Overview

Any history of English starts with the evidence its narrators select, the historical periods they focus on, and the guiding principles and frameworks they adopt. Even slightly different choices lead to significantly different narratives. English Begins at Jamestown investigates the factors behind these choices and the effects they have on our understanding of the English language and its history. Tim Machan explores how people tell and have told the story of English, from its Indo-European origins to its present-day status as a global language. He describes how narrative principles are constructed, what kinds of facts and analyses they allow or prevent, and what can be known outside of them. The book's historically and critically wide-ranging arguments center on the themes of social purpose, aesthetics, periodization, and grammatical structure, while the conclusion extends the discussion into the roles of speakers themselves, who have transformed the grammar and pragmatics of English since the colonial period embodied in the Jamestown settlement. English Begins at Jamestown shows that there are better, worse, and wrong ways to narrate the language's history, even if there cannot necessarily be one correct way.

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9780198846369

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Reviews

Tim Machan's book is a much-needed exploration of the stories that we tell ourselves about the history of the English language. Fascinating, engaging, and original, this work ranges across centuries of the linguistic past, providing important historiographical analysis and inviting us to think in new ways about the field and practices of English language history. * Colette Moore, University of Washington * English Begins at Jamestown is an original and thought-provoking take on how to write the history of English. With wit and verve it explores the often unspoken intellectual underpinnings of the enterprise and it should be required reading for all those interested in the history of any language. * Paul Russell, University of Cambridge *

Author Information

Tim William Machan is Mary Lee Duda Professor of Literature at the University of Notre Dame. He has published widely on historical linguistics, multilingualism, reception, and textual criticism, and on medieval English, Norse, and French literature. His previous books with OUP include Language Anxiety: Conflict and Change in the History of English (2009) and What Is English? And Why Should We Care? (2013; paperback 2016).

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