Introduction to Volume III

Summary

The development of English in the past few centuries is highlighted in this volume with the major issues of transmission and change forming the main focus. Different levels of languages are examined in individual chapters and individual case studies throw light on specifically relevant developments. The chronological range of the volume extends to the present with changes in Modern English viewed as continuations of trajectories established over a much longer preceding period. The role of ideology and prescriptivism in shaping the manner in which English was standardised in the Late Modern English period is also a central concern with the nature of networks, coalitions, communities of practice and enregisterment examined in detail.

This is the third volume of the New Cambridge History of the English Language, which in terms of chronological divisions can be roughly equated with the Late Modern English period and its transition to the present day. However, the periodisation is only approximate, and the volume is more concerned with how English was transmitted and how change took place, especially change motivated by external forces, ultimately of social origin.

The volume is divided into three parts which are dedicated to the themes of transmission, change and ideology respectively. Transmission is a term that suggests various types of diffusion: diffusion of the language itself or at least of aspects of the language; diffusion of knowledge about the language; and the diffusion of resources for the study of the language. Between them, the five chapters in Part I of this volume cover these aspects: dictionaries and grammars (Considine, Chapter 1, and Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Chapter 2) as the formal means of documenting the language at the onset of the late modern period, beginning approximately at the turn of the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries. From the seventeenth century onwards, and especially in the eighteenth century, these publications were the interface at which the ever-increasing reading public related to scholars working on the English language, albeit in a manner which would nowadays be labelled as prescriptive. The first part of the volume then moves to the present to consider how the history of English is represented in today’s digital age (Tagg and Evans, Chapter 4) and to document the resources available for the language in non-print media, especially the internet (Miura, Chapter 5).

Part II is dedicated to documenting the major instances of change in English in the past three to four centuries across the different levels of language. It begins with considerations of the emergent system of spelling (Conde- Silvestre and Hernández-Campoy, Chapter 6) and continues with considerations of the sound system (Stenbrenden, Chapter 7) and its application (Crystal, Chapter 8) along with a detailed study of the emerging pronunciation standard (Mugglestone, Chapter 9) and of the history of /r/ in English (Hickey, Chapter 10) . There follow eight detailed chapters on the broad field of syntax (De Smet, Chapter 11 to Bowie and Aarts, Chapter 18). Questions pertaining to written registers (Yáñez-Bouza and Perez-Guerra, Chapter 19) and semantics as well as pragmatics (Fitzmaurice and Mehl, Chapter 20, and Brinton, Chapter 21) conclude this middle part of the volume.

Part III is focused on so-called external factors in language development and change. First and foremost of these are the ideology of the emerging standard (Milroy, Chapter 22) and the issues surrounding increasing prescriptivism found in the eighteenth century (Chapman, Chapter 23). The role of dictionaries in recording the language and the part they played in its standardisation are treated (Brewer, Chapter 24) as attention is paid to the social groups of different kinds into which speakers organised themselves – networks, coalitions and communities of practice (Dossena, Chapter 25, Kopaczyk-McPherson and Jucker, Chapter 26). Finally, the significance of enregisterment, the public recognition of key features of varieties, for their further development is scrutinised (Beal and Cooper, Chapter 27).

I The Transmission of English

Chapter 1 by John Considine considers the role of dictionaries throughout the history of English, from the earliest Anglo-Saxon glosses onwards. He challenges the received view of dictionaries as primarily instruments of standardisation. The Anglo-Saxon glosses, in providing English equivalents for Latin words, were agents in the transmission of written English, to the students who used them at the time, and as records of the language of their time. They also played an important role in education, in the multilingual use of English (alongside Latin in this case) and, in recording and often inventing English equivalents for the Latin words, in expanding the vocabulary and establishing the credentials of English. Considine demonstrates how these functions of dictionaries continue throughout the history of English lexicography (Considine 2019), with more recent dictionaries also transmitting information about the pluricentricity of the language.

Chapter 2 by Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade addresses the question of how early grammars of English were written (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2008). Concentrating on grammars produced from the late sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth centuries, she demonstrates that early grammars of English were based on Latin because no other model of grammar was available, but that grammarians increasingly became aware of features peculiar to English. She also considers the intended readership of the grammars and the role of publishers in facilitating and disseminating them.

In Chapter 3, Peter Grund gives an account of speech representation in the history of English. He traces the development of ways of marking direct and indirect speech from Middle English onwards, and in various genres such as legal depositions and fiction. He issues a note of caution regarding the use of direct speech as a resource for reconstructing the language of the past, since, even in court depositions, speech is not necessarily recorded verbatim but mediated by context and scribes (Kytö and Smitterberg 2020). Grund concludes that there is still much research to be done in this relatively new field.

Chapter 4, by Caroline Tagg and Melanie Evans, examines the role of digitally mediated interaction in the history of English. They identify three phases in the evolution of such interaction: the emergent stage from the 1980s to 2000 when digital interaction was restricted to elite groups on platforms such as email and bulletin boards; the expanding stage in the first decade of the twenty-first century, characterised by greater democratisation and the potential for synchronous interaction via SMS and early social media platforms such as MySpace; and the embedding phase from 2010 onwards, involving a greater array of platforms such as TikTok, Facebook and Twitter, and the tendency for online activities to blend with users’ offline lives. For each of these phases, Tagg and Evans present an analysis of data from a characteristic platform: a newsgroup on Usenet, a corpus of SMS messages and a Twitter corpus respectively. They discover that, whilst the data from the Usenet corpus differ little from pre-digital written language, those from the two later corpora become increasingly multilingual and multimodal (Danet and Herring 2007).

Chapter 5, by Ayumi Miura, provides an overview of internet resources for the history of English, most of which have been developed and made available in the course of the twenty-first century, after the publication of the original Cambridge History of the English Language. Each section is ordered chronologically, starting with resources for the study of Old English. The chapter surveys digitised manuscripts and facsimiles; editions; dictionaries and concordances; maps and atlases; corpora and databases; multimedia learning tools; and communication platforms. Miura argues that, whilst these resources have transformed research into, and teaching of, the history of English (Moore and Palmer 2019), there are some drawbacks, such as the tendency for URLs to change or become obsolete. She suggests that there is a need for some overarching organisation to manage these resources on behalf of the community of scholars, teachers and students working in the history of English (Hejná and Walkden 2022).

II Tracking Change in the History of English

The theme of Part II is ‘tracking change’. The sixteen chapters in this section complement and supplement the ‘long view’ chapters in Part I, providing more detailed accounts of change in areas of the language where recent research has revealed new insights or new perspectives. The chapters have been organised thematically, with five chapters on spelling and phonology, eight on grammar and syntax and the remaining three on register, semantics and pragmatics respectively.

Chapter 6 by Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre and Juan Manuel Hernández- Campoy deals with spelling practices and the emergence of standard writing. The authors concentrate on developments in the fifteenth century, when evidence for standardisation began to emerge. They demonstrate how, since the beginning of the twenty-first century, detailed examination of a wide range of texts of various genres and geographical origins, along with a sociohistorical approach, has called into question the previously accepted idea that standardisation of English spelling was a ‘top-down’ process imposed by Chancery (Wright 2020). Instead, what emerges is the evolution of a number of locally and regionally focused varieties which developed as a result of ‘bottom-up’ processes such as koineisation, levelling and supralocalisation. After an overview of research in this area, the authors present two case studies which respectively demonstrate the agency of a community of practice and the spread of variants from higher social groups and more formal styles across time.

Chapter 7 by Gjertrud Stenbrenden presents a detailed case study of the Great Vowel Shift (GVS, or Long Vowel Shift, see Minkova, Vol. I; Minkova 2014) in order to discuss the nature of phonological change and the challenges it poses to phonological theory. The chapter begins with an account of phonological change and of vowel shifts as a particular type of change. She then goes on to give a brief account of evidence for the GVS and of the different interpretations of this evidence as to the timing and nature of the shift. The following sections discuss how the GVS is explained within six different theoretical frameworks: generative phonology, optimality theory, particle phonology, cognitive linguistics, evolutionary linguistics and articulatory phonology. She concludes by asking whether historical phonology should confine itself to finding the most economical account of how systems change or also take into account actuation and therefore include the phonetic aspects of phonology.

Chapter 8 by David Crystal provides an account of the application of historical phonology to non-academic or non-specialist practitioners who have an interest in reconstructing the pronunciation of the past. This is a field in which Crystal has been the pioneer in developing Original Pronunciation (OP) as a field of linguistics in which the expertise of historical phonologists is applied in the ‘elucidation of language problems which have arisen in other areas of experience’. The most well-known application of OP has been in Crystal’s collaborations with theatre groups, including the Royal Shakespeare Company, to facilitate productions in a reconstructed pronunciation of Shakespeare’s time (Crystal 2016). Crystal provides a detailed account of the challenges and rewards of this enterprise, but also discusses the application of historical phonology in early music; in readings of the King James Bible and liturgical settings; heritage settings and non-dramatic poetry. He discusses the challenges involved in reconstructing the OP of periods, such as that of Shakespeare, when the evidence provides many variants, and the need for informed decisions that take into account the needs of the practitioner. His conclusion acknowledges the tension between linguistic theory and applied practice in OP but expresses the hope that more historical phonologists will engage with practitioners and other groups with an interest in reconstruction.

In Chapter 9, Lynda Mugglestone tracks the emergence of the supraregional variety of British English pronunciation which became known as RP (Mugglestone 2003). She shows that whilst the orthoepists of the seventeenth century sought to establish an inventory of the sounds of English, those of the eighteenth century defined orthoepy as ‘the right pronunciation of words’. Mugglestone demonstrates how the pronouncing dictionaries of the eighteenth century sought to establish and disseminate a supraregional norm, whilst elocution lectures and classes provided more practical ways of acquiring it. She goes on to provide evidence from ego-documents of the practices of those who wished to acquire this pronunciation. Whilst the phoneticians of the nineteenth century, such as Ellis, denied that this supraregional variety was a standard, it was firmly established in popular consciousness as the correct way to speak. Mugglestone illustrates this point with cartoons from popular publications such as Punch, in which shibboleths of pronunciation are lampooned. Finally, Mugglestone considers the role of the BBC in disseminating RP and notes that, despite the alleged democratisation of attitudes to accent in the twenty-first century, there is still a market for ‘accent reduction’ programmes.

Chapter 10 by Raymond Hickey provides a detailed account of the history of /r/, or rhotics. This phoneme merits close attention because of its wide variety of realisations in varieties of English and in other languages; its effect on neighbouring segments, triggering epenthesis and metathesis as well as various sandhi phenomena; and its salience in classifying and differentiating varieties of English. Hickey begins with an account of the phonetic nature of rhotics and processes involving rhotics in English and other languages before proceeding to the history of these sounds in English. He traces the development of /r/ from what may have been a bunched /r/ or possibly a uvular realisation in Old English, triggering breaking in West Saxon, to an apical sound and to the loss of rhoticity in some varieties, starting with those of London and the South-East of England. He goes on to discuss the effect caused by the loss of rhoticity on vowels and diphthongs preceding historical /r/ and the effect of /r/ on neighbouring sibilants and dentals before providing an account of differences between varieties of English involving /r/ and neighbouring segments.

In Chapter 11, Hendrik De Smet provides an account of the history of complement clauses (CCs) in English (De Smet 2013). He begins by providing a definition of CCs as a particular type of subordinate clause, traditionally described as filling the argument slot in the higher clause, though he notes that this analysis has recently been challenged. De Smet suggests instead that, especially since the distribution of CCs tends to be lexically patterned, they should instead be defined as lexically licensed by the higher clauses that they complement. He then goes on to outline the many types and subtypes of CCs in English, noting that the system of complementation in English is much more complex than those of other West Germanic languages. The following sections deal respectively with the questions of how CCs emerge, how they evolve and how the system of CCs evolves. In the last of these sections, De Smet notes that the system of CCs in English has been in a constant state of flux, and that the changes in the system are interconnected, which has led to the term ‘Great Complement Shift’ being applied to this set of changes. Finally, De Smet addresses the question ‘what becomes of CCs?’, arguing that there is a tendency for CCs to become more prominent than their main clauses and subsequently become more like main clauses themselves.

Chapter 12, by Teresa Fanego, traces the history of tense, aspect and modality in English (Fischer 2007; Salkie Busuttil and van der Auwera 2009). Fanego begins by relating how the aspectual system of Proto-Indo-European, consisting of imperfective, perfective and retrospective aspects, was replaced in Germanic by the two-tense system of past and non-past. This meant that, in Germanic languages including English, analytical patterns evolved to mark aspectual distinctions. The chapter goes on to discuss tense, aspect and modality in turn. With regard to tense, Fanego traces the development of uses of the past and non-past, including the emergence of new functions such as the historical present and the irrealis past. Important developments in the aspectual system are then discussed: the emergence of periphrastic perfects with BE and HAVE and the decline of the former; the grammaticalisation of the BE Ving construction and the more recent increase in progressive forms with COME and GO; and the decline of the inflectional subjunctive from Old English to Late Modern English, followed by its revival in mandative contexts from the early twentieth century.

In Chapter 13, Peter Petré provides an account of developments in the passive construction from Old English to the present day (Petré 2014; Anderwald 2016). He notes that, whilst examples from Old English, originating in a copula + past participle construction, were adjectival in nature, passives became increasingly verbal in nature in the course of Middle English. He also discusses how, once the passive is interpreted as verbal, it can act as an alternative to an active construction, and so can be used with pragmatic and discourse functions which involve foregrounding or backgrounding the patient: such uses become more frequent in Middle and Early Modern English. Petré goes on to discuss extensions of the passive construction which develop from Middle English onwards, noting that these are rare or non-existent in other Germanic languages. These extensions include the prepositional passive (‘he is well thought of’), the recipient passive (‘he was given a book’) and the Nominative with Infinitive construction (‘she is known to be rich’), all of which are first attested in Middle English but become increasingly frequent in Early and Late Modern English. The last two extensions to be discussed are the passival (‘the house is building’) and the progressive passive (‘the house is being built’); the first of these developing from a gerundial construction in Old English, reaching a peak in the seventeenth century and then being largely replaced by the progressive passive in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Petré furthermore discusses the emergence of the get passive in Early Modern English and the mediopassive construction (‘this book sells well’), which becomes common from the seventeenth century onwards. He concludes that the history of the passive in English involved a process of grammaticalisation and that it is best described as a family of constructions.

Chapter 14 by Ursula Lenker provides an account of adverbs in English. Lenker begins by noting that adverbs have hitherto been relatively neglected by scholars, possibly because of their heterogeneity. She begins by providing an account of changes in the form and formation of adverbs from Old English onwards (Hasselgård 2010; Lenker 2010). The most important development here is the emergence of the suffix -lice, originally formed by the addition of the adverbial suffix -e to the adjectival -lic (itself derived from the noun -lic ‘body’). The reduced form -ly was first attested in Northern and Midland sources from the thirteenth century, and from Middle English became established as the signature of adverbs. Lenker goes on to discuss the functional diversification of adverbs. Apart from modifiers such as very, really etc., which have been stable as a category but subject to lexical change and recycling, she identifies three types of adverb: circumstance, relating to the speaker’s viewpoint according to place (here), time (now) or manner (well); and stance adverbs such as perhaps, maybe, fulfilling epistemic functions. Of these, only circumstance adverbs have existed throughout the history of English: stance adverbs emerged in Early Modern English, when the loss of subjunctive inflections led to the need for other ways of expressing modality, whilst circumstance adverbs are first attested in the nineteenth century and are now most frequently used in academic discourse. Lenker thus demonstrates that there is much more of interest in the history of adverbs in English than the much researched areas of variation between -ly and zero forms of adverbs and sociolinguistic variation in the use of intensifiers.

Negation is one of the most widely researched areas of English morphosyntax (Anderwald 2002) and in Chapter 15 Gabriella Mazzon tells its story. She argues that, in order to cover the history and continuing variability of negation in English, it is necessary to include accounts of semantic, pragmatic and sociolinguistic as well as strictly morphosyntactic research. Mazzon begins with an account of the process known as ‘Jespersen’s cycle’. This describes how, in English and many other languages, there is a diachronic sequence from pre-verbal negation as in Old English ne + verb, to reinforcement with a post-verbal element, ne + verb + not, to dropping of the pre-verbal element to give verb + not, and finally the movement of the negator to pre-verbal position as in do + not + verb, which restarts the cycle. Mazzon goes on to note that there has been criticism of Jespersen’s cycle, notably with regard to the variation which persists in various stages of English. The chapter then goes on to discuss negative concord. Whilst noting that discussion of this feature needs to include consideration of standardisation and regulation, Mazzon cites several studies that demonstrate how multiple negation in English was declining well before the publication of grammars that proscribed it. Pragmatic aspects of negation are then discussed, including negative raising, contrastive negation and paratactic negation. The following section deals with lexical and semantic aspects of negation, including an account of the history of the n- prefix, which was highly productive in Old English, but became less common when negation with pre-verbal ne disappeared. This section also considers negative polarity items (NPIs) such as an inch, a damned thing, which only occur in negative contexts. The final section covers variation and change in English negation, including research on ain’t, never as a general negator, the trend for sentences like I haven’t got any to replace for example I’ve got none, and the distribution of negative concord across varieties of English, age, gender etc.

In Chapter 16, Anette Rosenbach focuses on dative and genitive constructions in the history of English (Rosenbach 2002; Allen 2008, 2019), noting that there has been a considerable increase in the study of both since the publication of the original Cambridge History of the English Language. In both these cases, variation now exists between a synthetic construction the king’s crown, John gave Mary a book and a prepositional the crown of the king, John gave a book to Mary. In Old English, the prepositional forms were highly restricted but gained ground from Middle English onwards. Synthetic variants decreased drastically from the thirteenth century but regained some ground in the late fifteenth century and the alternation stabilises from Late Modern English onwards. Drawing on a number of quantitative studies, Rosenbach goes on to consider the role of harmonic alignment in the variation between synthetic and prepositional forms. She concludes that whilst the factors of animacy, length, pronominality and givenness do seem to affect the choice of variant, this is less clear for earlier periods of English and only becomes established in the course of Late Modern English. She then focuses on the factor of animacy, noting that, in the genitive, the synthetic construction is confined to animate and topical possessors and continues to be infrequent with inanimates in Early Modern English, but that there is an extension to possessors low in animacy in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries which is ongoing in present-day English. Whilst the effect of animacy is less strong for the dative, there is a corresponding development in the frequency of the form without to in the twentieth century. Rosenbach then considers the effect of the preference for animate possessors and recipients to be placed earlier in a sentence on the tendency for inflected genitives and the dative with recipient > theme order (John gave Mary a book) to be preferred with animate possessors and referents. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the convergence of developments in genitive and dative constructions.

Chapter 17, by Cristina Suárez-Gómez provides an account of relativisation in the history of English (Suárez-Gómez 2006), concentrating on adnominal relative clauses. The three types of relativiser that exist today, pronominal, invariable and zero, are shown to have been in use from Old English onwards, but the pronominal forms se/seo/þæt were replaced by the wh-relatives from late Middle English onwards, probably as a ‘change from above’ influenced by Latin and French. The invariable relativiser has also been in use throughout the history of English, first as Old English þe then as þat/that. By the thirteenth century, that was the default relativiser, but by the seventeenth century, when the paradigm of wh-relatives was complete, that became confined to inanimate antecedents and restrictive relative clauses. The zero relative has also existed since Old English, but its use was then very restricted. From Early Modern English onwards, the zero relative became more common with object antecedents. Suárez-Gómez goes on to discuss the use of relativisers in present-day English. The three types of relativiser and the use of who versus which vary according to whether the clause is restrictive or non-restrictive, the animacy of the antecedent and the syntactic function of the clause. Large-scale corpus studies reveal that wh-forms are the most frequent, followed by that and zero, but that the use of that increases from the late twentieth century, possibly as a result of colloquialisation and the influence of American English. The last sections of the chapter focus on variation and change in varieties of British English and World Englishes more generally.

In Chapter 18, Jill Bowie and Bas Aarts complement the preceding chapters in this section by focusing on the phenomenon of recent grammatical change in English and the issues involved in researching recent change (Mair 2006; Aarts, Bowie and Popova 2020). They begin with a rebuttal of Saussure’s synchronic/diachronic dichotomy, arguing that language is never in a static synchronic state, since it changes all the time. Bowie and Aarts note that whilst definitions of ‘recent change’ vary, they have chosen to concentrate on changes from 1900 onwards. They go on to give an overview of research on recent grammatical change before focusing on the issues involved in conducting such research, notably sources of data and approaches to tracking change. The section on sources of data provides an overview of the types of corpora that have been compiled for the study of recent change in English. The discussion of approaches to tracking change includes subsections on frequency comparisons of competing variants, frequency measurements of forms against various baselines, productivity measures and statistical approaches, with examples of research in each case. Bowie and Aarts go on to consider the role of genre in recent language change before discussing explanations for change. The latter section includes subsections on drift, grammaticalisation, economy and social influences.

Chapter 19 by Nuria Yáñez-Bouza and Javier Pérez-Guerra is concerned with the study of register in the history of English, focusing on the register of scientific writing. The authors begin by stating that the history of English emerged from the history of its texts, genres and registers (Biber and Conrad 2019). They argue for the importance of register in historical linguistic study, defining register as ‘a variety associated with a particular situation of use’ and note that registers are not internally homogeneous, but include a number of sub-registers. The chapter then provides an overview of the methodology of corpus-based analysis and of previous register studies of scientific English. These have demonstrated that, contrary to the traditional view of academic discourse as linguistically conservative, scientific writing has been the locus of dramatic change and that there has been a drift towards the literate end of the oral–literate dimension, with an increase in economy of language, abstractness and non-narrative characteristics. The chapter then moves on to a case study of five sub-registers of scientific writing in the eighteenth century: philosophy, history, astronomy, life sciences and medicine, according to the dimensions involved/interpersonal vs. narrative/abstract and complex/elaborate vs. non-elaborate. The study shows that philosophy differs from the other sub-registers on both dimensions, being markedly involved and complex, whilst history and astronomy are more narrative/abstract, and all sub-genres except medicine are complex.

The next two chapters deal with semantics and pragmatics respectively. In Chapter 20, Susan Fitzmaurice and Seth Mehl begin by stating that semantic change is rooted in pragmatic meaning and discursive context and distinguishing semantics as involving meaning whereas pragmatics involves use (Scott, Clark and Carston 2019; Sweetser 1990). They use the term ‘discursive concept’ to refer to meaning that emerges from the co-occurrence of lexical items and lemmas in use. The authors provide a historical overview of discursive approaches to semantic change, starting with the work of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century philologists such as Hermann Paul and going on to discuss research into the pragmatic basis of linguistic change, starting in the late twentieth century. They note that the pragmatic approach assumes that pragmatic change is the necessary basis for semantic change and present an account of Traugott’s Invited Inference Theory of Semantic Change and of research carried out in this framework. Fitzmaurice and Mehl go on to set out a new approach to semantic change developed by the Linguistic DNA project. This involves the use of concept modelling, a process designed to automatically identify evidence of discursive concepts as patterns of discourse by extracting patterns of co-occurrence involving four lemmas (quads) across spans of up to 100 tokens of text. The ensuing section presents detailed case studies which demonstrate how research in the Linguistic DNA project maps meaning from quads to discursive context.

Chapter 21 by Laurel Brinton deals with the history of pragmatic markers (PMs) in English (Brinton 1996; 2017). These are defined as syntactically independent forms typically occurring on the left or right periphery of a clause, which serve a variety of pragmatic functions. Brinton provides a list of characteristics of PMs and examples from various periods before briefly discussing approaches to studying them and sources of data in the history of English. A more substantial discussion of PMs follows, before the chapter moves on to an account of their sources (adverbials, main clauses and subordinate clauses) and the syntactic pathways of their development. After a brief discussion of semantic development, Brinton turns to an account of the processes that have been mooted to account for the development of PMs: grammaticalisation, pragmaticalisation and cooptation and the arguments put forward by their respective proponents. She then discusses the merits and limitations of these three approaches, concluding that, if a broad view of ‘grammar’ is adopted, grammaticalisation most adequately accounts for the development of PMs.

III Ideology, Society and the History of English

The final part of this volume reflects the upsurge of interest in sociolinguistic aspects of the history of English, including a more scholarly approach to the study of prescriptivism (Chapman and Rawlins 2020) and the application of sociolinguistic models to historical study (Romaine 1982). The first three chapters deal with prescriptivism and language ideology, whilst the remaining chapters fall within the field of sociohistorical linguistics. In Chapter 22 Lesley Milroy discusses the ideology of standard English (J. Milroy and L. Milroy 1999). She begins by defining the standard language ideology as the pervasive belief that there is a correct linguistic norm from which any deviation is erroneous and noting that professional linguists have tended to dismiss such beliefs as misguided, given what we know about linguistic variation and change (J. Milroy 1992). Milroy argues that language ideologies are constructed by speakers to make sense of observed linguistic variation and that everybody, linguists included, holds such ideologies: there is no such thing as a neutral perspective. She goes on to present a historical account of the standard language ideology as applied to English, concentrating first on the contribution of eighteenth-century authors to the processes involved in standardisation – elimination of variation, specification of norms and the codification of them – before discussing the emergence of social class discrimination in the ideological discourse of the nineteenth century. The following sections deal with the development of linguistics as a discipline and the ideological conflict between academic linguistics and prescriptivism, including an account of the Great Grammar Debate in the United Kingdom towards the end of the twentieth century. Milroy then goes on to compare the standard language ideologies of Britain and the United States.

Chapter 23 by Don Chapman provides a historical account of the discourse of prescriptivism, defined as discourse which evaluates linguistic variants, preferring one over the other(s) and sometimes giving reasons for this. Chapman’s survey begins with Old and Middle English, demonstrating that, whilst there is very little prescriptive discourse extant from these periods and most of this relates to languages other than English, the association of linguistic correctness with moral judgement is evident as early as the tenth century, when Aelfric’s colloquy uses terms such as riht (right) with reference to good Latin usage and idel (useless) to incorrect usage. With regard to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Chapman relates that, whilst prescriptive discourse relates mainly to preferred vs. proscribed dialects or sociolects, towards the end of the period book reviews emerge as a new text-type in which authors are criticised for their use of specific variants. The eighteenth century sees a rise in prescriptive discourse and a proliferation of the forms of discourse, with exercises of false syntax, illustrative quotations and footnotes introduced, and the text-types in which these occur, including usage guides and dictionaries (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2020). Chapman goes on to discuss how the introduction of universal education in the nineteenth century led to a proliferation of pedagogical grammars and self-help guides in which prescriptive discourse was simplified to bald statements of right and wrong. Like Milroy in the previous chapter, Chapman discusses the effect of philology and linguistics (Wright and Hickey, Vol. I), leading to a divide between descriptive and prescriptive accounts of language, but also having the effect of requiring the authors of texts such as usage guides to justify the reasons for their choices. He also discusses the new text-types which arose in the twentieth century: style guides, humorous self-help guides, online blogs and comment threads and, perhaps most influential of all, spell- and grammar checkers.

In Chapter 24, Charlotte Brewer discusses the development of monolingual English dictionaries. She begins by noting that whilst lexicographers, such as the founding editors of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), state that the job of a dictionary is to reflect usage, they all make decisions on which words to include or exclude which are influenced by their historical periods and societies. The chapter concentrates on Johnson’s dictionary and the various editions of the OED (Mugglestone 2000, 2005). After a brief review of English monolingual dictionaries before Johnson, Brewer notes that Johnson’s was the first to be based on a plan of how to choose the words and present the definitions. Johnson was also the first to use illustrative quotations and to give reasons for the authors chosen. Noting that Johnson’s dictionary continued to dominate throughout the nineteenth century, Brewer discusses the innovations of Richardson’s and Webster’s dictionaries before turning to the OED. She notes that, whilst the OED set out to provide a scientific historical account of English words based on quotation evidence, the choice of sources was biased towards literary genres and male authors. They also excluded words that offended the prevailing sense of decency and some definitions reflected attitudes which would be unacceptable today, such as describing some sexual practices as ‘vice’ and non-western peoples as ‘savages’. Brewer goes on to relate how the popular one-volume dictionaries which followed tended not to be updated, preserving the flaws and biases of the original. She then discusses the 1986 Supplement, which, whilst expanding the entries to include more scientific vocabulary and words from World Englishes, still favoured literary sources and left women underrepresented. The merger of this and the first edition into OED2 thus preserved these biases. The chapter then discusses the revolution in lexicography caused by the use of corpora, noting that, although in theory this should result in more objective and inclusive accounts of the vocabulary, manual editing means that corpus-based dictionaries differ in terms of words included and the degree of prescriptivism. The chapter concludes with an account of online dictionaries, beginning with OED3, and noting that, despite the cultural biases of the first two editions being eliminated, the list of the 1,000 most cited authors still demonstrates the underrepresentation of women, and the gradual and ongoing nature of the updating means that some of the shortcomings of the earlier editions remain.

The final three chapters in the volume are concerned with how methods developed in sociolinguistics can be applied to the study of language in historical periods. They reflect the growth of sociohistorical linguistics since the publication of CHEL and the increasing availability of resources for this kind of research (Nevalainen and Brunberg 2016; Timofeeva 2022; Hernández-Campoy and Conde-Silvestre 2025). In Chapter 25, Marina Dossena provides an overview of research into the language of networks and coalitions, concentrating on the late modern period. She notes that, whilst social networks contribute both to the maintenance of norms where strong ties exist and the onset of change where weak ties are concerned, it is difficult to study overarching phenomena via social networks. After a brief discussion of terminology, Dossena goes on to review existing resources for the study of Late Modern English (Beal 2004; Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2009), arguing that most corpora are unsuitable for research into Late Modern English because they rarely provide a representation of the language of all members of the network. She then provides examples of successful research on the language of networks and coalitions in Late Modern English before concluding with a discussion of the role of language ideology in such networks and coalitions.

In Chapter 26, Joanna Kopaczyk-McPherson and Andreas Jucker discuss research involving communities of practice (CoPs) in the history of English (Kopaczyk and Jucker 2013). They note that this framework is relatively new to historical sociolinguistics, having been first developed in the field of anthropology in the context of social learning in the workplace, then taken up by sociolinguists. A CoP is defined as a group of people engaged in a mutual enterprise and having the three dimensions of mutual engagement, joint enterprise and shared tools or a shared repertoire. Kopaczyk-McPherson and Jucker explain the differences between CoPs and social networks and between CoPs and discourse communities before going on to provide an overview of studies on CoPs in the history of English from Old English to the present day. They then focus on two case studies: a synchronic-historical study of the CoP involved in the Salem Witch Trials (Grund 2021) and a diachronic study reconstructing the CoP of a community of town clerks over 200 years. Both these studies involve reconstituting the mutual engagement and shared repertoires of a historical CoP, but the authors note that it is also possible to start from a shared repertoire and then consider the community that produced it, providing examples of the latter. They conclude by noting that the CoP framework is still evolving so that new ways of applying this to historical sociolinguistics can be expected in the future.

The final chapter by Joan C. Beal and Paul Cooper turns to what is perhaps the most recently developed approach to historical sociolinguistics, the framework of indexicality and enregisterment (Agha 2007). The chapter begins with an explanation of these key terms, the origins of the framework for their study in linguistic anthropology and their central role in ‘third-wave’ sociolinguistics. The authors then discuss the challenges facing linguists when applying this framework to historical studies, given that evidence for indexicality and enregisterment consists of expressed attitudes rather than linguistic features per se. They argue that such evidence can be found in metalinguistic comments, literary dialect/dialect literature and ego-documents, before going on to provide an overview of research using each of these three types of evidence. The authors conclude that the use of the framework of indexicality and enregisterment affords insights into the ways in which people viewed language in historical contexts.

This third volume of the New Cambridge History of the English Language illustrates the ways in which research on the history of English has developed, expanded and proliferated since the publication of the original Cambridge History of the English Language in 2001. The twenty-first century has witnessed the development of many diachronic corpora (see also Vol. II in this context). These have facilitated research into various aspects of the history of English, as well as new approaches and sub-disciplines, all of which are represented in this volume.