This conversation between Ilan Stavans and Volker Harm starts with a survey on the history of German lexicography which, in a broader picture, is described as a process of emancipation from bilingual lexicography with Latin toward monolingual lexicography of German. The overview ranges from the glossaries of the Middle Ages, the sixteenth-century schoolmaster dictionaries of Dasypodius and Fries, the benchmark work of Adelung, to the monumental Deutsches Wörterbuch of the Brothers Grimm and their contemporaries, notably the dictionary of Daniel Sanders. It also includes a glimpse on recent online dictionaries such as DWDS, the Duden, and Wortgeschichte digital, the dictionary Harm is currently working on. The status of dictionaries in German culture, and especially the relation of Grimm’s dictionary toward its audience, is explored as well. Another focus is on the practice of dictionary-making. A brief insight is given into Harm’s work on several historical dictionaries – printed and online – his academic background, and what his motivation was to start with the very special job of a dictionary worker.

This chapter explores the personal letter in the history of English through textual and material conventions of letter-writing, community aspects of letter-writing and language, and the role of editors and the reliability of edited epistolary sources. Community context is viewed as contemporary letter-writing practices, the involvement and influence of social networks and social relationships in letter-writing and language use, and the human factor and community aspects inherent in editing letters and compiling corpora.

This conversation between Ilan Stavans and Yukio Tono reveals a rich and complex history of Japanese lexicography, spanning over 1,400 years, from the earliest Kanji-character dictionaries of the 7th century to the present day. Japanese lexicography has evolved significantly, with a notable surge in the development of monolingual dictionaries after World War II. The history of bilingual lexicography, including English-Japanese and Japanese-English dictionaries, is also a significant area of development. Additionally, the development of electronic pocket dictionaries containing more than 100 full-content dictionaries was a unique technological innovation in Japanese monolingual and bilingual lexicography. In recent years, online dictionaries have become increasingly popular, offering users convenient and accessible ways to look up words and phrases. This overview provides a general summary of the development of Japanese lexicography, from its early beginnings to the present day, highlighting key milestones and trends in the field.

This chapter uncovers the power of academic language in bilingual education. Unlike casual speech, academic language is structured, dense, and cognitively demanding – challenging L2 learners. Success requires ‘L2 instructional competence’, blending language proficiency with advanced cognitive functions.

We explore key theories like the threshold hypothesis, which suggests a minimum language level for learning, and the interdependence hypothesis, which highlights skill transfer between languages. Classroom models categorize tasks by cognitive demand, illustrating structured speaking patterns and the need for rediscursification – language adjustments that enhance comprehension.

Academic language is crucial for professional and societal success, from writing essays to understanding abstract concepts. Biliteracy is a continuous process, supported by bilingual programmes such as CLIL and EMI. By linking cognitive insights with multilingual education, this chapter sets the foundation for quality bilingual instruction in a multilingual world.

Africa is a linguistically diverse continent, hosting between 1,250 and 2,100 languages. Some of the prominent languages include Swahili, Hausa, Lingala, Amharic, Yoruba, Oromo, Zulu, Xhosa, and Sotho. Lexicography in African languages has been shaped by colonialism and subsequent language politics. Pioneer dictionaries were compiled by European prospectors, missionaries, and colonial administrators, primarily for their own use as they needed to learn African languages and communicate with local communities. While those early dictionaries made landmark contributions toward the development of African languages and some of them remain useful even today, they often failed to accurately represent African languages’ linguistic, cultural, and religious systems. Mother-tongue speakers of African languages started to drive internally motivated lexicographic projects in the twentieth century, prioritizing mother-tongue speakers as target users. Dictionaries began to occupy a prominent position in the development of African languages. This has resulted in some governments such as in South Africa investing in dictionary-making and universities offering academic and professional lexicographic training.

This chapter explores the intersection of historical linguistics and psycholinguistics by investigating the role of core psycholinguistic factors and phenomena in language change: frequency, salience, chunking, priming, analogy, ambiguity and acquisition. Recent research from cognitive sciences, particularly within a complex systems framework, reveals that language change is influenced by patterns of use and is interconnected with language acquisition and cognition. Bridging the gap between community and individual research, the chapter highlights studies that explore this relationship. It also examines the potential of psycholinguistic methodologies for diachronic research. Additionally, the chapter suggests avenues for further research where psycholinguistic perspectives have had less impact on the study of historical language change. Furthermore, it discusses how psycholinguistic factors have been incorporated into various theoretical approaches to English language change, such as generative and usage-based modelling.

The Old English poem Beowulf is a particularly valuable source of information about early features of the English language. In its present form the poem is recorded in a manuscript of unknown provenance made, in all probability, shortly after the millennium. Yet it evinces linguistic features that are highly conservative, suggesting that the extant text was copied, perhaps directly, from a much older exemplar, and that the poem was composed in a more northerly dialect than the Late West Saxon one in which it is preserved. Some of the poem’s conservative linguistic features are detectable only on the basis of poetic meter. Other of the poem’s archaic features include some that are orthographic in nature: phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical and metrical. Beowulf is not the only linguistically conservative poem preserved in Old English, but in many ways it reveals, more than any other poem, a great deal about what the language was like at a much earlier time than that at which all but a minuscule portion of the total extant corpus of Old English was recorded. It is thus an invaluable window on the prehistory of the English language.

This conversation focuses on the history of dictionary-making for ancient Greek, especially focused on the post-classical phase of the language in use during the time in which the New Testament and early Christian writings were produced. The discussions highlights the philological chain of dependence through the history of ancient Greek lexicons and their methodological overlap with contemporary modern language dictionaries.

In this chapter, we address some ways in which the use of corpora has revolutionised the study of the history of English. We first account for the development of historical corpora of English and discuss advantages and drawbacks associated with different corpus sizes. We also address types of language use that are not well represented in existing corpora, potential clashes between comparability and representativity, and features such as tagging and spelling normalisation. We then consider contributions that historical corpora have made to specific linguistic fields, notably in variationist studies, historical sociolinguistics and historical pragmatics, and illustrate historical corpus methodology by presenting a case study on sentence-initial and in Late Modern English based on the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). We conclude the chapter with a list of desiderata for future corpus-based research on the history of the English language.

The wide-ranging conversation in this chapter between Ilan Stavans and Mark Turin terminological and definitional questions – such as what and who is Indigenous – the status and importance of linguistic diversity in North America and South Asia, and the role of missionaries in early dictionary work. Turin and Stavans discuss complex questions of colonialism, migration and settlement, Indigenous sovereignty in language work, and the powerful space that dictionaries occupy in language reclamation and revitalization projects. Turin offers ethnographic examples and cultural vignettes from his three decades of collaborative work with the Thangmi-speaking community of eastern Nepal, whose Indigenous Tibeto-Burman language he documented and for which he helped develop an orthography.

This chapter examines courtroom documents, focusing on trials and depositions, which offer glimpses of spoken language of the past. Trials written in English, often in the form of questions and answers, are rare before the late sixteenth century. Depositions, the oral testimony of a witness recorded by a scribe prior to trial and used as evidence, become more available in English from the mid sixteenth century. Trials and depositions exist as manuscripts, contemporaneous printed texts and later printed editions, and have recently become accessible through corpora and modern linguistic editions. Manuscripts (already one step beyond the original speech event) are less susceptible to interference by editors, printers and so on, but even these texts should not be treated as verbatim records. Nevertheless, the texts supply valuable data for researchers taking historical pragmatic and sociolinguistic approaches and/or examining linguistic variation and change, and in a wide range of other areas.

In this chapter, I argue for the importance of two models in explorations of orality in the history of English: communicative immediacy and ‘oral/conversational diagnostics’, within the framework of oral vs. literate/production styles. Based on the two models, I identify certain (sub)registers and genres as reference points for assessing the nature of orality reflected in historical linguistic data. In addition, I use the major conclusions of the ‘bad’ data debate, foundational for historical pragmatics, as a springboard for a selective survey of research focused on interjections, speech acts, and specific discourse domains and genres such as wills, courtroom discourse and letters. Potential directions for future research and new data sources are also provided to indicate gaps in the coverage of historical oralities in English.

The chapter considers the nature of lexical borrowing and the challenges of identifying the contribution that it has made to the lexicon of English. It looks at the major sources of data, especially historical dictionaries. It considers the importance of identifying by whom a word is used, and in which contexts. It also examines phenomena of discontinuity and multiple inputs in the histories of words, and the challenges that these present for constructing linear histories of English words, and larger-scale narratives of the history of the lexicon.

This chapter examines key features of the language of print newspapers in Britain from the founding of the London Gazette in 1665 up until the present day. It describes significant milestones in the history of English newspapers, outlining major socio-historical, economic, cultural and technological developments which have had an impact on the emergence, diversification and professionalisation of this important mass medium. After an overview of the major subgenres found in these multi-text conglomerates – news, opinion and advertising – the focus is on news reports. The chapter outlines how the chronological mode of reporting news preferred in the first two hundred years of newspapers gave way to the inverted pyramid style of news narration, subsequently abandoned for more flexible models like the package approach in modern news discourse. Furthermore, this chapter provides insights into contemporary journalistic ideals and practices employed in positioning the paper and balancing information density and readership appeal.