Resources for Studying the History and Development of English (in Progress, May 30, 2010) (With many thanks to Edwin Duncan and Dan Mosser!) Please let me know if any of these links fail to work.

Scholarly Societies

• American Dialect Society: http://www.americandialect.org/ (fabulous list of resources)

• Linguistic Society of America: http://www.lsadc.org/ (some good stuff on the resources tab)

• The Linguist List (largest online community of language scholars): http://linguistlist.org/

• Word Origins: http://www.wordorigins.org/ (fabulous list of resources)

Dictionaries

• American Heritage Dictionary
  American Speech
  Dictionary of American Regional English
  Dictionary of Canadian Place Names
  Historical Dictionary of American Slang
  Illustrated Dictionary of Place Names
  New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English
  Oxford English Dictionary
  Webster's Third New International Dictionary

These are general, all-purpose dictionaries that contain excellent etymological information.

• American Dict. of the English Lang. (Webster, 1828) [Historical]
  American Heritage Dictionary
  Cambridge Dictionaries Online
  Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia [Historical]
  Dictionary of the English Language (Johnson, 1755) [Historical]
  Dictionary.com
  Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary
  OneLook Dictionary
  Oxford English Dictionary
  Shorter Oxford English Dictionary
  Webster's Third New International Dictionary

Etymology/Historical Linguistics/History of English

These are sources, other than dictionaries, that address etymology, historical linguistics, and the history of the English language.

• Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology
  Chambers Dictionary of Etymology
  Comments on Etymology
  Concise Etymological Dict. of the English Lang. [Historical]
  English Language, The (Barber)
  Historical Linguistics (Schendl)
  Inventing English
  Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories
  Origins of English Words (Shipley)
  Oxford Dictionary of Word Histories
  Oxford Guide to Etymology

General

• The HEL (History of the English Language) Home Page (Dan Mosser) -- the major portal page that scholars in the field use
• A Narrative History of England (Peter Williams) from pre-Roman times to the present
• Take Our Word for It A weekly web magazine of interesting origins of English words.
• World Wide Words (Michael Quinion) - Information about interesting English words.
• British History (Britannia) - timelines, documents, monarchs, biographies, etc.
• The Cambridge History of English and American Literature (Project Bartleby) - complete English literary history.
• American Heritage Dictionary, 4th ed. (Yahoo) - useful for etymologies, which go back to Indo-European roots
• Online Etymology Dictionary (Douglas Harper)
•  BBC interactive timeline of history of language:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/launch_tl_ages_english.shtml Click the microphone to hear samples
• British Library Changing Language timeline: http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/changlang/across/languagetimeline.html good examples
• Suzanne Kemmer, “Words in English: A Timeline”: http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~kemmer/Words04/history/index.html
• National Science Foundation special report on Language Learning & Acquisition: http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/linguistics/learn.jsp.

Phonetics and Phonology

• Phonetics: The Sounds of English and Spanish (University of Iowa) - click on English sounds library (requires Quicktime and Flash plug-ins)
• The International Phonetic Alphabet (Peter Ladefoged) - vowel and consonant chart, sounds (requires RealPlayer)
• The Phones and Phonemes of English (George Dillon) - descriptions, charts, sounds of phonemes
• The IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) Home Page
• Phthong (University of Toronto) - exercises for phonemic transcription
• IPA Articulators (SIL) - facial chart locates parts of the speech-producing mechanism
• Interactive Sagittal Section (University of Toronto) - shows points and manners of articulation for various phonemes
• SIL [Summer Institute of Linguistics] free downloads of phonetic fonts. Usually Times New Roman (or Times-OE2 for Macs) will have what you need, but these are complete phonemic sets: http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=encore-ipa&highlight=IPA#5de80512
• More free linguistics font help from Jen Smith at UNC-Chapel Hill: http://www.unc.edu/~jlsmith/ipa-fonts.html

Indo-European and Nostratic

• The Indo-European Language Family (18:02) || Quiz
• Verner's Law (Ari Hoptman) - YouTube Videos - Part 1 (7:51) - Part 2 (3:12) - Part 3 (7:14)
• "Everything you wanted to know about Proto-Indo-European but were afraid to ask" (University of Texas)
• List of Proto-Indo-European Roots (Wiktionary)
• "What We All Spoke When the World Was Young" - Feb. 1, 2000, NY Times article on language superfamilies and the comparative method
• "Linguists Debating Deepest Roots of Language" (1995 NY Times article on Nostratic)
• "The Early History of the Indo-European Languages" (Thomas V. Gamkrelidze and V. V. Ivanov) - 1990 Scientific American article on Nostratic
• The Nostratic Language (Wikipedia)
• "Decoding Antiquity," Andrew Robinson's cover story in New Scientist, 27 May 2009, pp. 24-30, a fascinating account of alphabets for ancient languages that haven't yet been decoded. http://0-search.ebscohost.com.library.winthrop.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=41019283&site=ehost-live.

Germanic

• Tree of Germanic Languages (George Freeman)
• The Seven Distinctive Features of Germanic - linguistic features, Grimm's Law
• The Lord's Prayer in several Germanic languages (Cathy Ball)
• Indo-European Language Resources (Sean Crist) - Gothic, Old English, Old High German glossaries, Tocharian texts and notes, etc.
• The Germanic Invasion of Western Europe (University of Calgary)

Old English

• Old English Pages (Cathy Ball) - texts, fonts, art, links, etc.
• Old English/Anglo-Saxon (Omniglot) - brief explanation with focus on the OE alphabet and its pronunciation; links
• Complete Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Poetry - texts of all surviving OE poetry; no translations or recordings
• The Electronic Sermo Lupi ad Anglos (Melissa Bernstein) - Old English sermon with manuscript image, texts, translation; good for learning to read Old English script
• Bright's Anglo-Saxon Glossary (Sean Crist) - abridged Old English dictionary
• Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (Sean Crist) - complete Old English dictionary.
• King Alfred's Old English Grammar - complete OE grammar with modern grammar review, useful exercises
• Old English Aloud (Steve Pollington) - texts, readings in OE Poetry - Click on capital letter for sound. RealAudio
• Introduction to Old English (Peter Baker) - pronunciation, grammar, texts, useful exercises
• An Online Course in Old English (Murray McGillivray) - pronunciation, grammar, texts, RealAudio recordings

Middle English

• Chaucer's Language, Pronunciation, and Vocabulary (Elizabeth Rehfeld) - explanations, charts, sound recordings of phonemes and texts, grammar of Middle English
• The English Language in the Fourteenth Century (Larry Benson) - explanation with links to French and Latin borrowings, bibliography, other useful information
• The Middle English Compendium (U. of Michigan) - the MED (Middle English Dictionary), searchable library of Middle English works, and more
• Elly van Gelderen's Audio Page - links to RealAudio recordings of readings in Old and Middle English

Early Modern English

• The Great Vowel Shift (Melinda Menzer) vowel sounds (requires Java plug-in) - useful, informative
• The Great Vowel Shift (Larry Benson) - explanation, charts, vowel sounds
• Renascence Editions (Richard Bear) - English works printed 1477-1799
• The Complete Works of Shakespeare (James Matthew Farrow)
• The King James Version of the Bible (U. of Michigan)

Modern English

• Yankee or Dixie Quiz (Harvard Computer Society) - take a short quiz to learn how much of your speech is Yankee and how much Dixie
• American Varieties (PBS)
• Dialect Survey of the U.S. (Harvard Computer Society)
• The Best of British: the American's Guide to Speaking British (Mike Etherington)
• The American Dialect Society Home Page
• American Dialect Links (Claudio Salvucci) - extensive set of links to various regional dialects, many informal and fun
• A Phonological Atlas of North America (U. of Pennsylvania) - descriptions, maps, links
• Language Varieties (U. of New England [Australia]) - AAVE (African-American Vernacular English), other world pidgins and creoles
• Speech Accent Archive (George Mason U.) - sound recordings of various language speakers reading an English paragraph
• MLA Language Map (Modern Language Association) - county-by-county breakdown of over 300 languages spoken in the U. S. A.
• The Voices Recordings (BBC) - sound recordings of dialects in dozens of locations in Great Britain