The History of English

English is a language of the Germanic group, a major branch of the Indo-European language family.Germanic is now subdivided into two groups, North and West Germanic. 1The present-day North Germanic languages are Danish, Swedish, Norwegian (Bokmål and Nynorsk), Faroese, and Icelandic.West Germanic consists of German, English, Frisian, Dutch, and Scots (if recognized as a separate language) along with Afrikaans, a colonial form of Dutch in South Africa, and Yiddish, the traditional language of East European Jews (and also of the Jewish diaspora, e.g. in New York).English is most closely related to Frisian, German, and Dutch.Historically, English is divided into four periods: Old English (450-1066), Middle English (1066-1500), Early Modern English (1500-1700), and Late Modern English (1700 to the present).Due to colonial expansion and, recently, due to its status as a lingua franca, English is found in most countries across the world.The main countries with native-speaker populations are Great Britain (England, Wales, Scotland), Ireland, USA, Canada, various Caribbean countries (notably Jamaica, Barbados, the Bahamas, Trinidad and Tobago), South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand as well as various smaller islands, e.g. in the South Atlantic along with various Pacific islands.There are many pidgins/creoles deriving from English as a lexifier language, e.g. in West Africa in Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nigeria, and Cameroon as well as in island nations of the south-west Pacific, notably in Papua New Guinea with Tok Pisin.Given the topic of the current book, this section will only consider historical change in the sound system of English (Hickey 2014e, Bermúdez-Otero 2007; Blevins 2006; Salmons 2010; Bowie and Yaeger-Dror 2015; Cser 2015) which has had a bearing on the varieties of the language which we can observe today.The study of English pronunciation has a long pedigree, going back at least to the sixteenth century, reaching an early zenith in the prescriptive works of scholars like Thomas Sheridan and John Walker in the late eighteenth century (Görlach 2001).A more objective, academic approach came to the fore a century later in the work of scholars like A.J. Ellis (1868-1889), followed at the beginning of the twentieth century by Henry Sweet (1908) and Joseph Wright (1905) and culminating in the establishment of modern linguistic phonetics in the work of Daniel Jones (see Jones 1918 as an early example of this). B.1 Old English (450-1066)This is the initial period in the history of English which lasted from the mid-fifth to the mideleventh century (J.Smith 2009).It begins with the traditional date for the arrival of the Germanic

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