Customer Reviews

A Cultural History of the English Language

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This slim book presents a clear and comprehensive overview of the history of the English language. For the most part, the book is well written and accessible to general audiences. Most foreign language phrases are translated, but a non-native speaker may have trouble guessing the meanings of words from the early part of the modern-English period presented in their original spellings. One drawback is that, like so many books on the topic, the author focuses on the early history of the languages of the British Isles, rather than on the earliest history of English. Thus, there is an inordinate focus on Celtic languages before the arrival of the Angles and Saxons, and not enough about what the languages of the Angles and Saxons were like before the tribes arrived on the island. After all, this is supposed to be a history of a language, not of an island. When describing the modern period, Knowles tends to emphasize British developments, such as the development of class accents and Received Pronunciation, and does not go into great detail about other varieties of English beyond England. The organization of the book is chronological, from the pre-English British Isles through English as an international language on the Internet. Included are suggestions for further reading, a lengthy bibliography, and an index. The book would be suitable for general audiences or for a text in an undergraduate history of English course, especially if the course is taught outside North America. (Due to its heavy emphasis on British English in the modern period, other texts might be more appropriate for North American courses.)

(I have the U.K. Arnold paperback edition. OUP is the publisher for the U.S.)

I was interested in this title because I am an EFL teacher in Japan, and I wanted to update and revise my schematic knowledge of the historic development of English (a process that is still going on by the way, with English's global reach going way beyond the British Empire or American hegemony).

It would be hard to find another book that says so much (from pre-Anglo-Saxon Britain to the information superhighway) in so few pages (less than 200) about the English language.

This book is especially informative and thought-provoking when it covers how the language got from its middle period to its early modern stage. If I had been exposed to something like this when I was an undergraduate student reading in both British history and British literature, the linguistic background this book provides would have made me a much wiser learner at the other subjects. It certainly has given me a much more balanced perspective on the language I teach to FL learners. Anyone who is an English teacher but without a lot of linguistics study would benefit greatly from reading this work.

I would recommend this book to people with an open-minded interest in the English language. I would also recommend it to those with an interest in British history and literature, since the type of linguistic knowledge this author provides can greatly inform the study of those two topics. This would make a great textbook for undergraduate or graduate students needing an introductory overview to the development of English. It is of course a work of linguistics, but the type of linguistics it conveys is of a very accessible cross-disciplinary type. One note of warning, those people who have a very prescriptive view of language will find this work very challenging their preconceptions.

I think this title, combined with David Crystal's 'English as a Global Language', would make the meat of an excellent course for non-specialists--a syllabus for those who would benefit from more linguistics in their education (history, literature, cultural studies, writing majors etc.). I would probably throw in a chapter from Sampson's fine 'Writing Sytems' to supplement the development of English orthography.