A History of English Language

A history of the english language 186
Friederici, Der Lautstand Londons um 1400 (Jena, Germany, 1937; Forsch. zur engl. Phil, no.
6). An influential classification of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century varieties is by M.L.
Samuels, “Some Applications of Middle English Dialectology,” English Studies, 44 (1963), 81–
94, revised in Laing. The latest of these varieties, Chancery English, is examined by John
H.Fisher in a series of essays and in The Emergence of Standard English (Lexington, KY,
1996). For complexities to be considered in a full account, see Laura Wright, “About the
Evolution of Standard English,” in Studies in English Language and Literature, ed. Elizabeth
M.Tyler and M.Jane Toswell (London, 1996), pp. 99–115, and the essays in The Development
of Standard English 1300–1800: Theories, Descriptions, Conflicts, ed. Laura Wright
(Cambridge, UK, 2000). More generally on literacy and writing in medieval England, see
M.T.Clanchy’s From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066–1307 (2nd ed., Oxford, 1993).
Important collections of localized documents will be found in L.Morsbach, Mittelenglische
Originalurkunden von der Chaucer-Zeit bis zur Mitte des XV. Jahrhunderts (Heidelberg, 1923);
H.M.Flasdieck, Mittelenglische Originalurkunden (1405–1430) (Heidelberg, 1926);
R.W.Chambers and Marjorie Daunt, A Book of London English, 1384–1425 (2nd ed., Oxford,
1967); and John H. Fisher, Malcolm Richardson, and Jane L.Fisher, An Anthology of Chancery
English (Knoxville, TN, 1984).