English

by Graddol, David; Leith, Dick; Swann, Joan

• ISBN13: 9780415131186
• ISBN10: 0415131189
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1996-05-01
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

The story of English is often presented as one of progress: from a set of Germanic dialects to a fully-fledged national and international language. The emphasis in this book is on the diversity of English throughout its history and the changing social meanings of different varieties of English.

Table of Contents

Book editors and contributors
Introduction	p. 1
English voices	p. 3
Reading A The English Language Today	p. 29
Reading B: Franglais	p. 32
Reading C Language varieties and standard language	p. 37
English manuscripts: the emergence of a visual identity	p. 41
Reading A Extending the Roman alphabet: some orthographic experiments of the past four centuries	p. 81
Reading B An essay on the necessity, advantages and practicability of reforming the mode of spelling, and of rendering the orthography of words correspondent to the punctuation	p. 91
The origins of English	p. 95
Reading A The story of Old English	p. 133
Modernity and English as a national language	p. 136
Reading A Caxton on dialects	p. 167
Reading B The development of scientific English	p. 171
English - colonial to postcolonial	p. 180
Reading A Extract from the Australian National Dictionary	p. 213
Reading B Identifying Nigerian Usages in Nigerian English	p. 216
Reading C Creole English	p. 219
Variation in English grammar	p. 222
Reading A Modals on Tyneside	p. 252
Reading B Bislama pronouns	p. 254
Reading C Sentence structure in Irish English	p. 256
Acccents of English	p. 259
Reading A The high rising tone in Australian English	p. 289
Reading B Milton Keynes and dialect levelling in south-eastern British English	p. 292
Style shifting, codeswitching	p. 301
Reading A Hark, Hark the Lark: multiple voicing in DJ talk	p. 325
Reading B Strategic ambiguity: code-switching in the management of conflict	p. 331
Reading C Codeswitching with English: types of switching, types of communities	p. 334
Good and bad English	p. 338
Reading A Extracts from The Times	p. 365
Reading B Of dipsticks and the joys of a double negative	p. 368
Reading C Why do purists grumble so much?	p. 370
References	p. 372
Historical timeline	p. 382
IPA consonant and vowel charts	p. 386
Acknowledgements	p. 387
Index	p. 390
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.