Book contents
- Language in Britain and Ireland
- Language in Britain and Ireland
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Map of Britain and Ireland
- Introduction
- Part I English
- 1 The History of English
- 2 Standard and Non-standard English
- 3 Phonetic and Phonological Variation in England
- 4 Grammatical Variation in England
- 5 Discourse-Pragmatic Variation in England
- 6 Scots and Scottish Standard English
- 7 English in Ireland
- 8 English in Wales
- 9 Insular Varieties of English in Britain
- 9 Insular Varieties of English in Britain
- 9 Insular Varieties of English in Britain
- 9 Insular Varieties of English in Britain
- Part II Multilingualism in Britain and Ireland: The Celtic Languages
- Part III Multilingualism in Britain and Ireland: Minority Languages
- Part IV Multilingualism: The Development of Urban Contact Varieties
- Part V Applied Sociolinguistic Issues
- Index
- References
1 - The History of English
from Part I - English
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 October 2024
- Language in Britain and Ireland
- Language in Britain and Ireland
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Map of Britain and Ireland
- Introduction
- Part I English
- 1 The History of English
- 2 Standard and Non-standard English
- 3 Phonetic and Phonological Variation in England
- 4 Grammatical Variation in England
- 5 Discourse-Pragmatic Variation in England
- 6 Scots and Scottish Standard English
- 7 English in Ireland
- 8 English in Wales
- 9 Insular Varieties of English in Britain
- 9 Insular Varieties of English in Britain
- 9 Insular Varieties of English in Britain
- 9 Insular Varieties of English in Britain
- Part II Multilingualism in Britain and Ireland: The Celtic Languages
- Part III Multilingualism in Britain and Ireland: Minority Languages
- Part IV Multilingualism: The Development of Urban Contact Varieties
- Part V Applied Sociolinguistic Issues
- Index
- References
Summary
Couched in socio-economic history, the first chapter provides an overview of the origins and development of the English language in Britain from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day. Both internal and external factors for language variation and change are considered when discussing the major orthographic, lexical, phonological and morphosyntactic developments. The English language and its development will therefore also be viewed in relation to other languages that were spoken, written or printed in the British Isles over the last 1,500 years. The creation and increasing availability of new data sources (access to hitherto un- or underexplored social layers, text types, regions) during the last decade (e.g. historical corpora like the Corpus of Early English Correspondence and databases like Eighteenth Century Collections Online) have led to many new studies on a range of different linguistic variables. Many of the new findings form the basis of the chapter, which aims to complement traditional histories of English.
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- Language in Britain and Ireland , pp. 11 - 47Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024