A Cultural History of the English Language

Access to large corpuses of English have allowed historians of English to assess the minutiae of linguistic change in far more precise detail than before and there is much new research. This text presents a history of English written from the perspective of sociolinguistics and discourse analysis, relating changes and at the same time providing a framework for corpus-based historical research. The book covers major social events in Britain and Europe, the colonies and the "aftermath of Empire".