The Stories of English

David Crystal

• Publisher: Abrams Press
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN:
  9781585677191
• eBook ISBN:
  9781468306170
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Historical & Comparative Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

A groundbreaking history of worldwide English in all its dialects, differences, and linguistic delights: "Informative . . . distinctive . . . a spirited celebration." — The Guardian
In this "well-informed and appealing" work ( Publishers Weekly), David Crystal puts aside the usual focus on "standard" English, and instead provides a startlingly original view of where the richness, creativity, and diversity of the language truly lies—in the accents and dialects of nonstandard English users all over the world. Whatever their regional, social, or ethnic background, each group has a story worth telling, whether it is in Scotland or Somerset, South Africa or Singapore. He reminds us that for several hundred wonderful years, there was no such thing as "incorrect" English—and traces the evolution of the language from a few thousand Anglo-Saxons to the 1.5 billion people who speak it today.
Moving from Beowulf to Chaucer to Shakespeare to Dickens and the present day, Crystal puts regional speech and writing at center stage, giving a sense of the social realities behind the development of English. This significant shift in perspective enables us to understand for the first time the importance of everyday, previously marginalized, voices in our language—and provides an argument too for the way English should be taught in the future.
"A work of impeccable scholarship [that] could easily serve as a standard textbook for students of linguistics, but Mr. Crystal, reaching out to a more general audience, recognizes that even the most avid reader might flinch at the sections on Old Norse grammatical influence. Cleverly, he has sprinkled the book with little digressions, set apart in boxes, that address historical mysteries, strange loanwords, interesting etymologies and the like." — The New York Times
"Learned and often provocative . . . demonstrates repeatedly that common conceptions about language are often historically inaccurate—split infinitives bothered no one until recently (likewise sentence-ending prepositions)." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
 
"Simply the best introductory history of the English language family that we have. The plan of the book is ingenious, the writing lively, the exposition clear, and the scholarly standard uncompromisingly high." —J.M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• List of Illustrations
• List of Maps
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The origins of Old English
• Chapter 2: The Old English dialects
• Chapter 3: Early lexical diversity
• Chapter 4: Stylistic variation in Old English
• Chapter 5: The transition to Middle English
• Chapter 6: A trilingual nation
• Chapter 7: Lexical invasions
• Chapter 8: Evolving variation
• Chapter 9: A dialect age
• Chapter 10: The emerging standard
• Chapter 11: Printing and its consequences
• Chapter 12: Early Modern English preoccupations
• Chapter 13: Linguistic daring
• Chapter 14: Dialect fallout
• Chapter 15: Stabilizing disorder
• Chapter 16: Standard rules
• Chapter 17: New horizons
• Chapter 18: Linguistic life goes on
• Chapter 19: And dialect life goes on
• Chapter 20: Times a-changin’
• Appendix: The location of the towns and counties of England referred to in this book
• Notes
• References
• Acknowledgements
• Person Index
• Subject Index
• The Stories of English