Joan C. Beal is Emeritus Professor of English Language, University of Sheffield. She is an editor of De Gruyter Dialects of English series, co-editor of Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Prescriptivism (2003), author of English in Modern Times 1700–1945 (2004), and co-author of The English Language (third edition, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

• General editor's introduction Raymond Hickey; Introduction Joan C. Beal and Raymond Hickey; Part I. The Transmission of English: 1. Dictionaries in the history of English John Considine; 2. Writing grammars for English Ingrid Tieken–Boon van Ostade; 3. Speech representation in the history of English Peter Grund; 4. The history of English in the digital age Caroline Tagg and Melanie Evans; 5. Internet resources for the history of English Ayumi Miura; Part II. Tracking Change in the History of English: 6. Spelling practices and emergent standard writing Juan Camilo Conde Silvestre and Juan Manuel Hernández Campoy; 7. Phonological change Gjertrud Flermoen Stenbrenden; 8. Applying historical phonology David Crystal; 9. The emerging phonological standard Lynda Mugglestone; 10. The history of R in English Raymond Hickey; 11. The system of clausal complementation Hendrik de Smet; 12. Tense and aspect in the history of English Teresa Fanego; 13. Development in the passive construction Peter Petré; 14. Adverbs in the history of English Ursula Lenker; 15. The story of English negation Gabriella Mazzon; 16. Dative and genitive variability in the history of English Anette Rosenbach; 17. Relativisation Cristina Suárez Gómez; 18. Recent grammatical change in English Jill Bowie and Bas Aarts; 19. The history of English registers Nuria Yáñez Bouza and Javier Perez Guerra; 20. The history of semantic theory Susan Fitzmaurice and Seth Mehl; 21. The development of pragmatic markers Laurel Brinton; Part III. Ideology, Society and the History of English: 22. The ideology of standard English Lesley Milroy; 23. The discourse of prescriptivism Don Chapman; 24. English dictionaries from the Eighteenth–century onwards Charlotte Brewer; 25. Networks, coalitions and language change Marina Dossena; 26. Communities of practice in the history of English Joanna Kopaczyk and Andreas Jucker; 27. Historical enregisterment Joan Beal and Paul Cooper.