This essential new text provides a comprehensive, modern account of how the English language originated, developed, changed, and continues to morph into new forms in contemporary society.

Seth Lerer is Distinguished Professor of Literature Emeritus at the University of California at San Diego, where he has also served as Dean of Arts and Humanities. His publications include Chaucer and His Readers (1993), Error and the Academic Self (2002), Inventing English (revised edition, 2015), Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter (2008), and Shakespeare's Lyric Stage (2018). He has published creative non-fiction in The American Scholar, The Yale Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and in his memoir, Prospero's Son (2013).

List of Figures
List of Tables

Preface
English Phonemes and Transcribing Speech
Acknowledgments
Introduction: What Is Language and How Do We Study It?
Chapter 1: The Indo-European Languages
Chapter 2: The Germanic Languages
Chapter 3: The Old English Period
Chapter 4: Middle English
Chapter 5. From Middle English to Modern English
Chapter 6. English in the Age of Shakespeare and the King James Bible
Chapter 7: The Age of Regulation: British English, 1650-1800
Chapter 8. The Sounds and Shapes of English in Great Britain, 1800-2000
Chapter 9: American English: Origins, Varieties, and Attitudes
Chapter 10: The English Language and the Black Atlantic
Chapter 11: English in the World
Chapter 12: Twenty-First-Century English
Index