Drawing on their classroom experiences, five secondary school language educators present how training in linguistics has positively impacted their pedagogical practices and increased student engagement, enjoyment, and motivation. These teachers of French, German, Latin, and Spanish describe how they bring linguistics into the L2 classroom, giving concrete examples of how the metalinguistic and social awareness that comes with “doing linguistics” can help students learn new languages by drawing on their L1 strengths, as well as gain an appreciation of the beauty and complexity of language, contributing to a welcoming classroom for students of all language backgrounds. These examples, alongside the student feedback described in the chapter, demonstrate that training teachers in linguistics has the potential to keep students curious and motivated, improving both student retention and learning outcomes in secondary L2 classes.

This chapter deals with changes between 1700 and 1900. It begins with analysis of a text from 1711 to illustrate the differences between the English of this period and the present day. There are sections on spelling and punctuation; standardization, codification, and prescriptivism; the verb system (the progressive in particular); phonological change and Received Pronunciation; and scientific vocabulary and lexical innovation more broadly, including an account of the methods of word formation. The importance of corpora and other electronic resources for research into the language of this period is discussed, and the chapter draws on these resources and research based on them.

This chapter discusses standardisation as a major factor in sociolinguistic history. After a brief dicussion of basic concepts such as diglossia, Ausbau, Abstand and diaglossia, we introduce the Haugen model, including the key concepts of selection, codification, elaboration and acceptance. We go on to argue that the later introduced concept of implementation is crucial in analyses of the interaction of norms and language use in the language community. Focusing on this interaction, and based on case studies from English and Dutch, three scenarios are distinguished: prescriptive influence, prescriptive delay and concurrent prescriptivism. The chapter ends by situating the interaction of norms and usage into the wider framework of the total linguistic fact as developed by Silverstein.

This chapter looks at changes in the first quarter of the twenty-first century and discusses possible future developments. The role of social media, migration, and travel in the rapid global spread of new features is discussed, as is the levelling of local and regional varieties and the rise of multicultural varieties in large cities. The Oxford English Dictionary is used to illustrate patterns of lexical innovation and changes of meaning in this period. Recent changes in the nature and status of Received Pronunciation are outlined. Sections devoted to recent changes in pronunciation and grammar are followed by discussion of possible future trends.

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.

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.

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.

Even after many decades of incessant research, the system of negation in English still has a story to tell, especially as concerns its diachronic development. This chapter will try to tell this story by reviewing a few of the main strands and occasionally delving into details. The chapter will follow a thematic, rather than a chronological, progression, and will mostly focus on sentential negation, which is still being discussed in its diachronic development more than a century after Jespersen’s hypothesised ‘negative cycle’. Formal approaches will be mentioned, but the chapter will give greater prominence to sociolinguistic and socio-pragmatic angles of research on English negation from a diachronic point of view. Some space is devoted to recent research on phenomena such as multiple negation, as well as to the influence of pragmatic factors on negation patterns and to lexicalised forms of negation.

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.

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 chapter presents an overview of relative clauses and relativisation processes from Old English to Contemporary English, as well as in varieties of English around the world. It centres on adnominal restrictive relative clauses and addresses the factors determining the distribution of relativisers used to introduce the relative clause. Of particular interest will be the changing frequency of each relativiser over time, and the changing weight of the relevant predictors used, focusing on those of a semantic, morphosyntactic, social or stylistic nature. Also included will be a micro-analysis of recent changes in relation to relative constructions and individual relativisers, especially in less formal language, such as the demise of which in favour of that and the specialisation of who with human antecedents in subject function. Already widely reported in both standard and World Englishes, these innovations are likely to become part of the grammatical core of standard English.

Often regarded as comprehensive, impartial and authoritative works, monolingual dictionaries of the standard variety of English have never been neutral repositories of vocabulary. Instead, they have acted as vehicles for ideologies of one sort or another, transmitting societal values as well as linguistic information. All dictionary-makers make decisions on whose and which words to include and to exclude; equally all gather and process these words in ways that influence their presentation to the dictionary-user, employing editorial methods and technological means that have varied from one period to another. This chapter focuses on Johnson’s Dictionary and successive versions of the Oxford English Dictionary in an historically organised account of dictionaries to the present day, noting the under-representation in these two works of women as language-producers. It also discusses editions of the Webster dictionaries, of twentieth-century desk dictionaries before and after the introduction of corpus-based lexicography, and online dictionaries.

The English language is generally discussed publicly with reference to an ideologically constructed correct form. Such discourses first emerged in the eighteenth century forming part of a long process of language standardisation, a process associated with major political imperatives. Standard language ideologies, articulated and maintained by powerful social groups, vary in different nations. Distinctive British and American ideologies are associated with critical points in national histories, and have the effect of disadvantaging specific social groups by disparaging their language varieties. Rather than being dismissed as examples of ill-informed misunderstanding of the nature of language promoted by powerful speakers for their own purposes, such ideologies can be considered more broadly as part of a larger set of perspectives on language articulated by language users, intimately connected not only with vested social and political interests but with explaining connections between language and the social world or describing its structure systematically.

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.

The chapter is divided into two parts, focusing on historiography and methodology, respectively, and linked by a survey of the functions of punctuation over time. The historiographical part offers a discussion on the principles of written language, the fundamental representational principles and functional designs in the history of English orthography, and the system and status of Present-Day English orthography in terms of the main historical lines as seen from structural as well as sociolinguistic viewpoints. The emphasis in the methodological part is on the development of new approaches and methodologies based on the expanding digitisation of historical texts that have grown in interdisciplinary ways out of the traditional philological paradigm – research primarily using large digital datasets and corpus-driven methodologies, as well as exploring the data in innovative ways to chart sociolinguistic networks.

This chapter focuses on the authors’ personal experience challenging some of the dominant language ideologies in Croatia’s public sphere. We first provide a brief overview of the language situation in Croatia with special emphasis on the prevailing conceptualizations of language(s) in the works of established language ideologues and authors of usage guides, found in popular language-focused television and radio programs as well. We then move on to classifying and addressing some of the positive and also negative (print, audio, online) reactions from the conservative linguistic circles and their ideologies and discourse strategies following the publication of our book Jeziku je svejedno [Language could care less, 2019, Zagreb: Sandorf], in which we carried out a detailed qualitative critical analysis of prescriptivist discourse in Croatia, most notably as found in contemporary usage guides. Finally, we outline some of our ideas for future activist work with the aim of deconstructing harmful language ideologies, empowering average speakers and reducing the level of linguistic insecurity and self-hatred.

The complications of usage in general dictionaries and the complications of dictionaries in specialized dictionaries of usage. Superficially, usage refers to “good usage” or correctness judgments about language variation, like lie vs. lay, and general dictionaries have tried to signal such judgments for some words. Yet usage also refers to “actual usage,” “contextual usage,” and “traditional usage,” which are all bound up with the simpler notion of “good usage.” The first part of this chapter elaborates these types of usage, the relationships among them, and the ways general dictionaries have incorporated all four types. The second part focuses on specialized dictionaries that focus exclusively on usage issues in all four senses. Such dictionaries vary widely in their macro-structures and micro-structures, and the chapter provides a framework for discerning elements within the entries. Dictionaries of usage are usually better than general dictionaries in giving detailed explanations and treating more issues and more kinds of issues. They do not seem to have improved on general dictionaries for identifying the most important usage issues to be aware of.