Websites for the Study of English

Richard W. Bailey

Department of English

The University of Michigan

rwbailey@umich.edu

Suggestions for additional links will be welcome.

Bibliographical resources.

1. A detailed record of the materials in Robert Cotton’s library with (very incomplete) records of editions and commentaries.

http://www.shef.ac.uk/hri/cotton.htm

2. U. S. English site showing English-Only laws by state.

http://www.us-english.org/inc/official/states.asp

3. Dan Mosser’s History-of-English link index.

http://ebbs.english.vt.edu/hel/hel.html

4. Felicia Jean Steele’s links for Canadian, Caribbean, and “lesser=known” varieties of English (including Pitcairn and Magdalen islands). Audio resources.

http://steele.intrasun.tcnj.edu/engl202/lesserknown.htm

5. The Labyrinth: Resources for Medieval Studies

http://www.georgetown.edu/labyrinth/labyrinth-home.html

Databases:

1. Many databases are available or under construction at the University of Sheffield. From this site, for instance, one can get searchable access to the London Criminal Court records from the eighteenth century (and a little earlier to boot).

http://www.shef.ac.uk/hri/

2. The British National Corpus:

http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/

3. Collection of digital and searchable major books. See especially “Renaissance Festival Books.”

http://www.bl.uk/treasures/treasuresinfull.html

4. Medieval ms. containing recipes for prepared food. The site includes images of the ms., transcripts, and commentaries.

http://www.bllearning.co.uk/live/text/cookery/medieval/

5. Electronic Beowulf Project: Kevin Kiernan.

http://www.uky.edu/~kiernan/eBeowulf/guide.htm

6. Michigan Corpus of Academic Standard English

http://micase.umdl.umich.edu/m/micase/

Dialects:

1. Accents and Dialects (with links) in the sound archive of the British Library.

http://www.bl.uk/collections/sound-archive/accents.html

2. Vaux’s Survey of American Dialects

http://cfprod01.imt.uwm.edu/Dept/FLL/linguistics/dialect/index.html

3. Labov’s Telsur Survey

http://www.ling.upenn.edu/phono_atlas/home.html

4. American Dialect Links

http://www.evolpub.com/Americandialects/AmDialLnx.html

5. Felicia Jean Steele’s interactive site for Old English Dialects

http://steele.intrasun.tcnj.edu/engl202/asmap.htm

Dictionaries:

1. The Scottish Dictionary combining the print publications: Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue and Scottish National Dictionary.

http://www.scotsdictionaries.org.uk/

2. The Middle English Dictionary. Password required.

http://ets.umdl.umich.edu/m/med/

3. The Oxford English Dictionary, second edition. Password required.

http://ets.umdl.umich.edu/o/oed/

4. Felicia Jean Steele’s demonstration tutorial for the use of OED, third edition.

http://steele.intrasun.tcnj.edu/fall2005/shel_4/oeddemo_final.html

5. A new search engine applied to the quotation database in the OED allows historical innovation studies. Pw= m42

http://view.byu.edu/

6. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1^st and 4^th editions).

http://ets.umdl.umich.edu/j/johnson/

7. The Dictionary of Old English

http://www.doe.utoronto.ca/

Other Resources:

1. Guidelines for Gender-Inclusive Language from the Linguistic Society of America.

http://www.lsadc.org/resolutions/index.php?aaa=nonsexist.htm

2. Multilingual America. Maps showing the location of speakers of more than 30 languages (from the 2000 census).

http://www.mla.org/census_main

3. Anne Curzan’s collection of English-language sites.

http://sitemaker.umich.edu/acurzan/electronic_resources_for_english_language_study

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