A history of the English Language

Handbuch der englischen Wortbildungslehre
(2nd ed., Heidelberg, 
1972); Hans Marchand, 
The Categories and Types of Present-Day English Word-Formation
(2nd ed., Munich, 1969); and Valerie Adams, 
An Introduction to Modern English Word-
Formation
(London, 1973). On degeneration and regeneration there are two important 
monographs: H.Schreuder, 
Pejorative
Sense Development in English
(Groningen, 1929), and 
G.A.Van Dongen, 
Amelioratives in English
(Rotterdam, 1933). For slang see Eric Partridge, ed., 
Slang To-day and Yesterday
(4th ed., New York, 1970); Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg 
Flexner, eds., 
Dictionary of American Slang
(2nd ed., New York 1975); Jonathan E.Lighter et 
al., eds., 
Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang,
vol. 1, A-G (New York, 
1994); and Connie Eble, 
Slang & Sociability: In-Group Language among College Students
(Chapel Hill, NC, 1996). An engaging account of differences between nineteenth-century and 
A history of the english language 328

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contemporary English is Richard W.Bailey’s 
Nineteenth-Century English
(Ann Arbor, MI, 
1996). 
For varieties of English in the British Isles, good overviews are Martyn F.Wakelin, 
English 
Dialects: An Introduction
(rev. ed., London, 1977); Arthur Hughes and Peter Trudgill, 
English 
Accents and Dialects: An Introduction to Social and Regional Varieties of British English
(London, 1979); Peter Trudgill, ed., 
Language in the British Isles
(Cambridge, 1984); and Peter 
Trudgill, 
The Dialects of England
(Oxford, 1990). The essays in 
Dialects of English: Studies in 
Grammatical Variation,
ed. Peter Trudgill and J.K.Chambers (London, 1991) emphasize syntax, 
mainly in British and American varieties. All these studies are compatible in their approaches 
with the geographically specialized volumes of the series Varieties of English around the World 
(VEAW), under the general editorship of Manfred Görlach—for example, Wolfgang Viereck, 
ed., 
Focus on: England and Wales,
VEAW G4 (Amsterdam, 1985). The two full-scale dialect 
surveys are Joseph Wright’s 
English Dialect Dictionary
(6 vols., London, 1898–1905), from 
which his 
English Dialect Grammar
was published separately (Oxford, 1905), and 
The 
Linguistic Atlas of England,
ed. Harold Orton, Stewart Sanderson, and J.D.A.Widdowson 
(London, 1978), the publication of which was preceded by an Introduction and twelve books of 
Basic Material in the 
Survey of English Dialects,
ed. Harold Orton and Eugen Dieth (Leeds, 
UK, 1962–1971). Vocabulary items from the 
Survey
are displayed in Harold Orton and Nathalia 
Wright, 
A Word Geography of England
(London, 1974). A useful companion to the Orton Atlas 
is Eduard Kolb et al., 
Atlas of English Sounds
(Bern, 1979). The essays in 
Studies in Linguistic 
Geography: The Dialects of English in Britain and Ireland,
ed. John M.Kirk, Stewart 
Sanderson, and J.D.A.Widdowson (London, 1985) discuss methods of dialectology in the 
British Isles. In British urban sociolinguistics, numerous studies have followed Peter Trudgill, 
The Social Differentiation of English in Norwich
(Cambridge, UK, 1974). An older work by 
William Matthews, 
Cockney Past and Present: A Short History of the Dialect of London
(London, 1938) is a treatment of a perennially interesting subject. Traditional responses to 
prestigious and stigmatized accents in Britain are described in John Honey,