The American Revolution did not occur in a historical or political vacuum. Throughout the middle decades of the eighteenth century, the thirteen British American colonies had simmered with uneasiness and unrest on a host of issues – religious, economic, political, racial, and gender – and people had become increasingly restive and prone to protest in the pre-Revolutionary era. No matter who they were – male or female, white or Black or Native American, urban or rural, free or enslaved – people in British America were certainly no strangers to conflict. This essay argues that the experience of struggling against longstanding localized grievances helped prepare people for taking action in a time of Revolutionary crisis – whatever side they took, Patriot or Tory or even neither.

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.

When considering the political institutions that helped lead the American Revolution, often we focus on the Continental Congress. Celebrated and influential figures such as George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and others provided invaluable leadership during pivotal moments. However, they were not alone. Often forgotten and overlooked are the various committees, yet they too were instrumental in the Revolution’s success. Without these committees, composed of common people, the Continental Association could not have been possible. Despite the Patriots’ ultimate success, it would be inaccurate to assume that they did not encounter significant challenges. Divisions and disunity threatened the Revolution, posing complex issues for the Congress and the committees to consistently address. With legitimacy and unity hanging in the balance, Patriots used coercion, boycotts, ceremonies, and newspapers to combat dissent. Such measures allow us to recognize the Revolution as a civil war whose conclusion was anything but determined.

Why did the British war effort in the South fail so badly, and therefore lead to the British loss of the American mainland colonies? The British tried to solve the political problem of reunification through military means, which was always a poor fit. Further, the British continuously underrated their allies and did not use them effectively. These mistakes doomed the British war effort in the South. The region dissolved into a brutal civil war fought through guerrilla means. Neither side could win complete victory. Mistakes compounded, making British victory impossible.

Phonology is concerned with the system of distinctive sounds (phonemes) in a language, and how these phonemes may be combined (phonotactics). Phonological changes may thus be defined as innovations that bring about a change in phoneme inventories and phonotactics. This chapter examines in detail one such type of phonological change, that is shifts, in order to illustrate the challenges posed by historical sound-change to phonological theory. It addresses questions regarding the ontology of change, as well as the relationship between phonetics and phonology, realisations and systems. It looks specifically at the shift known as the ‘Great Vowel Shift’ or more recently as the ‘Long Vowel Shift’, to see how well different phonological theories are able to account for and to explain this shift.

Adverbs are the ‘mixed bag’ among the word classes, today comprising such diverse items as time, space or manner adverbs (PDE now, here, quickly), intensifiers (PDE very, terribly) or stance (PDE surely, frankly) and linking adverbs (PDE however, therefore). After a rough sketch of the formal developments in adverbs, in particular the emergence and establishment of the adverbial suffix –ly by re-analysis, this chapter will show that the functional heterogeneity within today’s English adverbs is a rather recent development. Overall, we see semantic and functional diversification in the category ‘adverb’, gradually becoming more varied in signalling epistemic, evidential and textual speaker attitudes. This diversification is here seen to have been supported by the new distinct mark of adverbial status, the adverbial suffix –ly.

Prescriptive discourse basically evaluates linguistic variants and sometimes gives reasons for preferring one variant over another. It is most readily found in metalinguistic texts, like dictionaries and grammars. Several basic assumptions in prescriptive discourse that have endured to the present were already present in early centuries and set the stage for the flourishing of prescriptive discourse in the eighteenth century. Prescriptive discourse continued to flourish and became more widespread and naturalised in subsequent centuries. It remains a robust tradition and has adapted to new modes of communication and new cultural forces. Key features of prescriptive discourse examined in this chapter include the degree of specificity with which the discourse was formulated, the venues that published prescriptive discourse, the kinds of linguistic variants that were included in prescriptive discourse, and the justifications for the prescriptive judgements.

Indexicality and enregisterment are terms introduced by Silverstein (1976, 2003) and Agha (2003, 2007) as part of an ideological approach to linguistic variation and change. This chapter explains these terms, discusses how they have been used in research into the historical sociolinguistics of English, and evaluates the potential of this approach for further research in the history of English. The chapter begins with an explanation of the terminology and the research contexts in which it has been used. It then goes on to note the difficulties of applying an approach which was first used in ethnographic research to historical contexts. Three types of historical evidence are identified as providing evidence for historical indexicality and enregisterment: metalinguistic and metapragmatic comments; dialect literature and literary dialect; and ego-documents. For each of these, a review of research in English historical linguistics using such data is provided.

This chapter surveys the field of recent grammatical change in English. We focus on the period since 1900 but also discuss how certain recent changes relate to longer-term trends. Many of our examples involve the verb phrase or verbal complementation, but changes in other areas such as the noun phrase are also noted. We address methodological issues that arise in researching recent change, considering the various kinds of corpora available and the complexities involved in tracking grammatical change over time. We then discuss how patterns of change vary between spoken and written language and across different genres. Finally, we consider a range of possible explanations or motivations for change, including grammaticalisation, economy and social influences.

Registers have proved to be powerful proxies for language variation and stylistic change in historical research. This chapter investigates five sub-registers within the domain of scientific discourse: philosophy (humanities), history (social sciences), life sciences and astronomy (natural sciences) and medical texts. With data from the Coruña Corpus of Scientific Writing and the corpus of Late Modern English Medical Texts, we carry out a Multi-dimensional analysis of one million words of eighteenth-century scientific English, this leading to the scaling of the five sub-registers along two main dimensions of variation: ‘Involved/Interpersonal versus Narrative/Abstract’ and ‘Complex/Elaborate versus Non-elaborate’ discourse. The analysis confirms, first, that there are substantial differences among sub-registers in terms of the distribution and pervasiveness of distinctive linguistic features, and, second, that fluctuation in prose discourse is a general characteristic of Late Modern English scientific writing.

This chapter surveys stability, variation, and change in the mechanisms, functions and frequency of speech representation across the history of English. Attention is paid to speech representation expressions (e.g. they said) and ‘speech descriptors’ (they said confidently), speech representation cues (e.g. quotation marks and ‘perspective shifters’ such as discourse markers), speech representation categories (e.g. direct speech They said ‘We will come!’ versus indirect speech They said that they will come), and generic and sociopragmatic functions of speech representation (e.g. dramatisation). The chapter also explores the development of the speech representation verbs murmur, mutter and whisper in Late Modern English as an illustration of the gradual development and integration of an increasing number of speech representation resources over time.

Our focus on digital interaction in the history of English foregrounds the mutually transformative relationship between language and society, with technological affordances enabling (new) forms of social interaction, whilst impeding or remediating (older) communication practices. Early internet forum users maximised meaning-making with available linguistic resources, including pre-digital typographical and respelling practices. Today, within the diversity of digital Englishes, strategies typical of early digital interaction remain, reconfigured for users’ local language ideologies and community norms and expanded to incorporate multilingual practices and new semiotic modes. This chapter explores the sociopragmatic practices of identity and belonging across the digital age, from Usenet in the 1980s and SMS in the 2000s to Twitter in the 2020s, detailing a complex interplay between new communicative opportunities and long-established sociopragmatic practices originating offline. Our analysis points to a diversification of English-using internet users and an expansion of multilingual, multimodal repertoires which prompt a revisiting of traditional sociolinguistic conceptions of English.

The verbal system of Proto-Indo-European was primarily based not on distinctions of tense, but rather on distinctions of aspect. The shift from the three aspect system (imperfective, perfective, retrospective) of late Proto-Indo-European to the binary tense system (past vs. non-past) of Germanic explains why the older forms of Germanic lack aspectual forms completely, and also why in historical times the various Germanic languages have developed analytic aspectual patterns of various kinds. In the case of English, these include two perfects to mark past events relevant to the present (I have seen her twice; The warm sea wind was risen and blew over them now), a fully grammaticalised be progressive (She is reading a book) and a second, partly grammaticalised progressive periphrasis formed on a deictic motion verb (Bill went whistling down the street). Also examined in the chapter are changes pertaining to the domain of modality.

This chapter provides an overview of web-based resources for the study of the history of English and varieties of English around the world which have been developed in the two decades since the completion of The Cambridge History of the English Language (Hogg 1992–2001) as well as materials in preparation now. Topics cover online versions of reference works like manuscripts and facsimiles, editions, dictionaries/concordances and maps; corpora and databases which can be searched on the web; multimedia learning tools which supplement traditional classroom teaching, for example companion websites for textbooks, TED and YouTube; and communication platforms which help develop the field beyond academia, such as blogs, podcasts, Twitter and Facebook. The chapter also discusses some desiderata in the currently available resources.