The current website – Studying the History of English – is intended as a resource for linguistics students at various levels who are concerned with different aspects of the hstory of English. The material in this website is organised into branches on the tree on the left. Each branch has a number of nodes underneath it; by clicking on these you can access texts explaining various aspects of the topic of the particular branch.

The information on this website has been deposited here to allow students to access information on the history of English with maximum ease in the hope that this will heighten their interest in and improve their knowledge of the subject. The material here, the texts, the timelines, the galleries, the bibliographies, etc. have been compiled by the author of this website, Raymond Hickey, and if you use this data for your own work — term essays, publications, presentations or whatever — then you are asked to acknowledge this accordingly.

The current website has a companion, dealing with varieties of English, which can be accessed via the following link: Studying Varieties of English

There is a further more specialised website which I constructed as a source of information on Irish English. This can be reached at the following address: Irish English Resource Centre

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Raymond Hickey
English Linguistics
University of Duisburg and Essen

PS: A word to students: websites do not replace books. They are intended to offer overviews and general information which students can use when beginning their study of a particular subject. When studying the history of English, a website is particularly useful because many maps and other visual material can be included in liberal amounts. But remember that for linguistic details and analyses there is no substitute for books, so make sure that you progress from here to the printed word.