Includes bibliographical references and index

Table of contents 1. The origins of Old English. The Celtic language puzzle --
2. The Old English dialects. The rise and fall of West Saxon --
3. Early lexical diversity. Understanding Danes --
4. Stylistic variation in Old English. Grammatical transition --
5. The transition to Middle English. Two Peterborough Chronicles --
6. A trilingual nation. Lay Subsidy dialects --
7. Lexical invasions. The first dialect story --
8. Evolving variation. Well well --
9. A dialect age. Where did the -s ending come from? --
10. The emerging standard. Complaining about change --
11. Printing and its consequences. The first English dictionary --
12. Early modern English preoccupations. Choosing thou or you --
13. Linguistic daring. Avoiding transcriptional anaemia --
14. Dialect fallout. A beggarly portrayal --
15. Stabilizing disorder. Delusions of simplicity --
16. Standard rules. Glottal stops --
17. New horizons. Tracking a change : the case of y'all --
18. Linguistic life goes on. The grammatical heart of nonstandard English --
19. And dialect life goes on. Dialect in Middle Earth --
20. Times a-changin'. Appendix : The location of the towns and counties of England referred to in this book.

The growing awareness and use of regional variation in the sixteenth century eventually manifested itself in terminology, notably in the arrival in English of the words dialect and accent. Accent came first, from Latin via French, recorded in 1538 in a very general sense of 'tone of voice' or 'pronunciation': call with a 'timorous accent', Iago tells Roderigo, in the opening scene of Othello (I.i.75). And from the 1580s we find writers such as Sidney and Spenser using it with reference to the accentual beat of poetry and to the diacritical marks used to represent it. Dialect, referring to the whole manner of speaking typical of a person or group - including grammar and vocabulary as well as pronunciation - is also a borrowing from Latin via French, first recorded in the dedication to Spenser's Shepheardes Calender (1579). The notion of a dialect as a variety of a language -with a first hint of a subordinate status - is also present from the 1570s, when a writer talks of 'Hebrew dialects'. And there is a third usage, in which the term was used for dialectic - a confusion which may still be heard today, when people talk of dialectical (instead of dialectal) variation.

English