The Stories of English

By David Crystal

The groundbreaking history of the English language, fusing chronological with anecdotal and etymological accounts of individual word-histories, to create not ONE story, by many stories.
Alongside standard English we have a rich variety of the language from around the world.
"This new history of the English language in all its manifestations is among the best ever written, and is both entertaining and informative." Steven Pinker, author of The Language Instinct
"Simply the best introductory history of the English language family that we have. The plan of the book is ingenious, the writing lively, the exposition clear, and the scholarly standard uncompromisingly high.' J. M. Coetzee (Nobel Prize for fiction 2003)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Group
• Release date: Sep 6, 2005
• ISBN: 9781468306170

David Crystal

David Crystal is Honorary Professor of Linguistics at the University of Bangor, UK. He is a writer, editor, lecturer and broadcaster who has specialised for over 50 years on all aspects of the English language. His books include The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (2019) which is now in its third edition, as well as Sounds Appealing (2018) and We Are Not Amused (2017).

Reviews for The Stories of English

[neurodrew · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The evolution of Anglo Saxon to global English, in enormous detail Interesting, but in endless detail, with word lists, interludes, and asides. The author's point of view is that dialect and borrowings from other languages are perfectly normal and healthy for the growth of expressiveness in a language, and he considers English to be the language with the greatest flexibility and vocabulary because of its borrowings. He is against prescriptive grammarians, and insists that the language is what the people speak. The interludes are set off in text boxes, and tell interesting stories about single words or collections of phrases and words. Page 402 has a list of common phrases like "dead as a door nail" that originated with Shakespeare, for instance. My interest faded during old and middle English, and picked up again with modern "global" English. The quotations from obscure and well known volumes must have taken years to collect.

[charlie68_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A good, sometimes tedious look at the origins of the English language, from its earliest beginnings as a language of the Anglo-Saxons to its current dominance of the globe. Takes a look at the Standard and Non-standard forms of English and argues quite convincingly for respect of the Non-standard.

[thorold_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a manifesto for sociolinguistics disguised as a history of the English language, or possibly vice-versa...In Crystal's view, a language is a form of agreed social behaviour, static neither in time nor in space, varying also according to the purpose for which it is being used at any given moment. Its history is the story of all the millions of people who've used it over the centuries. Unfortunately, only a tiny and unrepresentative proportion of their utterances have made any kind of retrievable mark on the historical record, so when we do historical linguistics we are likely to end up with a model of one particular form of the language, and there's a great temptation to identify Old English uniquely with the language of Beowulf, Middle English with the language of Chaucer and Early Modern English with the language of Shakespeare (for example). Crystal goes through the evidence again and shows us how weak that kind of assumption can be - as can the many others we make about language stability, about "correct" forms, about pronunciation, spelling, and grammar, and so on. Pedants watch out!This is, as you would expect from Crystal, a lively read, never going deep into the sort of dry philological detail you find in something like the Cambridge History, but staying at the sort of level that would appeal to undergraduates and general readers. There wasn't a huge amount that was new to me, but I did get quite a few new insights from Crystal's way of looking at the evidence, so well worth a read, especially if you don't know much about the history of English.

[lukerik-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A vast info-dump. It reads like the production of a privately-printing seventeenth-century antiquary who has written down many thing that interest him and has had no publishers telling him to remember consumer demographics or to keep it under three hundred pages. Which is not to say that it's a mess, it's not, but arranged chronologically and squeezed in to chapters. But there's a definite sense of spread caused, I think, by the astounding levels of detail. Crystal hates sweeping statements and you'll suddenly realise you're reading about the variant spellings of 'man' in Cotton Aug.ii.64.Another thing Crystal hates is snobbery. This is a theme that has run through all the books of his that I've read. The thought that one person's English is better than another's makes him bilious and he denigrates histories that provide an over-simplified narrative at the expense of regional forms. Having read one or two of those histories I have to agree with him, but those readings being now some time in the past I could have done with something to reorient myself to the timeline. If you're looking for a straight-forward history of English this is not that book. Look, if you're sitting there with your ignorance in one hand and this book in the other then read the book. You'll love it. It's brilliant. If you know literally nothing bout the history of English and you're looking for a heads-up history read one of those, it doesn't matter which one, and then read this.

[cjrecordvt-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A beautiful set of anecdotes of how we got from Old English to World Englishes, with all the side shows along the way.

[clicksclan · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Found it really interesting, covered a wide range of aspects of English going right back to the very beginning.Loved that Tolkien got a little mention in the section on dialect.The way it was organised was good but some of the little boxes with additional information were in the middle of interesting sections so you had to flick back and forth to read everything.Was good to finally read it because I'd dipped into bits of it before and David Crystal is such a huge name in linguistics.

[shimmin_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It's a pretty heavy work in contrast to something like Mother Tongue, examining and explaining the history and diversity of English, without putting the usual emphasis on "Standard English". There's lots of stuff about the varieties that peacefully coexisted through most of history until some stupid ideas about linguistic and moral purity exploded onto the scene in the 1700s-ish. I enjoyed it despite feeling it was tough going at times, and had to settle into a good blend of reading and skimming. It's 585 pages! Crystal includes a lot of "sidebars" with examples, which are often interesting but can break up the flow considerably. He also spends a lot of time on the language reformers, but not actually an unreasonable amount in the end. A good solid book.

[annbury_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A history of the English language for the non-academic reader, and a very good book indeed. The development of the language is examined in detail, from a social/historic perspective as well as a linguistic one, and areas of uncertainty are highlighted, rather than buried as they so often are. The organization is clear, the storyline compelling, and the writing (as ever with Mr. Crystal) a pleasure to read. Note: this is NOT the "Story of English" published to complement a BBC series in the mid-1990's -- this book is much more informative.

[snapperxv · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Excellent, scholarly and easily understood.

[bhowell_35 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book is a real treasure and it is not necessary to sit down and read it cover to cover in order to enjoy it. Keep it with you, read individual chapters as they catch your interest, go back and forth, let the book inspire you and entertain you with it's wonderful mix of linguistics, history, and literature.

[kevinwmoor · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A bit heavy going for me, particularly in the early chapters.