Introduction

This book assumes little or no knowledge of the history of the language or even of the descriptive terminology needed to talk meaningfully about it. This contextualising Introduction, which includes a skeleton outline of the history of English in relation to its origins, is therefore followed in Chapter 2 by a short description of the linguistic terminology used elsewhere in the book. If readers are confident of their knowledge of phonetics, grammar, etc., they may, if they wish, skip this chapter.