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It is now over 400 years since the death of the greatest English author and the English language has changed considerably in this time. The present course is intended to take a fresh look at the developments in the language - both in Britain and overseas - during the past few centuries. During this period certain key issues came to the fore: 1) the rise of a fixed standard in Britain and, with this, prescriptive attitudes towards those who do not speak this standard, 2) the spread of English overseas with the rise of national varieties outside of Britain, 3) the increasing separation of British and American English, 4) the use of the English language as a lingua franca by non-native speakers.
These and other matters will be treated in detail in this course. Special emphasis will be laid on the way in which linguists can track recent change in the language and the tools they use to do this.
Recommended literature
Bailey, Richard W. 1996. Nineteenth Century English. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Barber, Charles 1997. Early Modern English. 2nd edition. Edinburgh: University Press.
Beal, Joan C. 2004. English in Modern Times 1700-1945. London: Edward Arnold.
Görlach, Manfred 1999. English in the Nineteenth-Century England. Cambridge: University Press.
Hickey, Raymond (ed) 2010. Eighteenth-Century English. Cambridge: University Press.
Jones, Charles 2004. An Introduction to Late Modern English. Edinburgh: University Press.
Kytö, Merja et al. (eds) 2006. Nineteenth Century English. Cambridge: University Press.
Nevalainen, Terttu 2004. An Introduction to Early Modern English. Edinburgh: University Press.
Romaine, Suzanne 1998. The Cambridge History of the English Language. Volume IV 1776-1997. Cambridge: University Press.
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