The Oxford History of English

Lynda Mugglestone is Professor of History of English at the University of Oxford and Fellow and Tutor in English at Pembroke College. Recent books include Dictionaries. A Very Short Introduction and, edited with Freya Johnston, Johnson's Pendulum, both published by Oxford.

For a scholarly book pursuing English from its hazy origins to the internet, this book provides much pleasure.

• Introduction: A History of the English Language ; 1. Preliminaries: before English ; 2. Beginnings and Transitions: Old English ; 3. Contacts and Conflicts: Latin, Norse, and French ; 4. Middle English - dialects and diversity ; 5. From Middle to Early Modern English ; 6. Restructuring Renaissance English ; 7. Mapping Change in Tudor English ; 8. The Babel of Renaissance English ; 9. Speakers and Writers of Eighteenth-century English ; 10. English in the Nineteenth Century ; 11. Modern Regional English in the British Isles ; 12. English Among the Languages ; 13. English World-wide in the Twentieth Century ; 14. Into the Twenty-first Century ; TImeline ; Table of Phonetic Equivalents ; Glossary ; References ; Contributors ; Acknowledgements ; Index