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A History of the English Language

The history and development of English, from the earliest known writings to its status today as a dominant world language, is a subject of major importance to linguists and historians. In this authoritative volume, a team of international experts cover the entire recorded history of the English language, outlining its development over fifteen centuries. With an emphasis on more recent periods, every key stage in the history of the language is discussed, with full accounts of standardisation, names, the distribution of English in Britain and North America, and its global spread. New historical surveys of the crucial aspects of the language (sounds, word structure, grammar and vocabulary) are presented, and historical changes that have affected English are treated as a continuing process, helping to explain the shape of the language today. Comprehensive and fully up-to-date, the volume will be indispensable to all advanced students, scholars and teachers in this prominent field.

R I C H A R D H O G G is Smith Professor of Language and Medieval English at the University of Manchester. He is editor of volume 1 of The Cambridge History of the English Language (six volumes, 1992–2001) and one of the founding editors of the journal English Language and Linguistics (also published by Cambridge University Press). He is author of Metrical Phonology with Christopher McCully (Cambridge University Press, 1986), A Grammar of Old English (1992) and An Introduction to Old English (2002). He is Fellow of the British Academy (1994), and Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2004).

D AV I D D E N I S O N is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Manchester, and has held visiting appointments at the universities of Amsterdam, British Columbia, Santiago de Compostela and Paris 3. He is one of the founding editors of the journal English Language and Linguistics (published by Cambridge University Press), and author of English Historical Syntax (1993/2004) and of the ‘Syntax’ chapter in volume 4 of The Cambridge History of the English Language

(1998). He is also co-editor of Fuzzy Grammar (2004).

Frontispiece: Map of England

A History of the

English Language

Edited by

R I C H A R D H O G G A N D DAV I D D E N I S O N

cambridge university press

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo

Cambridge University Press

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 2ru, UK

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

www.cambridge.org

Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521662277

© Cambridge University Press 2006

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First published in print format 2006

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