Most of us have no problem reading novels, plays, diaries, or newspapers from the eighteenth century. But speaking eighteenth-century English can be trickier. This series of lessons has been designed to help historical interpreters and reenactors better understand the language of the period and sound more like the persons they portray. Lessons contain grammar, vocabulary, and conversational etiquette for all levels of society.

The eighteenth century was a key period in the development of the English language, in which the modern standard emerged and many dictionaries and grammars first appeared. This book is divided into thematic sections which deal with issues central to English in the eighteenth century. These include linguistic ideology and the grammatical tradition, the contribution of women to the writing of grammars, the interactions of writers at this time and how politeness was encoded in language, including that on a regional level. The contributions also discuss how language was seen and discussed in public and how grammarians, lexicographers, journalists, pamphleteers and publishers judged on-going change. The novel insights offered in this book extend our knowledge of the English language at the onset of the modern period.

How vocabularies once associated with outsiders became objects of fascination in eighteenth-century Britain While eighteenth-century efforts to standardize the English language have long been studied—from Samuel Johnson's Dictionary to grammar and elocution books of the period—less well-known are the era's popular collections of odd slang, criminal argots, provincial dialects, and nautical jargon. Strange Vernaculars delves into how these published works presented the supposed lexicons of the "common people" and traces the ways that these languages, once shunned and associated with outsiders, became objects of fascination in printed glossaries—from The New Canting Dictionary to Francis Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue—and in novels, poems, and songs, including works by Daniel Defoe, John Gay, Samuel Richardson, Robert Burns, and others. Janet Sorensen argues that the recognition and recovery of outsider languages was part of a transition in the eighteenth century from an aristocratic, exclusive body politic to a British national community based on the rhetoric of inclusion and liberty, as well as the revaluing of a common British past. These representations of the vernacular made room for the "common people" within national culture, but only after representing their language as "strange." Such strange and estranged languages, even or especially in their obscurity, came to be claimed as British, making for complex imaginings of the nation and those who composed it. Odd cant languages, witty slang phrases, provincial terms newly valued for their connection to British history, or nautical jargon repurposed for sentimental connections all toggle, in eighteenth-century jest books, novels, and poems, between the alluringly alien and familiarly British. Shedding new light on the history of the English language, Strange Vernaculars explores how eighteenth-century British literature transformed the patois attributed to those on the margins into living symbols of the nation. Examples of slang from Strange Vernaculars bum-boat woman: one who sells bread, cheese, greens, and liquor to sailors from a small boat alongside a ship collar day: execution day crewnting: groaning, like a grunting horse gentleman's companion: lice gingerbread-work: gilded carvings of a ship's bow and stern luggs: ears mort: a large amount thraw: to argue hotly and loudly

Zhivov's magisterial work tells the story of the creation of a new vernacularliterary language in modern Russia, an achievement arguably on a par with thenation's extraordinary military successes, territorial expansion, developmentof the arts, and formation of a modern empire.

A collection of studies on the role of English in German-speaking countries, covering a broad range of topics.

This three-volume set brings together current research in the history of language learning and teaching (HoLLT) in Europe and beyond. Providing the first overview of research in the field, it will be an indispensable reference for teachers, teacher educators and all those interested in the history of language learning and teaching and the history of applied linguistics avant la lettre. Volume I presents the history of how languages were learnt and taught across Europe, from Russia and Scandinavia to the Iberian peninsula, up to about 1800. Case studies deal with the teaching and learning of French, Italian, German and Portuguese, as well as Latin, still the first 'foreign language' for many learners in this period. Nicola McLelland is Professor of German and History of Linguistics at the University of Nottingham. She has published widely in the history of German linguistics and the history of language learning, and is co-editor of the journal Language & History. Richard Smith is a Reader in English Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics at the University of Warwick. Founder of the Warwick ELT Archive and the AILA Research Network on History of Language Learning and Teaching, he has been active in the fields of historical research and teacher-research in language education.

What is the role of language in human cognition? Could we attain self-consciousness and construct our civilization without language? Such were the questions at the basis of eighteenth-century debates on the joint evolution of language, mind, and culture. Language and Enlightenment highlights the importance of language in the social theory, epistemology, and aesthetics of the Enlightenment. While focusing on the Berlin Academy under Frederick the Great, Avi Lifschitz situates the Berlin debates within a larger temporal and geographical framework. He argues that awareness of the historicity and linguistic rootedness of all forms of life was a mainstream Enlightenment notion rather than a feature of the so-called 'Counter-Enlightenment'. Enlightenment authors of different persuasions investigated whether speechless human beings could have developed their language and society on their own. Such inquiries usually pondered the difficult shift from natural signs like cries and gestures to the artificial, articulate words of human language. This transition from nature to artifice was mirrored in other domains of inquiry, such as the origins of social relations, inequality, the arts, and the sciences. By examining a wide variety of authors - Leibniz, Wolff, Condillac, Rousseau, Michaelis, and Herder, among others - Language and Enlightenment emphasises the open and malleable character of the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters. The language debates demonstrate that German theories of culture and language were not merely a rejection of French ideas. New notions of the genius of language and its role in cognition were constructed through a complex interaction with cross-European currents, especially via the prize contests at the Berlin Academy.

Through innovative interdisciplinary methodologies and fresh avenues of inquiry, the nine essays collected in A Peculiar Mixture endeavor to transform how we understand the bewildering multiplicity and complexity that characterized the experience of German-speaking people in the middle colonies. They explore how the various cultural expressions of German speakers helped them bridge regional, religious, and denominational divides and eventually find a way to partake in America’s emerging national identity. Instead of thinking about early American culture and literature as evolving continuously as a singular entity, the contributions to this volume conceive of it as an ever-shifting and tangled “web of contact zones.” They present a society with a plurality of different native and colonial cultures interacting not only with one another but also with cultures and traditions from outside the colonies, in a “peculiar mixture” of Old World practices and New World influences. Aside from the editors, the contributors are Rosalind J. Beiler, Patrick M. Erben, Cynthia G. Falk, Marie Basile McDaniel, Philip Otterness, Liam Riordan, Matthias Schönhofer, and Marianne S. Wokeck.

Written in a detailed and fascinating manner, this book is ideal for general readers interested in the English language.

This three-volume set brings together current research in the history of language learning and teaching (HoLLT) in Europe and beyond. Providing the first overview of research in the field, it will be an indispensable reference for teachers, teacher educators and all those interested in the history of language learning and teaching and the history of applied linguistics avant la lettre. The chapters in Volume II present case studies from the period when modern languages became established in school curricula across Europe and when modern language teaching became professionalized. The chapters consider 19th-century innovations in Europe including the Reform Movement and its precursors, as well as developments in policy and practice in the 20th century. Nicola McLelland is Professor of German and History of Linguistics at the University of Nottingham. She has published widely in the history of German linguistics and the history of language learning, and is co-editor of the journal Language & History. Richard Smith is a Reader in English Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics at the University of Warwick. Founder of the Warwick ELT Archive and the AILA Research Network on History of Language Learning and Teaching, he has been active in the fields of historical research and teacher-research in language education.