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This volume offers in-depth coverage of varieties of English across the world, outside of the British and North American arenas. It is split into two parts, with Part 1 dedicated to varieties of English across Africa, and Part 2 looking at varieties in Asia, and Australia and the Pacific. There are introductory chapters dealing with the colonial transportation of English overseas, and the generic types of English which resulted, often labelled World Englishes, and examinations of English-lexifier pidgins and creoles. The remaining sections look at different geographic regions. Anglophone Africa divides into three blocks: west, east and south, each with different linguistic ecologies determined by history and demography. Asia, especially South Asia and South-East Asia, is similar in the kinds of English it now shows, with the significance of East Asia for varieties of English increasing in recent years. Varieties of English in Australia and the Pacific are also examined.
This volume offers in-depth coverage of varieties of English across the world, outside of the British and North American arenas. It is split into two parts, with Part one dedicated to varieties of English across Africa, and Part two looking at varieties in Asia, and Australia and the Pacific. There are introductory chapters dealing with the colonial transportation of English overseas, and the generic types of English which resulted, often labelled World Englishes, and examinations of English-lexifier pidgins and creoles. The remaining sections look at different geographic regions. Anglophone Africa divides into three blocks: west, east and south, each with different linguistic ecologies determined by history and demography. Asia, especially South Asia and South-East Asia, is similar in the kinds of English it now shows, with the significance of East Asia for varieties of English increasing in recent years. Varieties of English in Australia and the Pacific are also examined.
This volume examines the development of forms of English in North America from the earliest founder populations through to present-day varieties in the United States and Canada. The linguistic analyses of today's forms emphasise language variation and change with a view to determining the trajectories for current linguistic change. The first part on English in the United States also has dedicated chapters on the history of African American English and the English of Spanish-heritage people in the United States. Part II is concerned with English in Canada and contains seven chapters beginning with the anglophone settlement of Canada and continuing with chapters on individual regions of that country including English in Quebec. Part III consists of chapters devoted to the history of English in the Anglophone Caribbean, looking at various creoles in that region, both in the islands and the Rim, with a special chapter on Jamaica and on the connections between the Caribbean and the United States.
This volume focuses on the vernacular forms of English found at various locations both in Britain and Ireland as well as a few in continental Europe. The goal of these chapters is to provide histories of those dialects not necessarily leading to standard English, largely within the framework of language variation and change, which is the immediate concern of the opening chapters. There follow treatments of dialects in English including that of early London and the various regions of England. The English language in Scotland is given special treatment with chapters on Scots and Standard Scottish English. Wales and Ireland form the focus of subsequent chapters which in particular examine language contact and its effect on English in these regions. The volume closes with presentations of the development of English in the Channel Islands, Gibraltar, Malta and Cyprus.
This volume investigates the Indo-European and Germanic background to the English language, looking at how inherited elements of phonology and morphology survived into the Old English period. It then considers various kinds of contact between the first speakers of English and speakers of Celtic, Latin and Scandinavian, under different sociolinguistic circumstances. The manner in which initial standardisation of English took place, with considerable code-switching, and the structural changes which the language underwent in this early period are discussed. The various analytical methods used to examine the available data are considered in a dedicated chapter on philology. The volume also contains a set of longer chapters. These take a detailed look at various levels of language from phonology, morphology, syntax through to semantics and pragmatics, and include reviews of historical sociolinguistics and onomastics.
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.