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| List of figures | |
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| Acknowledgements | |
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| Introduction | |
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| An external history of English | |
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| Origins of English | |
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| The Romans in Britain | |
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| The arrival of the Anglo-Saxons | |
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| English: what's in a name? | |
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| Christianity reaches England | |
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| Viking raids | |
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| The history of English or the history of Englishes? | |
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| Old English dialects | |
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| The rise of West Saxon | |
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| Dialect boundaries | |
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| Language contact in the Middle Ages | |
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| 1066 and all that | |
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| From Old English to Middle English | |
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| The decline of French and the rise of English | |
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| Middle English dialects | |
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| From Middle English to Early Modern English | |
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| External influences on pronunciation | |
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| The translation of the Bible into English | |
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| The process of standardisation | |
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| Dialects and emerging standards | |
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| Caxton and the impact of the printing press | |
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| Dictionaries and grammars | |
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| The boundaries of Early Modern English | |
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| Colonialism, Imperialism and the spread of English | |
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| English in the New World | |
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| The expansion of the British Empire | |
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| Moves towards Present Day English | |
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| The Industrial Revolution | |
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| The Oxford English Dictionary | |
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| A spoken standard | |
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| The linguistic consequences of war | |
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| Technology and communication | |
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| Global English and beyond | |
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| English: a global language | |
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| Globalisation and changes in English | |
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| Assessing the linguistic impact of historical events | |
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| Development | |
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| A developing language | |
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| Understanding Old English | |
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| Spelling and sound in Old English | |
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| The vocabulary of Old English | |
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| Old English: a synthetic language | |
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| Case, gender and number | |
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| Old English verbs | |
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| Varieties of Old English | |
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| Old English and Scots | |
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| Old English dialectal differences | |
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| The emergence of Middle English | |
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| The context of change | |
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| Spelling and sound in Middle English | |
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| Changes in the system of inflections | |
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| Middle English vocabulary | |
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| Sound shifts | |
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| Speech sounds | |
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| Changes in the long vowels | |
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| The Uniformitarian Principle in relation to the Great Vowel Shift | |
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| Consequences of the Great Vowel Shift | |
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| Writing in Early Modern English | |
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| Orthography in Early Modern English | |
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| Some grammatical characteristics | |
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| Expanding the lexicon | |
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| The development of American English | |
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| Causes of linguistic development in the American colonies | |
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| A developing standard | |
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| 'Archaisms' in American English | |
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| The beginnings of African American English | |
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| International English | |
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| Australian English | |
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| Indian English | |
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| Pidgins and creoles on the West African coast | |
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| The globalisation of English | |
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| Attitudes towards global English | |
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| World Standard English | |
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| Fragmentation or fusion? | |
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| Exploration | |
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| Exploring the history of English | |
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| The roots of English | |
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| Language family trees | |
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| Pronouncing Old English | |
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| Case | |
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| Regions and dialects | |
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| Dialectal differences in an Old English text | |
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| Place names | |
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| From Old English to Middle English | |
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| Loanwords | |
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| The Canterbury Tales | |
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| A Middle English Pater noster | |
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| Codification and attitudes towards English | |
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| A Table Alphabeticall | |
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| English Orthographie | |
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| Problems with prescriptivism | |
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| Further elements of grammar in Early Modern English | |
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| More on pronouns | |
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| Gradable adjectives | |
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| What did do do? | |
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| English in the New World | |
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| Loanwords in American English | |
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| The politics of spelling | |
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| Early African American English | |
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| Present Day Englishes | |
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| Unknown words from Australian English? | |
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| Enlarging the lexicon | |
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| Tok Pisin | |
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| The future of English | |
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| The cost of global English | |
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| Scare stories: declining standards | |
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| Future developments in English | |
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| Extension | |
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| Readings in the history of English | |
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| Vocabulary in Old English | |
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| Other differences between Old English and Modern English (Bruce Mitchell) | |
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| Issues to consider | |
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| Old English dialects | |
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| The study of Old English dialects (Joseph P. Crowley) | |
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| Issues to consider | |
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| The influence of French | |
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| Who spoke French in England? (Douglas Kibbee) | |
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| Issues to consider | |
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| Changes in pronunciation | |
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| The Great Vowel Shift (Dick Leith) | |
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| The Mad Hatter's tea-party (Jean Aitchison) | |
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| Issues to consider | |
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| 'Fixing' the language | |
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| The appeal to authority, 1650-1800 (Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable) | |
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| Issues to consider | |
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| The development of American English | |
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| The beginnings of American (H. L. Mencken) | |
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| Issues to consider | |
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| A corpus approach to linguistic development | |
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| Recent grammatical change in written English, 1961-1992: some preliminary findings of a comparison of American with British English (Geoffrey Leech and Nick Smith) | |
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| Issues to consider | |
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| The future of English? | |
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| English as a transitional phenomenon (David Graddol) | |
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| Issues to consider | |
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| Glossary of linguistic terms | |
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| Further reading | |
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| General histories of English | |
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| Old English | |
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| Middle English | |
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| Early Modern English | |
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| Eighteenth-century English to the present day | |
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| World Englishes | |
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| References | |
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| Index | |