This chapter provides an overview of the evolution of English morphology, focusing on inflection. Beside a largely synchronic account of the nominal and verbal morphology in the individual historical periods, the chapter explains the underlying mechanisms and motivations behind morphological developments pertinent to individual stages. These include changes such as loss of inflections, transformation of case, number and gender systems, or the restructuring of the formal marking of tense and mood. The typological drift which English experienced over the last 1300 years stays central to the discussion, as does language contact with Celtic, Norse and Norman French, whose role as a potential catalyst for morphological changes will be explored. The discussion emphasises the dynamic nature of the morphological system and the continuity of the processes involved in its gradual transformation over the centuries.

This chapter explores the link between education and linguistic innovation in the early history of English, by looking at the evolution of the school system and the languages of school instruction. Varieties of spoken and written Latin and Latin as a second (and third) language are among the other sociolinguistic anchors of this chapter. The turning points are located at about 650 CE, the spread of Christianity and formal schooling in Latin among the Anglo-Saxons, at 1066, the introduction of French as a second vernacular and language of school instruction, and at 1349, the reversal of the latter situation in the wake of the socio-demographic changes caused by the Black Death. The survey starts on the eve of the Germanic migration to Britain and ends around 1500; it is illustrated with a selection of lexical and structural features introduced into English through contact with Latin.

The study of the history of English has its roots in the work of English scholars who first concerned themselves with the nature of their language about four hundred years ago. Prior to the eighteenth century this work was pre-linguistic, positing a divine origin for language and comparing English (unfavourably) to Classical Greek and Latin. With the advent of modern linguistics in Indo-European research, the history of English became an object of academic interest and the first university positions for its study were established, mainly in Germany and Scandinavia. Simultaneously there arose a tradition of studying English dialects, first as an antiquarian occupation in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, then later as an attempt to capture local history in the vocabulary of specific regions in the twentieth.  This then led to the production of dialect dictionaries and surveys.

This chapter introduces and explores the complex evidence for the Scandinavian influence on English. This influence resulted from the period of intense contact following the settlement of speakers of the early Scandinavian languages (Old Norse) in Viking age Britain, and its effects were extensive and profound, most measurably upon the lexicon. We begin by addressing the considerable difficulty of identifying Scandinavian input at the etymological level. We then highlight the wide range of English sources, medieval and modern, which need to be examined in order to find and analyse lexical material influenced by Norse. We assess the evidence provided by some of these sources for how Norse-derived words were integrated into early English vocabulary, paying attention to dialect distribution and to the semantic and stylistic relationships that these terms established with other members of their semantic fields.

The New Cambridge History of the English Language is aimed at providing a contemporary and comprehensive overiew of English, tracing its roots in Germanic and investigating the contact scenarios in which the language has been an active participant. It discusses the various models and methodologies which have been developed to analyse diachronic data concisely and consistently. The new history furthermore examines the trajectories which the language has embarked on during its spread worldwide and presents overviews of the varieties of English found throughout the world today.

After an outline of the basis of scientific historical linguistics, this chapter discusses what can be learned about Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the earliest recoverable ancestor of English, from archaeology and the study of ancient DNA. It then discusses some characteristics of PIE, outlines how its daughter languages diversified and sketches how Proto-Germanic developed. The chapter closes with a survey of words of PIE and its immediate daughter languages that survive in Modern English (ModE). A special theme is the first- and second-person pronouns, whose development is sketched very briefly from PIE to ModE.

English historical sociolinguistics traces the transition of a ‘small’ language into a ‘big’ one. Old English was a small language in terms of its regional coverage and number of speakers, whereas Present-day English is a comprehensively documented world language with hundreds of millions of first-language speakers. Its 1500-year history involves gradually developing social structures of different timescales, but it was also affected by abrupt changes brought about by forces such as invasions and pandemics. Sociolinguistics highlights the agency of language users in shaping and changing their language and, consequently, the society they live in. Written records on individual language use are sparse from the earliest periods but multiply as people from different walks of life become literate and pass on data on their linguistic practices. With time, increasing efforts are, however, also expended on regulating usage with the aim of language standardisation.

The questions of how and why words change meaning are integral to any history of English. Semantic change is complex, since it always takes place in a particular social and historical context, and one change in the system may lead to others. Words also have different meanings at different times for different speakers, and the neat descriptions of changes that are often presented in the literature do not always take account of the polysemy that is always involved. After a summary of the evolution of this branch of historical linguistics, this chapter describes different tendencies in semantic change, and the ways in which changes can be motivated, offering a structural classification of such change. It goes on to consider change in each period of the history of English, exploring the meaning of compounds in Old English, the relationship between the meanings of borrowed words and their etymons in Middle and Early Modern English, and the impact of conscious efforts to change the meanings and usage of socially sensitive words in Late Modern English. Each section is informed by detailed discussions of varied semantic histories, drawn from a range of historical and contemporary dictionaries, corpora and text collections.

The background to English lies in the forms of Germanic taken from the North Sea rim to the island of Britain in the fifth century. In this introduction the chapters of this volume dealing with the roots of this input, both in earlier Germanic and in more distant Indo-European are discussed. Contact with Latin, Celtic, Scandinavian and northern medieval French in the several centuries after settlement in England by the Germanic tribes is a major focus among the chapters of the present volume as is the nature of the contact situation, which is regarded as responsible for the transfer effects which can be observed. The typological reorientation which English experienced is a further focus in the volume as is the later development of the history of English as a subject of academic research. In addition, there are several ‘long view’ chapters which present overviews of linguistic areas and levels for the entire history of English.

The Celtic hypothesis is a cover term used to refer to a number of structural features of Old English (and later stages of English) which might have their origin in language contact and shift between the BrythonicBrittonic-speaking Celtic population and the Germanic invaders in the early Old English period. Among such features are the internal possessor construction, the isomorphy of intensifiers and reflexives, two forms of the verb be, the progressive and periphrastic do. This chapter reviews the literature on this area and considers the case to be made for contact and transfer during language shift but accords equal weight to internal factors in an attempt to reach a balanced appraisal of the Celtic hypothesis.

English is a member of the Germanic subgroup of Indo-European, sharing with other Germanic languages a distinctive set of hallmarks, though recent developments have made it in some respects an outlier in this group. In addition, English shares some features with successively smaller subsets of these languages. The observed pattern of similarities and differences arises from a history of shared inheritance, divergence and subsequent interaction which can be reconstructed in detail by systematically comparing the languages, guided by a rigorous methodology. A focus of scholarship for two centuries, this enterprise has taken on renewed vitality in recent decades, informed by new understandings of the role of language contact in shaping linguistic histories. After a brief introduction to the process of comparative reconstruction and the traditional representation of the pedigree of English derived from it, this chapter will introduce the more intricate picture emerging from recent studies.