Historical thesauri are indispensable tools for understanding the historical lexicon of English. The arrangement of historical lexis by semantic field reveals patterns in vocabulary which cannot be seen in an alphabetical ordering, and so historical thesauri are essential for the investigation of cultural development and the history of ideas as well as charting the evolution of the lexicon. This chapter gives examples from the Historical Thesaurus of English and its related projects, including A Thesaurus of Old English, The Bilingual Thesaurus of Everyday Life in Medieval England and Love, Sex, and Marriage: A Historical Thesaurus. It enumerates the key principles of a historical thesaurus, discusses sources of lexical data as well as the organisational principles by which historical thesauri arrange words, and overviews research projects in the history of English which have been made possible by historical thesauri.

This chapter deals with changes in the history of English as they are informed by the functional approach to language, which starts from the assumption that linguistic structure cannot be analysed independently from the uses to which it is put. Three types of external, functional explanation are distinguished: communication-based (discourse- and information-structural), processing and cognitive explanations. Against this background, I discuss the impact of these external functional factors on the traditional domains of language change: sound change, morphological change, syntactic change and semantic-pragmatic change. In a final section, I address grammaticalisation as a domain combining morphosyntactic and semantic-pragmatic change.

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.

This chapter provides an overview of the history of books and printing in English, in four sections defined by time period. Each section briefly surveys the technological innovations of that period and discusses how the changing print industry influenced and reflected developments of English between 1476 and the present. After an introduction (7.1), Section 7.2 discusses the rise of print in England during the incunabula and early print period (1476–1640). Section 7.3 then follows the continued expansion of print across England and North America during the hand-press period (1641–c. 1800), and Section 7.4 considers the explosion of printed texts during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The final section culminates with an overview of the rise of digital reading platforms and a discussion of how the ongoing evolution of text technologies continues to influence the development of English today.

Adopting a broad understanding of editing, this chapter views medieval and early modern text producers as precursors of present-day scholarly textual editors. The chapter surveys how editors from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century discuss their choices concerning the selection and reproduction of texts when making them available to contemporary audiences. Editors’ awareness of the historical nature of their project makes their work philological. The comments examined in the chapter are obtained from editors’ prefatory materials from three time periods: 1. the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, before the emergence of scholarly editing and the disciplinisation of English studies; 2. the mid nineteenth century – characterised by a more systematised activity in vernacular text editing and societies promoting it; 3. the twenty-first century, dominated by the rise of digital editing. The survey shows that editors of all three periods address textual selection and reproduction in their comments. Although editors in all periods sometimes arrive at similar editorial solutions, for example in favour of the faithful linguistic reproduction of the source, their decisions do not necessarily spring from similar motives. Throughout the three periods, editors convey their ideas of the target audience; readability is identified as a major editorial concern from early on.

The anglophone slang lexis has been recorded for 500 years and probably been used for much longer. Initially seen as a purely crime-based vocabulary, and despised as such, it has gradually moved into ‘civilian’ use: still outlawed, still looked down upon by many, but an essential part of the greater English language. The story is geographical as well as social: if slang was a British creation until the nineteenth century, the former colonies of the US and Australia have generated their own slangs. It is they, especially African Americans, who dominate the lexis now.

This chapter focuses on grammatical writing from the seventh century to the publication of the first grammar of English in the sixteenth. Except for the last one, these texts focus primarily on Latin grammar, though the vernacular languages spoken in England played an important role since the engagement with Latin grammar resulted in grammatical descriptions of the vernaculars themselves. The chapter opens with an introduction to the teaching of Latin grammar and continues with a discussion of the English content of Ælfric’s Grammar. Then it provides insights into grammar writing after the Norman Conquest and takes a detailed look at the grammatical treatises in Middle English and the linguistic data these treatises provide. The chapter finishes with an outlook to the sixteenth century and the publication of the authorised ‘Lily Grammar’ and of Bullokar’s Pamphlet for Grammar (1586), the first grammar of English.

This conversation between Ilan Stavans and Hassan Hamze is about the birth of the Arabic dictionary in the eighth century, a birth linked to that of other linguistic and religious disciplines in a flourishing society that would inherit the sciences of the ancients before developing and transmitting them to modern Western civilization. The small, utilitarian lexicons quickly gave way to the great dictionary al-ʿAyn, which established the Arabic lexicographical tradition. The bilingual dictionary did not appear until much later, first with the languages of the Arab-Muslim world, then with Latin in Andalusia after the eleventh century, and with other languages, particularly Western ones, in the modern era. Its role today is significant in terminological creation. The Arabic dictionary is, above all, a dictionary of word families classified by consonantal roots. The classification by words, which appeared very early in specialized dictionaries, did not appear in the general dictionary until the mid twentieth century, under the influence of the European dictionary, due to the issues posed by the status of short vowels and broken plurals.

This chapter explores language as a form of capital – both cultural and symbolic – and its role in social inequality. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory (1986), it examines how language distribution reinforces power structures, with ruling classes controlling literacy in specialized fields. The ‘linguistic deficit’ theory links lower socioeconomic status (SES) with limited language resources, leading to educational and social deficits. It also introduces the Matthew effect, where students with more language capital accumulate even more, and the Great Gatsby Curve, suggesting that inequality in language resources perpetuates social stratification.

Through a series of case studies of bilingualism, the chapter illustrates how language shapes social power dynamics. It argues that, in a globalized world, bilingualism – often a privilege in elite education – should be made available to all to address broader social inequities. Only through multilingual education will language policies reduce inequality and enable true social mobility.