A History of English Language

The nineteenth century and after 329
contemporary English is Richard W.Bailey’s Nineteenth-Century English (Ann Arbor, MI,
1996).
For varieties of English in the British Isles, good overviews are Martyn F.Wakelin, English
Dialects: An Introduction (rev. ed., London, 1977); Arthur Hughes and Peter Trudgill, English
Accents and Dialects: An Introduction to Social and Regional Varieties of British English
(London, 1979); Peter Trudgill, ed., Language in the British Isles (Cambridge, 1984); and Peter
Trudgill, The Dialects of England (Oxford, 1990). The essays in Dialects of English: Studies in
Grammatical Variation, ed. Peter Trudgill and J.K.Chambers (London, 1991) emphasize syntax,
mainly in British and American varieties. All these studies are compatible in their approaches
with the geographically specialized volumes of the series Varieties of English around the World
(VEAW), under the general editorship of Manfred Görlach—for example, Wolfgang Viereck,
ed., Focus on: England and Wales, VEAW G4 (Amsterdam, 1985). The two full-scale dialect
surveys are Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary (6 vols., London, 1898–1905), from
which his English Dialect Grammar was published separately (Oxford, 1905), and The
Linguistic Atlas of England, ed. Harold Orton, Stewart Sanderson, and J.D.A.Widdowson
(London, 1978), the publication of which was preceded by an Introduction and twelve books of
Basic Material in the Survey of English Dialects, ed. Harold Orton and Eugen Dieth (Leeds,
UK, 1962–1971). Vocabulary items from the Survey are displayed in Harold Orton and Nathalia
Wright, A Word Geography of England (London, 1974). A useful companion to the Orton Atlas
is Eduard Kolb et al., Atlas of English Sounds (Bern, 1979). The essays in Studies in Linguistic
Geography: The Dialects of English in Britain and Ireland, ed. John M.Kirk, Stewart
Sanderson, and J.D.A.Widdowson (London, 1985) discuss methods of dialectology in the
British Isles. In British urban sociolinguistics, numerous studies have followed Peter Trudgill,
The Social Differentiation of English in Norwich (Cambridge, UK, 1974). An older work by
William Matthews, Cockney Past and Present: A Short History of the Dialect of London
(London, 1938) is a treatment of a perennially interesting subject. Traditional responses to
prestigious and stigmatized accents in Britain are described in John Honey, Does Accent
Matter? The Pygmalion Factor (London, 1989). Various aspects of Scots are treated in The
Scottish Tongue: A Series of Lectures on the Vernacular Language of Lowland Scotland, by
W.A.Craigie et al. (London, 1924), and the pronunciation is described in William Grant, The
Pronunciation of English in Scotland (Cambridge, UK, 1913). More recent studies are gathered
in Languages of Scotland, ed. A.J.Aitken and Tom McArthur (Edinburgh, 1979) and in Focus
on: Scotland, ed. Manfred Görlach, VEAW G5 (Amsterdam, 1985). Of the two major Scottish
dictionaries, the Scottish National Dictionary, ed. William Grant and David A.Murison (10
vols., Edinburgh, 1931–1976) is complete, and A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, ed.
William A.Craigie and A.J.Aitken (Chicago, 1931–) is still in progress. A third major reference
work is The Linguistic Atlas of Scotland, ed. J.Y.Mather and H.H.Speitel (3 vols., London,
1975–1986). For Wales, David Parry has done important work, including the Survey of Anglo-
Welsh Dialects (2 vols., Swansea, UK, 1977–1979). Essays on the English of Ireland are
collected in Aspects of English Dialects in Ireland, ed. Michael V.Barry (Belfast, 1981).
Good introductions to Australasian English are G.W.Turner, The English Language in Australia
and New Zealand (2nd ed., London, 1972), and W.S.Ramson, ed., English Transported: Essays
on Australasian English (Canberra, Australia, 1970). See also S.J.Baker, The Australian
Language (2nd ed., Sydney, 1966), whose scholarly methods have been criticized;
W.S.Ramson, Australian English: An Historical Study of the Vocabulary, 1788–1898
(Canberra, 1966); and Barbara Horvath, Variation in Australian English: The Sociolects of
Sydney (Cambridge, UK, 1985). The essays in Language in Australia, ed. Suzanne Romaine
(Cambridge, UK, 1991), cover aboriginal languages and pidgins and creoles as well as
Australian English. Two dictionaries of Australian English are to a degree complementary: The
Macquarie Dictionary, ed. A.Delbridge (St. Leonards, Australia, 1981) is synchronic and
inclusive; The Australian National Dictionary: A Dictionary of Australianisms on Historical
Principles, ed. W.S.Ramson (Melbourne, 1988) is diachronic in the OED tradition and