The great Cambridge philologist traces the dialects of English from the Anglo-Saxon glosses onward: Northumbrian, Mercian and Southern speech, the distinctive dialect of Kent, the foreign elements brought by Danes and Normans, and the later history of the dialects up to the surveys of his own time. Short passages of old texts illustrate each stage.
A clear, compact introduction for readers curious about why English sounds so different from county to county. Download the free EPUB.