English Present and Future

This introductory chapter indicates the many subjects that are a part of the history of the English language. It is a history that encompasses both cultural events and linguistic developments, the “external” and “internal” stories of English. The cultural stories involve speakers of different languages in contact during the past 1,500 years: the Roman Christianizing of Britain, the Scandinavian invasions of England, the Norman Conquest, the expansion of the British Empire, the worldwide spread of varieties of English, and other momentous events. Entwined with these historical events are extensive linguistic changes: the expansion of the vocabulary, the loss of grammatical inflections, the adaptation of natural rather than grammatical gender, and the development of many “global Englishes” with their own identities.