A history of English: A sociolinguistic approach. By Barbara Fennell. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001. Pp. xiii, 284. Paper. $29.95.

Abstract

The task of writing a history of English that can serve as a textbook is not an enviable endeavor. For every point that an author chooses to include, a host of others may be omitted; for every detail an author chooses to address, a host of terminological and theoretical issues must often be explained in order to make the details comprehensible. Perhaps for these reasons, despite the numerous textbooks that have tackled this challenge, there is still room for scholars drawing on different methodologies and theoretical approaches and, therefore, raising different questions, to add their voice to the scholarly and pedagogical conversation. And perhaps, in the end, we must resign ourselves to the fact that not everyone will be satisfied with any one textbook. Barbara Fennell's explicitly sociolinguistic approach in her new textbook, A History of English, distinguishes her work from many of the textbooks that precede hers and means that she addresses a range of important and interesting research questions that do not typically appear in such texts. Perhaps the compromise is that this book may better serve as a supplemental text, with a focus on the significant sociolinguistic perspective that it adds on the relevant historical issues, rather than as a primary textbook for most introductory university courses on the history of the English language.