Chapter 8: Modern English: 1700-Present
This chapter outlines the changes that occur in English from the 18th century on. After 1700, there are fewer major language internal changes than in the previous periods. However, there are many external developments as a result of colonialism. The closer we get to Modern English, the better we can investigate the details of language use, such as differences due to the gender, age, region, and socio-economic status of the speakers, and there are many sociolinguistic studies devoted to these aspects. This chapter focuses on the overall changes in the sounds and grammar of English.
Useful Links
Texts / Corpora
The British National Corpus is a one hundred million word corpus of British English from around 1990, both spoken and written and a good interface is here. The latter site also hosts a Corpus of American English and a variety of other useful corpora!
Dictionaries
A list of early dictionaries is maintained by the University of Toronto.
Dialects
The British Library has dialectal recordings with linguistic analysis here and another nice site here.
The BBC has a great site here of 1200 different voices that they are no longer updating so it may disappear soon.
There is a dictionary of Appalachian English here.
Neither Elly van Gelderen, Tim Gades, nor ASU is responsible in any way for the information provided by the external links on this page, and make no claims as to its applicability or accuracy.