Overview

This volume investigates the Indo-European and Germanic background to the English language, looking at how inherited elements of phonology and morphology survived into the Old English period. It then considers various kinds of contact between the first speakers of English and speakers of Celtic, Latin and Scandinavian, under different sociolinguistic circumstances. The manner in which initial standardisation of English took place, with considerable code-switching, and the structural changes which the language underwent in this early period are discussed. The various analytical methods used to examine the available data are considered in a dedicated chapter on philology. The volume also contains a set of longer chapters. These take a detailed look at various levels of language from phonology, morphology, syntax through to semantics and pragmatics, and include reviews of historical sociolinguistics and onomastics.

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9781009205689

Table of Contents

Reviews

Author Information

Laura Wright is Professor of the History of the English Language at the University of Cambridge. Among her recent publications are The Multilingual Origins of Standard English (2020), Sunnyside: A Sociolinguistic History of British House Names (2020), The Social Life of Words (2023) and English Grammar for Literature Students (2024). Raymond Hickey is Adjunct Professor at the University of Limerick, Ireland and former Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. His recent publications include Listening to the Past (2017), The Cambridge Handbook of Areal Linguistics (2017), English in Multilingual South Africa (2020), The Handbook of Language Contact (2020), Sounds of English Worldwide (2023) and The Oxford Handbook of Irish English (2024).

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