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.

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.