English, Later Modern (ca. 1700–1900)

doi:10.1016/B0-08-044854-2/04620-4

Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (Second Edition)

2006, Pages 167-176

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The first linguist to recognise ‘Late Modern English’ as a separate period in the history of English appears to be Poutsma (1914), whose A grammar of Late Modern English was effectively a synchronic study of what, to him, was present-day English. Although Wyld (1936) saw the need for a division between ‘Early Modern English’ (1400 to mid-16th century) and the later centuries, the study of Late Modern English as a coherent period is very recent. In this article, a discussion of the external history of Late Modern English will be followed by a review of major changes in morphology and syntax, phonology and lexis.

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Joan Beal is Professor of English Language and Director of the National Centre for English Cultural Tradition at the University of Sheffield. She was born in Warrington, Cheshire, and educated at the Warrington High School for Girls, and at the University of Newcastle, where she graduated with a B.A. in English language and literature in 1974. She was employed at the University of Newcastle as a Lecturer and later Senior Lecturer in English Language from 1978 until 2001. Her Ph.D. (also from the University of Newcastle) was on Thomas Spence's Grand repository of the English language. She is the author of English pronunciation in the eighteenth century (1999, Oxford University Press) and English in modern times 1700–1945 (2004, Hodder Arnold). She has also written articles and chapters on dialects of English (especially Northern dialects) and Late Modern English.

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