedicated to this subject, such as English World Wide, 1980- (Amsterdam: John Benjamins), with an accompanying book series, and World Englishes, 1981- (Oxford: Blackwell). More information on varieties of English can be found on the website Studying Varieties of English.
A reassessment of the role of language contact in the history of English has been taking place in the last decade or so. Much of the work concentrates on the possible influence of Brythonic (the assumed Celtic language spoken in Britain at and for some time after the arrival of the Germanic settlers). Two works can be singled out in this context, the edited volume by Markku Filppula, Juhani Klemola and Heli Pitkänen (eds, 2002) and the monograph by the same Finnish team Filppula, Klemola and Paulasto (2008). The interaction of various languages in the British Isles, some from a diachronic and some from a synchronic perspective, is a subject in Britain (ed., 2007). A more diachronic approach which also deals with language contact between varieties of English in the British Isles is found in Dieter Kastovsky and Arthur Mettinger (eds, 2001) and in the conference proceedings volumes published by Hildegard Tristram (ed. 1997, 2000, 2003, 2006). A more general overview of current thinking on language contact is available in the many contributions in Hickey (ed., 2020) and in the section on language contact in Nevalainen and Traugott (eds, 2012).
For a more complete list of references for the history of English, please consult the Reference Guide which comes with this website.
Aarts, Bas and April McMahon (eds) 2006. The Handbook of English Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Algeo, John (ed.) 2001. English in North America. Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. 6. Cambridge: University Press.
Allen, Cynthia 1999. Case marking and reanalysis. Grammatical relations from Old to Early Modern English. Oxford: University Press.
Allen, Cynthia L. 2008. Genitives in Early English. Typology and Evidence. Oxford: University Press.
Ans van Kemenade and Bettelou Los (eds) 2006. The Handbook of the History of English. Oxford: Blackwell.
Bailey, Richard W. 1991. Images of English. A cultural history of the language. Cambridge: University Press.
Bailey, Richard W. 1996. Nineteenth century English. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Baker, Peter S. 2003. Introduction to Old English. Oxford: Blackwell.
Barber, Charles 1997 [1976]. Early Modern English. 2nd edition. London: André Deutsch.
Barber, Charles 1993. The English Language. A Historical Introduction. Cambridge: University Press.
Barber, Charles, Joan C. Beal and Philip A. Shaw 2009. The English language. A historical introduction. New and revised edition of Barber (1993). Cambridge: University Press.
Baugh, Albert C. and Thomas Cable 2002. A history of the English language. 5th edition. London: Routledge.
Beal, Joan 2004. English in modern times 1700-1945. London: Arnold.
Bergs, Alexander 2005. Social Networks and Historical Sociolinguistics. Studies in Morphosyntactic Variation in the Paston Letters (1421-1503). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Bex, Tony and Richard J. Watts (eds) 1999. Standard English. The widening debate. London: Routledge.
Blake, Norman 1996. A history of English language. London: Macmillan.
Blake, Norman 2002. A Grammar of Shakespeare’s Language. London: Palgrave.
Blank, Paula 1996. Broken English. Dialects and the politics of language in renaissance writings. London: Routledge.
Bolton, W. F. and David Crystal (eds) 1987. The English language. London: Sphere Books.
Bragg, Melvyn 2003. The Adventure of English. The Biography of a Language. London: Sceptre.
Brinton, Laurel J. 1996. Pragmatic Markers in English. Grammaticalization and Discourse Functions. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter
Brinton, Laurel and Leslie Arnovick 2005. The English language. A linguistic history. New York: Oxford University Press.
Brinton, Laurel and Elizabeth Closs Traugott 2005. Lexicalization and Language Change. Cambridge: University Press.
Brinton, Laurel and Alexander Bergs (eds) 2012. Historical Linguistics of English. 2 vols. HSK series. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Britain, David (ed.) 2007. Language in the British Isles. 2nd edition. Cambridge: University Press.
Brownlees, Nicholas (ed.) 2006. News Discourse in Early Modern Britain. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Burchfield, Robert (ed.) 1994. English in Britain and Overseas. Origins and Development. The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol. 5. Cambridge: University Press.
Burridge, Kate 2004. Blooming English. Observations on the roots, cultivation and hybrids of the English language. Cambridge: University Press.
Burridge, Kate 2005. Weeds in the garden of words. Further observations on the tangled history of the English language. Cambridge: University Press.
Chambers, J. K., Peter Trudgill and Natalie Schilling-Estes (eds) 2002. The Handbook of Language Variation and Change. Oxford: Blackwell.
Cheshire, Jenny and Dieter Stein (eds) 1997. Taming the vernacular. From dialect to written standard language. London: Longman.
Clackson, James 2007. Indo-European Linguistics. An Introduction. Cambridge: University Press.
Claridge, Claudia 2000. Multi-word Verbs in Early Modern English. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Corrigan, Karen P., Hermann Moisl and Joan Beal (eds) 2007. Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora. 2 vols. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Crystal, David 1995. The Cambridge encylopedia of the English language. Cambridge: University Press.
Crystal, David 2004. The Stories of English. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Culpeper, Jonathan 2005. History of English. 2nd edition. London: Routledge.
Crowley, Tony 1989. The politics of discourse. The standard language question in British cultural debates. London.
Crowley, Tony 1991. Proper English? Readings in language, history and cultural identity. London: Routledge.
Crystal, David 2005. Pronouncing Shakespeare. The Globe experiment. Cambridge: University Press.
Culpeper, Jonathan 2005. History of English. 2nd edition. London: Routledge.
Culpeper, Jonathan and Merja Kytö 2010. Early Modern English Dialogues. Spoken Interaction as Writing. Cambridge: University Press.
Denison, David 1993. English Historical Syntax. London: Longman.
Denison, David, Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero, Chris McCully and Emma Moore (eds) 2011. Analysing Older English. Cambridge: University Press.
Dobson, E. J. 1968. English pronunciation 1500-1700. Vol.1 - Survey of the sources. Vol.2 - Phonology. 2nd edition. Oxford: University Press.
Dossena, Marina and Susan M. Fitzmaurice (eds) 2006. Business and Official Correspondence: Historical investigations. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Dossena, Marina and Charles Jones (eds) 2003. Insights into Late Modern English. Linguistic Insights, Studies in Language and
Dossena, Marina and Irma Taavitsainen (eds) 2006. Diachronic Perspectives on Domain-specific English. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Communication, Vol 7. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Durkin, Philip 2009. The Oxford Guide to Etymology. Oxford: University Press.
Fennell, Barbara 1998. A History of English. A Sociolinguistic Approach. Oxford: Blackwell.
Filppula, Markku, Juhani Klemola and Heli Pitkänen (eds) 2002. The Celtic Roots of English. Studies in
Language, Vol 37. University of Joensuu: Faculty of Humanities.
Filppula, Markku, Juhani Klemola and Heli Paulasto 2008. English and Celtic in contact. London: Routledge.
Fitzmaurice, Susan M. 2002. The Familiar Letter in Early Modern English. A pragmatic approach. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Fitzmaurice, Susan (ed.) 2000. Rhetoric, Language and Literature: New Perspectives on English in the Eighteenth Century. Special Issue of Language Sciences 22.3.
Fitzmaurice, Susan M. and Irma Taavitsainen (eds) 2007. Methods in Historical Pragmatics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Fischer, Olga, Anette Rosenbach and Dieter Stein 2000. Pathways of change. Grammaticalization in English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Fischer, Olga, Ans van Kemenade, Willem Koopman and Wim van der Wurff 2001. The syntax of early English. Cambridge: University Press.
Fitzmaurice, Susan (ed.) 2000. Rhetoric, Language and Literature: New Perspectives on English in the Eighteenth Century. Special Issue of Language Sciences 22.3.
Fitzmaurice, Susan M. 2002. The Familiar Letter in Early Modern English. A Pragmatic Approach. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Folkerth, Wes 2002. The Sound of Shakespeare. London: Routledge.
Fortson, Benjamin W. 2004. Indo-European language and culture. An introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.
Gelderen, Elly van 2006. A History of the English Language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Görlach, Manfred 1991. Introduction to Early Modern English. Cambridge: University Press.
Görlach, Manfred 1999. English in the nineteenth century. Cambridge: University Press.
Görlach, Manfred 2001. Eighteenth-Century English. Cambridge: University Press.
Graddol, David and Joan Swann; Dick Leith 1996. English. History, diversity and change. London: Routledge.
Gramley, Stephan 2001. The vocabulary of world English. London: Arnold.
Harbert, Wayne 2006. The Germanic Languages. Cambridge: University Press.
Harley, Heidi 2003. English words. A linguistic introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.
Hickey, Raymond (ed.) 2002. Collecting views on language change. (Special issue of Language Sciences, Vol 24: 3-4).
Hickey, Raymond (ed.) 2003. Motives for Language Change. Cambridge: University Press.
Hickey, Raymond (ed.) 2004. Legacies of Colonial English. Cambridge: University Press.
Hickey, Raymond (ed.) 2010. Eighteenth Century English. Ideology and Change. Cambridge: University Press.
Hickey, Raymond (ed.) 2020. The Handbook of Language Contact. Second edition. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwells.
Hogg, Richard 2002. An introduction to Old English. Edinburgh: University Press.
Hogg, Richard and David Denison (eds) 2006. A history of the English language. Cambridge: University Press.
Hope, Jonathan 2003. Shakespeare’s Grammar. London: Thomson Learning.
Hopper, Paul and Elizabeth Closs Traugott 2003. Grammaticalization. 2nd edition. Cambridge: University Press.
Horobin, Simon 2006. Chaucer’s Language. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hough, Carole and John Corbett 2006. Beginning Old English. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hughes, Geoffrey 2000. A history of English words. Oxford: Blackwell.
Hüllen, Werner 1999. English dictionaries 800-1700. The topical tradition. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Jones, Charles 2002. An introduction to Late Modern English. Edinburgh: University Press.
Jones, Charles 2005. English Pronunciation in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Jones, Mari and Ishtla Singh 2005. Exploring Language Change. London: Routledge.
Jucker, Andreas H. (ed.) 1995. Historical Pragmatics. Pragmatic Developments in the History of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Jucker, Andreas H. and Irma Taavitsainen (eds) 2008. Speech Acts in the History of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Kastovsky, Dieter and Arthur Mettinger (eds) 2001. Language Contact in the History of English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Kemenade, Ans van and Bettelou Los (eds) 2006. The Handbook of the History of English. Oxford: Blackwell.
Kytö, Merja, Mats Rydén and Erik Smitterberg (eds) 2006. Nineteenth century English. Stability and change. Cambridge: University Press.
Labov, William 1966. The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics.
Labov, William 1981. ‘Resolving the Neogrammarian controversy’, Language 57: 267-308.
Labov, William 1994. Principles of Linguistic Change. Vol. 1 - Internal Factors. Oxford: Blackwell.
Labov, William 2001. Principles of Linguistic Change. Vol. 2 - Social Factors. Oxford: Blackwell.
Lass, Roger 1987. The shape of English. Structure and history. London: Dent.
Lass, Roger 1994. Old English. A historical linguistic companion. Cambridge: University Press.
Leith, Dick 1997. A social history of English. 2nd edition. London: Routledge.
Linn, Andrew R. and Nicola McLelland (eds) 2002. Standardization. Studies from the Germanic languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Lippi-Green, Rosina 1997. English with an accent. Language, ideology and discrimination in the United States. London: Routledge.
Machan, Tim William 2003. English in the Middle Ages. Oxford: University Press.
Mair, Christian 2006. Twentieth century English. History, variation and standardization. Cambridge: University Press.
McArthur, Tom 1992. The Oxford companion to the English language. Oxford: University Press.
McArthur, Tom 2002. The Oxford guide to world English. Oxford: University Press.
McCrum, Robert, Robert MacNeil and William Cran 2002. The Story of English. 3rd edition. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
McCully, Chris and Sharon Hilles 2005. The Earliest English: An Introduction to Old English Language. London: Longman.
Machan, Tim William 2003. English in the Middle Ages. Oxford: University Press.
McEnery, Tony 2005. Swearing in English. Bad language, purity and power from 1586 to the present. London: Routledge.
Marsden, Richard (ed.) 2004. The Cambridge Old English Reader. Cambridge: University Press.
Milroy, James and Lesley Milroy 1999. Authority in language. Investigating language prescription and standardisation. 3rd edition. Language, Education and Society London: Blackwell.
Milroy, James 1992. Linguistic variation and change. On the historical sociolinguistics of English. Oxford: Blackwell.
Minkova, Donka and Robert Stockwell (eds) 2000. Studies in the History of the English Language: A Millennian Perspective. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Mitchell, Bruce 1985. Old English syntax. 2 volsOxford: Clarendon Press.
Mitchell, Bruce and Fred C. Robinson 2006. A Guide to Old English. 7th edition. Oxford: Blackwell.
Momma Haruko and Michael Matto 2007. A companion to the history of the English language. Oxford: Blackwell.
Mufwene, Salikoko 2001. The ecology of language evolution. Cambridge: University Press.
Mugglestone, Lynda 2003. ‘Talking Proper’. The rise of accent as social symbol. 2nd edition. Oxford: University Press.
Mugglestone, Lynda 2006. The Oxford history of English. Oxford: University Press.
Nevalainen, Terttu and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg 2003. Historical Sociolinguistics. Language Change in Tudor and Stuart England. Longman Linguistics Library. London: Longman.
Nevalainen, Terttu 2004. An Introduction to Early Modern English. Edinburgh: University Press.
Nevalainen, Terttu and Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen (eds) 2004. Letter Writing, Special issue of Historical Pragmatics 5:2.
Nevalainen, Terttu and Elizabeth Traugott (eds) 2012. The Oxford Handbook of the History of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Perez-Guerra, Javier et al (eds) 2007. Of Varying Language and Opposing Creed: New Insights into Late Modern English. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Pintzuk, Susan, George Tsoulas and Anthony Warner (eds) 2001. Diachronic syntax. Models and mechanisms. Oxford: University Press.
Pyles, Thomas and John Algeo 1993. The origins and development of the English language. 4th edition. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Ringe, Don 2006. From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic. Oxford: University Press.
Ritt, Nikolaus and Herbert Schendl (eds) 2005. Rethinking Middle English. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Romaine, Suzanne 1982. Socio-historical linguistics. Its status and methodology. Cambridge: University Press.
Rydén, Mats, Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade and Merja Kytö (eds) 1998. A Reader in Early Modern English. Frankfurt: Lang.
Smith, Jeremy 1996. An historical study of English. London: Routledge.
Smith, Jeremy 2005. Essentials of Early English. Old, Middle and Early Modern English. 2nd edition. London: Routledge.
Smith, Jeremy 2009. Old English. An Introduction. Cambridge: University Press.
Smith, Jeremy and Simon Horobin 2002. An introduction to Middle English. Edinburgh: University Press.
Smitterberg, Erik 2005. The Progressive in 19th-Century English. A process of integration. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Stein, Dieter and Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (eds) 1993. Towards a standard English, 1600-1800. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Stockwell, Robert and Donka Minkova 2001. English words, history and structure. Cambridge: University Press.
Strang, Barbara 1970. A history of English. London: Methuen.
Taavitsainen, Irma and Andreas H. Jucker (eds) 2003. Diachronic perspectives on address term systems, Pragmatics and Beyond, New Series, Vol. 107. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Taavitsainen, Irma and Päivi Pahta (eds) 2004. Medical and Scientific Writing in Late Medieval English. Cambridge: University Press.
Taavitsainen, Irma, Terrtu Nevalainen, Päivi Pahta and Matti Rissanen (eds) 2000. Placing Middle English in context. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid 2009. An Introduction to Late Modern English. Edinburgh: University Press.
Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid (ed) 2008. Grammars, Grammarians and GrammarWriting in Eighteenth-Century England. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid, Gunnel Tottie and Wim van der Wurff (eds) 1999. Negation in the history of English. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid and Wim van der Wurff (eds) 2009. Current Issues in Late Modern English. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs 1989. ‘On the rise of epistemic meanings in English: An example of subjectification in semantic change’, Language 65, 1: 31-55.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs 2000. ‘From etymology to historical pragmatics’. in Minkova and Robert Stockwell (eds), pp. 21-53.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs 2004. ‘Historical pragmatics’, in Laurence R. Horn and Gregory Ward (eds) Handbook of Pragmatics. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 538-61.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs and Richard B. Dasher 2002. Regularity in Semantic Change. Cambridge: University Press.
Treharne, Elaine 2003. Old and Middle English. An anthology. Second edition. Oxford: Blackwell.
Tristram, Hildegard L. C. (ed.) 1997. The Celtic Englishes. Heidelberg: Carl Winter.
Tristram, Hildegard L. C. (ed.) 2000. The Celtic Englishes II. Heidelberg: Carl Winter.
Tristram, Hildegard L. C. (ed.) 2003. The Celtic Englishes III. Heidelberg: Carl Winter.
Tristram, Hildegard L. C. (ed.) 2006. The Celtic Englishes IV. Potsdam: University Press.
Trudgill, Peter 2004. New-dialect formation. The inevitability of colonial Englishes. Edinburgh: University Press.
Upton, Clive, William A. Kretzschmar, and Rafal Konopka 2001. Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation. Oxford: University Press.
Visser, F. Th. 1963-73. An historical syntax of the English language. 4 vols. Leiden: Brill.
Warner, Anthony R. 1993. English auxiliaries. Structure and history. Cambridge: University Press.
Watts, Richard and Peter Trudgill (eds) 2001. Alternative histories of English. London: Routledge.
Wright, Laura (ed.) 2000. The development of Standard English 1300-1800. Theories, descriptions, conflicts. Cambridge: University Press.
Early scholarship on the history of English
Early stages of English
New overviews of the history of English
Sociolinguistics and language change
Social networks and language change
New sources for the history of English
Domain-specific forms of English
Historical syntax
Grammaticalisation and lexicalisation
Vocabulary
Historical pragmatics
Development of the standard
Late modern English period
Transportation of English overseas
Language contact
References