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  3. The New Cambridge History of the English Language
  • General Editors: Raymond Hickey, Universitat Duisburg-Essen

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5 results in The New Cambridge History of the English Language

The New Cambridge History of the English Language
  • Britain, Ireland and Europe
  • Volume 4
  • Edited by Raymond Hickey
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    February 2026
    Print publication:
    28 February 2026
  • 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.

The New Cambridge History of the English Language

The New Cambridge History of the English Language
  • Transmission, Change and Ideology
  • Volume 3
  • Edited by Joan C. Beal
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    January 2026
    Print publication:
    31 October 2025
  • How language change manifests itself in the history of English is the primary focus of this volume. It considers the transmission of English through dictionaries and grammars down to the digital means found today. The chapters investigate various issues in language change, for instance what role internal and external factors played throughout history. There are several dedicated chapters to change in different areas and on different levels of language, including investigations of the verbal system, of adverbs, of negation and case variation in English as well as more recent instances of syntactic change. It also looks at issues such as style and spelling practices which fed into emergent standard writing, and the complex of linguistic prescriptivism, with chapters on linguistic ideology, phonological standards and the codification of English in dictionaries. The volume concludes with a consideration of networks and communities of practice and the historical enregisterment of linguistic features.

The New Cambridge History of the English Language
  • Documentation, Sources of Data and Modelling
  • Volume 2
  • Edited by Merja Kytö, Erik Smitterberg
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    January 2026
    Print publication:
    30 September 2025
  • This volume considers the various kinds of text which document the history of the English language. It looks closely at vernacular speech in writing and the broader context of orality along with issues of literacy and manuscripts. The value of text corpora in the collection and analysis of historical data is demonstrated in a number of chapters. A special focus of the volume is seen in the chapters on genre and medium in the textual record. Various types of evidence are considered, for instance, journalistic work, medical writings, historiography, grammatical treatises and ego documents, especially emigrant letters. A dedicated section examines the theories, models and methods which have been applied to the textual record of historical English, including generative and functionalist approaches as well as grammaticalisation and construction grammar. In addition, a group of chapters consider the English language as found in Beowulf and the writings of Chaucer and Shakespeare.

The New Cambridge History of the English Language
  • Context, Contact and Development
  • Volume 1
  • Edited by Laura Wright, Raymond Hickey
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    January 2026
    Print publication:
    30 September 2025
  • 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.