The Stories of English

The Stories of English is a groundbreaking history of the language by David Crystal, the world-renowned writer and commentator on English. Other books have been written on the subject, but they focused on the educated, printed language called standard English. Crystal turns the history of the language on its head and provides a startlingly original view of where the richness, creativity, and diversity of the language truly lies--in the accents and dialects of nonstandard English users all over the globe. Interwoven within this central chronological story are accounts of uses of dialect around the world as well as in literary classics from The Canterbury Tales to The Lord of the Rings. For the first time, regional speech and writing is placed center stage. This significant shift in perspective enables the reader to understand the importance of everyday, previously marginalized, voices in our language, and provides an argument for the way English should be taught in the future. 

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