The Emergence and Development of English: An Introduction (Cambridge Introductions to the English Language)

This textbook provides a step-by-step introduction to the history of the English language (HEL), offering a fresh perspective on the process of language change. Aimed at undergraduate students, The Emergence and Development of English is accessibly written, and contains a wealth of pedagogical tools, including chapter openers, key terms, chapter summaries, end-of-chapter exercises and suggestions for further reading. A central theme of the book is 'emergence', the key term from the study of complex systems, which describes how massive numbers of random verbal interactions give rise to regularities that 'emerge' without specific causes. This unique approach encourages readers to incorporate complex systems into the mainstream coverage of HEL. Additional resources include examples of language from each period, as well as appendices on terminology, online resources and audio samples.

William A. Kretzschmar, Jr is the Harry and Jane Willson Professor in Humanities at the University of Georgia, and also has an appointment at the University of Oulu, Finland. He is Editor of the American Linguistic Atlas Project, the oldest and largest national research project surveying how people speak differently across the country, and has provided American pronunciations for the online Oxford English Dictionary and other dictionaries in the Oxford US Dictionaries program. In 2014 he held an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Digital Innovation fellowship, during which he developed a computer simulation to model language change. Recent works include The Routledge Dictionary of Pronunciation for Current English (2017) with Clive Upton, and Exploring Linguistic Science: Language Use, Complexity, and Interaction (Cambridge, 2018) with Allison Burkette.