This essential new text provides a comprehensive, modern account of how the English language originated, developed, changed, and continues to morph into new forms in contemporary society. Introducing the History of the English Language first offers a rigorous, approachable introduction to the building blocks of language itself and then traces English language usage’s messy development in society, beginning with its origins in the Indo-European language family and continuing chronologically through the Old, Middle, Modern, and present-day forms.
Seth Lerer deftly tells this story not as a tale of standards and authority but of differences and diversity. He draws on public and private literary sources from different regions and those in different social classes, highlighting sources from women and people of color – and introduces readers to the effects of technology on English, and the politics of dialect and racial, gender, regional, and class identity across these periods. Further, this text extensively addresses the rich diversity of English varieties, with innovative, focused chapters dedicated to American English, African American English, Global English, and Virtual English.
Requiring no prior knowledge of language history or linguistics, offering an array of supplemental activities as online support material, and taking a socially motivated approach to pedagogy that seeks to generate productive reflection and discussion about language difference and politics, this book enables and encourages the twenty-first century student in the United States to see their own language use as deeply implicated in power dynamics and social relationships.
List of Figures
List of Tables
Preface
English Phonemes and Transcribing Speech
Acknowledgments
Introduction: What Is Language and How Do We Study It?
Chapter 1: The Indo-European Languages
Chapter 2: The Germanic Languages
Chapter 3: The Old English Period
Chapter 4: Middle English
Chapter 5. From Middle English to Modern English
Chapter 6. English in the Age of Shakespeare and the King James Bible
Chapter 7: The Age of Regulation: British English, 1650-1800
Chapter 8. The Sounds and Shapes of English in Great Britain, 1800-2000
Chapter 9: American English: Origins, Varieties, and Attitudes
Chapter 10: The English Language and the Black Atlantic
Chapter 11: English in the World
Chapter 12: Twenty-First-Century English
Index
Biography
Seth Lerer is Distinguished Professor of Literature Emeritus at the University of California at San Diego, where he has also served as Dean of Arts and Humanities. His publications include Chaucer and His Readers (1993), Error and the Academic Self (2002), Inventing English (revised edition, 2015), Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter (2008), and Shakespeare’s Lyric Stage (2018). He has published creative non-fiction in The American Scholar, The Yale Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and in his memoir, Prospero’s Son (2013).
"With elegance and clarity, and relying on recent developments in sociolinguistic thinking and methodology, Lerer’s Introducing the History of the English Language rights the imbalances of previous accounts by stressing English’s constant diversity. This important book is likely to become the standard textbook for the foreseeable future."
Tim William Machan, University of Notre Dame, USA
"Sensitive to both literature and lived experience, Seth Lerer’s Introducing the History of the English Language offers an accessible guide to English and its many voices. This is the modern, user-friendly textbook I have been waiting for."
Irina Dumitrescu, University of Bonn, Germany
