The Oxford history of English

Introduction: A History of the English Language 1. Preliminaries: Before English 2. Beginnings and Transitions: Old English 3. Contacts and Conflicts: Latin, Norse, and French 4. Middle English - Dialects and Diversity 5. From Middle to Early Modern English 6. Restructuring Renaissance English 7. Mapping Change in Tudor English 8. The Babel of Renaissance English 9. English at the Onset of the Normative Tradition 10. English in the Nineteenth Century 11. Modern Regional English in the British Isles 12. English Among the Languages 13. English Worldwide in the Twentieth Century 14. Into the Twenty-first Century A Chronology of English Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements References Index