Languages do not only vary over time, but all languages have variation within them at any one point in time. Each person who speaks a language has their own subtle preferences they make in word choice, pronunciation variations, and grammatical choices. At the individual level, these preferences form the speaker’s idiolect. Each individual speaker, however, also belongs to a larger group, whose utterances form a dialect. Dialects differ from other dialects not only in pronunciation (accent), but also in grammar and in lexicon. Thus, people in the Southern US will not only pronounce the long i-sound in words like eye or rice differently than people in other parts of the country, but they will also use grammatical constructions like “I might could go” or “I’m fixin’ to go,” that differ from those used by speakers elsewhere. They will also use words that are rare in other parts of the country, like “y’all,” or that have meanings that differ from how they are used elsewhere, like “carry” (meaning to take or drive someone somewhere, as in “I carried him to the doctor”).

Linguists use the term dialect to refer to varieties of a language that differ in phonology, grammar, and lexicon, but that remains mutually intelligible. When enough instances of pronunciation, grammar, and word choice are considered unacceptable that comprehension is no longer possible between two speakers, then we say that the two forms of speech are different languages rather than different dialects. In other words, dialects are mutually comprehensible, while languages are not mutually comprehensible.

When speaking about dialects and languages, it must be emphasized that all varieties of a language are dialects. In other words, there is no “pure”, non-dialectal version of a language. Many people think of “proper” English as being the “real” version, and then there also exist less educated or at least less well-spoken people who speak dialects. This is not the case. Every form of a language represents a dialect of that language, including the form that is considered “standard.” The notion of what is standard in a language comes about not from linguistic purity but from external factors. The standard dialect is often the dialect of the people who happen to have the most power: the wealthiest, most educated, people who hold positions of economic or political importance and who live in the most economically and politically powerful areas of the country.

Consider the following 13 sentences:

1. I’ll stay while eight.
2. I told un so.
3. I’m after seeing him.
4. I done tol’ him he cain’t come round here no mo’
5. The other team are all sitting down
6. That girl be workin’ hard.
7. That girl workin’ hard.
8. Are you coming with us? I might do.
9. Are you coming with us? I might could.
10. Are you coming with?
11. He been done work.
12. Ain’t nobody gonna come in here now.
13. The men works hard.

All these sentences are acceptable within certain communities of English speakers, but I am assuming that only a few of them are acceptable in your own dialects. I am also assuming some of them are to some degree incomprehensible to you. For example, in #1, what does the word “while” mean as used in this sentence? In #2 what does the word “‘un” mean? In #3, how would you interpret “after”? What is the grammatical difference between #6 and #7? Such variation is a crucial aspect of linguistic change, as is the growing incomprehensibility of certain constructions. As each year goes by, groups of speakers make different choices about pronunciation, word choice and grammar, causing their dialect to diverge from other dialects. Eventually, the divergence is so strong that we would consider the two as separate languages.

We will only spend a little time in this course on different contemporary dialects of English, which we can call Present-Day English (PDE), but earlier forms of the language can be considered in much the same way. In other words, when you read texts written in previous centuries there is the immediate problem of comprehension. While almost every reader today could comprehend Harry Potter with little difficulty, if we move back in time to an author like Dickens or Austen, there will be grammatical constructions or word choices that are less familiar to us, that is, less acceptable to us, and this will slow down our comprehension, although both Harry Potter and Sense and Sensibility are written in Modern English (ModE), which we define from about 1800 till today. The problems in comprehension grow if we move further back in time to an author like Shakespeare, whose word choices and grammar often conflict with our own. In fact, we would probably say that much of Shakespeare borders on unacceptable in terms of present-day usage. This would be even more so if modern editions of Shakespeare had not cleaned up the spellings to reflect modern conventions. And yet Shakespeare is still considered Early Modern English (eModE), meaning that the differences we see are not enough to truly differentiate his English from our own.

If we move further back to Chaucer, writing 600 years ago, we see that there are enough lexical and grammatical differences (and pronunciation if we include the spelling) to stand in the way of complete comprehension to the average modern reader. There are so many differences that his version of English is no longer the same as ours, and so we call it Middle English (ME). If we move back another four centuries, to a text like Beowulf, copied around the year 1000, we see that there are so many changes that the text can no longer be understood text except for a few small words here and there. This is Old English (OE), and almost all of it would be considered unacceptable by contemporary standards. The last half of this course will be devoted to understanding the basic systems (phonology, grammar, and lexicon) of these different forms of English, and how they changed from one to the other. You will learn the origins of many of Modern English’s constructions as well as find that more of Old and Middle English is comprehensible than you would first have thought. Before that, however, we will spend several weeks on a basic introduction to the aspects of language and linguistics that will be necessary for you to understand the last half of the course.