English – One Tongue, Many Voices

Jan Svartvik is Emeritus Professor at the University of Lund, Sweden. He is co-author of A Communicative Grammar of English (with Geoffrey Leech) and A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (with Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum and Geoffrey Leech). He has published on other varied aspects of English linguistics, such as corpus linguistics, forensic linguistics, contrastive grammar and nautical terminology. He is a Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, The Royal Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities and Academia Europaea. Geoffrey Leech (1935-2014) was Research Professor of Linguistics at Lancaster University, UK. Author, co-author, or co-editor of some 25 books and 100 papers or articles on varied aspects of linguistics and the English language, he was a Fellow of the British Academy and a Member of Academia Europaea. He was the author of widely used Explorations in Semantics and Pragmatics, co-author with Mike Short of A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry, and co-author with Margaret Deuchar and Robert Hoogenraad of English Grammar for Today: A New Introduction. David Crystal is Honorary Professor of Linguistics at the University of Bangor. He is the author or editor of over a hundred books on aspects of linguistics and the English language, such as The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, The Stories of English, Language and the Internet, and Evolving English. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and in 1995 was awarded an OBE for services to the English Language.

-1 English ­­  the working tongue of the global village. -PART I: History of an island language. -2 The first 500 years. -3 1066 and All That. -4 Modern English in the making. -PART II: The spread of English around the world. -5 English goes to the New World. -6 English transplanted. -7 English varieties in the British Isles. -8 American and British English. -9 English, pidgins and creoles. -PART III: A changing language in changing times. -10 The standard language today. -11 Linguistic change in progress: Back to the Inner Circle. -12 Electronic English. -13 English into the future. -Notes: Comments and References. -References. -Index of people. -Index of topics. -Pronunciation