Fifteen Eighty Four

The New Cambridge History of the English Language represents a second edition of the original Cambridge history published in the 1990s. Much has happened in English historical linguistics in the last three decades and so it was felt that a new history should reflect these shifts in research evident in current historical studies. Specifically, the new history is to take account of the new data sources, methodologies and analytical approaches visible in the field in recent years. In addition, the new history aims at affording full recognition to varieties of English world-wide without prioritizing any one or any small number of these.

The New Cambridge History of the English Language is divided into the following volumes:

Volume I:            Context, contact and development

Volume II:           Documentation, data and modelling

Volume III:          Transmission, change and ideology

Volume IV:          Britain, Ireland and Europe

Volume V:           North America and the Caribbean

Volume VI:          Africa, Asia, Australasia and the Pacific (2 books)

                            Part I:  English in Africa and the South Atlantic

                            Part II: English in Asia, Australasia and the Pacific

The organization of the new history is largely by topic (Vols. I-III) and then by area (Vols. IV-VI). This differs from that of the original Cambridge History of the English Language which was largely chronological (Vols. I-IV) and then by area (Vol. V-VI).

Volume I:            The Beginnings to 1066 (ed. Richard M. Hogg, 1992)

Volume II:           1066-1476 (ed. Nicholas Blake,1992)

Volume III:          1476-1776 (ed. Roger Lass, 1999)

Volume IV:          1776-1997 (ed. Suzanne Romaine, 1998)

Volume V:           English in Britain and Overseas – Origins and Development (ed. Robert Burchfield, 1994)

Volume VI:          English in North America (ed. John Algeo, 2001)

The first three volumes of the new history deal with themes and issues in the history of English before colonial expansion beyond Europe. Volume I begins with the pre-history of English, discussing its Germanic and Indo-European background and examining early contact of English with Celtic, Latin, Old Norse and forms of medieval French. Volume II concentrates on the types of text and evidence which form the documentation of early English. It then moves on to methods and models employed to analysis this data. Volume III focuses on tracing change throughout the history of English and considering the transmission of the language through time. It also considers how language ideology and social attitudes were formative in the rise of standard English, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Volume IV deals with varieties in Britain, Ireland and Europe which did not form an input to later standard English and which were marked by language contact and shift. Volumes V and VI are dedicated to the many varieties of English outside Europe, in the Atlantic and Indo-Pacific arenas, which arose in the past three to four centuries.

In all, the new history consists of some 172 chapters written by 227 contributors from universities around the world. Each volume had an editor or editors whose responsibility it was to coordinate the individual chapters and integrate them into the new history as a unified project.

Volume I:            Laura Wright (Cambridge) & Raymond Hickey (Limerick)

Volume II:           Merja Kytö (Uppsala) & Erik Smitterberg (Uppsala)

Volume III:          Joan Beal (Sheffield)

Volume IV:          Raymond Hickey (Limerick)

Volume V:           Natalie Schilling (Georgetown), Derek Denis (Toronto) & Raymond Hickey (Limerick)

Volume VI:          Raymond Hickey (Limerick)

A View of History

When planning the new history, the first question was: what does one understand by history? For the current work, history is understood as a dynamic process; it is continuously evolving, beginning deep in the past and reaching down to and including the present. Importantly, the history of English is not a straight line from the earliest documents in English to the present-day standard of British English. The image I have chosen to visualize this conception of history is that of a braided river which consists of several streams, which come together, move apart and come together again.

Approaches to the History of English

Most traditional treatments of the history of English have divided it into three large chronological blocks as follows:

Old English (450-1100)

Middle English (1100-1500)

Early Modern English (1500-present)

There are certain disadvantages associated with such a division, above all the frequent implication that the language evolved according to such compartmentalization. It addition, the tripartite division has Early Modern English as its third section, which with the passage of time became increasingly longer. This fact, along with other considerations, let to the following further division:

 Early Modern English (1500-1800)
 Late Modern English (1800- present)

This has allowed scholars to concentrate on essential changes – in language and attitudes – which occurred in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The essential concerns of the late modern period are reflected in many of the contributions in the new history.

Organization of the New History of the English Language

After checking university syllabuses for the history of English across the world, it became clear that practically no universities offered full-term courses using the traditional divisions into chronological segments, e.g. Old or Middle English. Rather the universities have topic-oriented courses, e.g. historical pragmatics, historical corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics and the history of English, etc. So the decision was made to have chapters of about 20-25 pages in the new history. These could then be used as reading material, say for a particular week, within courses dedicated to various historical topics.

The ‘Long View’ Perspective: Seven Detailed Chapters

While choosing the format of single 20-25 page chapters, it was recognised that overviews of linguistic levels and areas over the entire history of English would also be called for. To this end there are, in Volume 1, a series of seven chapters, which provide overviews of the respective fields from the earliest attestations of English down to the present day. The areas covered are the following:

            Phonology      Morphology   Syntax

            Semantics       Pragmatics     Sociolinguistics          Onomastics

The Language of Major Works/Authors

Although detailed treatments of a range of authors from various periods are not given there are nonetheless three chapters dedicated to the English language as found in (i) the Beowulf manuscript, (ii) the works of Geoffrey Chaucer and (iii) the works of William Shakespeare.

Present Research Trends

The research paradigm ‘Language Variation and Change’ has informed much recent research into the history of English. This approach examines minute instances of variation to discern trajectories of language change.

Methodologies

With the advent of powerful computers in the late 1980s and 1990s linguists began collecting large amounts of data – known as text corpora – and began using these increasingly in their research. This research avenue has been greatly expanded in the present century.

Sociolinguistics: Networks and Communities of Practice

The role of networks and communities of practice in social organisation and also in language maintenance and/or change has been increasingly recognised and its insights have been applied to the history of English.

New approaches: Women’s Voices in the History of English

Women authors have been active in many spheres of society over the centuries and have contributed to the textual record of English. There are early religious works by female writers and towards the modern period we find women dramatists and novelists with distinct voices and unique styles of language. Women have also left behind many collections of letters and works criticising practices of their time, notably slavery and colonialism.

New Approaches: Orality in Historical Documents

Scholars began discovering new paths to explore in the history of English. One of these was examining the relationship of colloquial spoken language (shown in texts) to formal written language.

New Approaches: The Rise of Standard English

This is a topic which has garnered much scholarly attention in the past few decades with a focus on how prescriptivism arose as a practice, above all in the nineteenth-century.  This is a practice in which some people tell others how they should speak and write, all the while condemning their native mode of language. It is associated with a number key authors, like Thomas Sheridan, John Walker and Robert Lowth, and with the codification of standard English in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

New Sources of Data

Historical newspapers, emigrant letters and court depositions, such as those of defendants at the Old Bailey in London over a considerable time span (1740-1913), are among the many new sources of historical English, which offer unique insights into vernacular English at various periods.

Furthermore, functional, usage-based and psycholinguistic approaches to language change are considered in dedicated chapters as are grammatical­isation and Construction Grammar, i.e. new models of grammar have arisen as alternatives to the established approaches of generative grammar.

Historical Pragmatics

This field covers a number of topics, such as how norms of politeness (and impoliteness) changed over the centuries. More generally, it also involves the means by which speakers organise their conversations with others, i.e. how they use language in concrete exchanges with others.

Varieties of English in the 21st Century

Africa and Asia have the largest growth in numbers of English speakers and this is likely to increase dramatically in the course of the present century with consequences in terms of the global diversification of English and the future history of the language. For this reason there are many chapters in the new history dedicated to varieties of English in Africa, Asia, Australasia and the Pacific.

Reassessments

A number of issues in the history of English have been reassessed for the new history. An example of this is the contact between speakers of Celtic and Germanic in the Old English period which may well be responsible for certain structures in later English, such as the use of personal pronouns with parts of the body, e.g. Mind you head; My elbow is sore.

Redressing Certain Imbalances

Lastly it should be mentioned that the new history has tried to redress a number of perceived imbalances in the original history. For instance, there were previously only two chapters on English in Canada – this has now be increased to seven – and there was only one on English in South Africa – this has now been increased to four.