"The Stories of English" is a necessary, dense, well-researched volume by an expert who clearly has a true passion for the language and its variations. However, it has some clear advantages and some very clear flaws. (I'm fully aware that it's a bit bathetic of me to dismiss any writing but this most wonderful of linguists, however I adore all of his other books!)

Crystal's mandate is clever and clear: provide a history of the evolution of the English language, with a particular eye to studying "non-standard English" in all its varieties. Changes to the language - be they merely regional slang, or international pidgin dialects - are too often forgotten, due to the fact that they rarely appear in surviving print documents, and Crystal wants to lift a light on the subject. We begin with a thorough examination of the growth of Early English, brought together by French, Latin, Anglo, Danish, and so on. Using extensive contemporary texts, Crystal analyses the development of the language, asking such questions as: why do some "loan words" overtake others?; why do some variations remain?; who has the right to decide which language is 'correct'?; and so on, and so forth. Gradually, he moves through Middle English, and into the Modern aspects of the language. Along the way, Crystal continues to provide lengthy excerpts from documents, and finds examples of how the 'non-standard' parts of the language arose, remained, and were treated by those on the 'right side' of English.

There are two particularly notable strengths to the book. The first is Crystal's true passion, which allows him to introduce a variety of texts from centuries ago, and make us feel intrigued by them. The second is his desire to expose the fallacies of those who believe English has exact rules, and should remain within its confines. From the earliest surviving texts, he finds examples of whiners - whether it be those who believe no French or Latin words should be included, or those who are terrified of ending sentences with prepositions - and explains where these mistaken beliefs came from. Crystal doesn't write everything off (he understands, after all, where they come from), but strives to show that strictness for strictness' sake is ridiculous.

However, the book is far from perfect. First of all, despite the claims in the blurb, Crystal's style is often dry and academic. Fair enough, this was never going to be "Gone with the Wind". But particularly in the early chapters, when the subject is six-hundred-year old manuscripts, and the variations of individual letters, it would've been promising to have a slightly more witty tour guide. And, while the first two-thirds of the story are comprehensive, the final third largely covers UK-specific English. There is one fascinating if dry chapter on the development of English throughout the world, but it's quite limited. Again, I understand the need for this, and it actually helps support Crystal's argument that much non-standard English, both on a historical and on a global standpoint, is under-researched, but - to a non-UK reader - things did become a bit specific toward the end.

Crystal has one other adorable but infuriating quirk. He's inclined to make witty - or at least clever - jokes and puns without prior explanation. On several occasions, however, the explanation is so obscure that he's forced to provide an endnote to his explanation of his own witticism. In these cases, he really could've done with just setting up the joke in the main body of the text, as I'd imagine most readers would have had to utilise these endnotes often!

All in all, I'm glad to have read this book. I picked up a lot of fascinating new information, and many of the excerpts were utterly astounding in what they exposed about the lives of our ancestors. At the same time, it never quite found the perfect balance between "popular science" and academia. ( )

David Crystal has audaciously performed a feat I would never have attempted in my wildest dreams. He has traced the evolution of the English language from its earliest beginnings with the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in Great Britain, through its developing dialects, the influences of Latin and Norman French (not to be confused with Parisian French), and the evolution of Old English. He continues through developments in Middle English and finishes at the dawn of the 21st century with the many different English versions worldwide.

The work is breathtaking in its scope. Is it thorough and well-researched? Absolutely! Is it easy to read? Well, for me, at least, no. No, it’s not.

I’m not a linguist and don’t want to become one. So, I skimmed over the bits I didn’t understand. But even so, reading the chapters on Middle English, I found myself mostly lost. What I did get was that during that period of around 300 years, the residents of Britain weren’t language snobs. Sometimes people from different regions had trouble understanding one another, and sometimes they made fun of one another. Still, no one felt one version of English was superior.

That attitude changed from the 16th through the 18th centuries when the inhabitants of London and the surrounding area began to claim ownership of the language, and prescriptivists like Samuel Johnson set out to standardize it. Crystal views this as a tragic situation that was doomed from the start. And rightly so, in his opinion.

Crystal is a descriptivist, not a prescriptivist. He feels languages should evolve naturally with certain basic grammar rules so that we can easily understand one another. But pronunciation guides and picky grammatical rules draw his ire. In particular, he hates the objections to split infinitives and ending sentences with prepositions. Because of this, I found him a pleasure to hang out with. (See what I did there?) I’d recommend this to those curious about our language and those who wish to better understand how languages change and grow. ( )

Interesting, but in endless detail, with word lists, interludes, and asides. The author's point of view is that dialect and borrowings from other languages are perfectly normal and healthy for the growth of expressiveness in a language, and he considers English to be the language with the greatest flexibility and vocabulary because of its borrowings. He is against prescriptive grammarians, and insists that the language is what the people speak. The interludes are set off in text boxes, and tell interesting stories about single words or collections of phrases and words. Page 402 has a list of common phrases like "dead as a door nail" that originated with Shakespeare, for instance. My interest faded during old and middle English, and picked up again with modern "global" English. The quotations from obscure and well known volumes must have taken years to collect. ( )

A good, sometimes tedious look at the origins of the English language, from its earliest beginnings as a language of the Anglo-Saxons to its current dominance of the globe. Takes a look at the Standard and Non-standard forms of English and argues quite convincingly for respect of the Non-standard. ( )

This is a manifesto for sociolinguistics disguised as a history of the English language, or possibly vice-versa...

In Crystal's view, a language is a form of agreed social behaviour, static neither in time nor in space, varying also according to the purpose for which it is being used at any given moment. Its history is the story of all the millions of people who've used it over the centuries. Unfortunately, only a tiny and unrepresentative proportion of their utterances have made any kind of retrievable mark on the historical record, so when we do historical linguistics we are likely to end up with a model of one particular form of the language, and there's a great temptation to identify Old English uniquely with the language of Beowulf, Middle English with the language of Chaucer and Early Modern English with the language of Shakespeare (for example). Crystal goes through the evidence again and shows us how weak that kind of assumption can be - as can the many others we make about language stability, about "correct" forms, about pronunciation, spelling, and grammar, and so on. Pedants watch out!

This is, as you would expect from Crystal, a lively read, never going deep into the sort of dry philological detail you find in something like the Cambridge History, but staying at the sort of level that would appeal to undergraduates and general readers. There wasn't a huge amount that was new to me, but I did get quite a few new insights from Crystal's way of looking at the evidence, so well worth a read, especially if you don't know much about the history of English. ( )

A vast info-dump. It reads like the production of a privately-printing seventeenth-century antiquary who has written down many thing that interest him and has had no publishers telling him to remember consumer demographics or to keep it under three hundred pages. Which is not to say that it's a mess, it's not, but arranged chronologically and squeezed in to chapters. But there's a definite sense of spread caused, I think, by the astounding levels of detail. Crystal hates sweeping statements and you'll suddenly realise you're reading about the variant spellings of 'man' in Cotton Aug.ii.64.

Another thing Crystal hates is snobbery. This is a theme that has run through all the books of his that I've read. The thought that one person's English is better than another's makes him bilious and he denigrates histories that provide an over-simplified narrative at the expense of regional forms. Having read one or two of those histories I have to agree with him, but those readings being now some time in the past I could have done with something to reorient myself to the timeline. If you're looking for a straight-forward history of English this is not that book. Look, if you're sitting there with your ignorance in one hand and this book in the other then read the book. You'll love it. It's brilliant. If you know literally nothing bout the history of English and you're looking for a heads-up history read one of those, it doesn't matter which one, and then read this. ( )

I wasn't as into the last few chapters, but there are just so many interesting details in the rest of the book that I'm giving it five stars. Maybe Standard English just isn't that interesting?

Oh, and for anyone that I haven't told yet, William Caxton had an assistant called Wynkyn de Worde. Hwat?! ( )

A beautiful set of anecdotes of how we got from Old English to World Englishes, with all the side shows along the way. ( )

Found it really interesting, covered a wide range of aspects of English going right back to the very beginning.

Loved that Tolkien got a little mention in the section on dialect.

The way it was organised was good but some of the little boxes with additional information were in the middle of interesting sections so you had to flick back and forth to read everything.

Was good to finally read it because I'd dipped into bits of it before and David Crystal is such a huge name in linguistics. ( )

[The stories of English]
I was reading his books back as a student... I really wish the publishers had taken the fact that some of us older folk still like to read this sort of thing. I loved the content, but every page was hard to get through because of the miniscule, tiny, small, and undersized print.

The print was so bad that I have had to rate lower because if it. ( )

It's a pretty heavy work in contrast to something like Mother Tongue, examining and explaining the history and diversity of English, without putting the usual emphasis on "Standard English". There's lots of stuff about the varieties that peacefully coexisted through most of history until some stupid ideas about linguistic and moral purity exploded onto the scene in the 1700s-ish. I enjoyed it despite feeling it was tough going at times, and had to settle into a good blend of reading and skimming. It's 585 pages! Crystal includes a lot of "sidebars" with examples, which are often interesting but can break up the flow considerably. He also spends a lot of time on the language reformers, but not actually an unreasonable amount in the end. A good solid book. ( )

I am likely to enjoy any interesting history of my favorite language, and this was a great one. He is refreshingly open-minded and even optimistic. I even might have learned not to fear that usages not to my liking point straight to the end of the world. Well, to fear that less. Packed full of fascinating facts and analysis, the book rewarded my close attention and careful reading.

A history of the English language for the non-academic reader, and a very good book indeed. The development of the language is examined in detail, from a social/historic perspective as well as a linguistic one, and areas of uncertainty are highlighted, rather than buried as they so often are. The organization is clear, the storyline compelling, and the writing (as ever with Mr. Crystal) a pleasure to read. Note: this is NOT the "Story of English" published to complement a PBS series in the mid-1990's -- this book is much more informative. ( )

Excellent, scholarly and easily understood. ( )

This book is a real treasure and it is not necessary to sit down and read it cover to cover in order to enjoy it. Keep it with you, read individual chapters as they catch your interest, go back and forth, let the book inspire you and entertain you with it's wonderful mix of linguistics, history, and literature. ( )

This book tells the detailed stories of all the English dialects and non-standard branches of the English language, starting way back with Old English and moving up to the present. I'm only a wee bit into the book, but I love picking it up and reading a short section.

A bit heavy going for me, particularly in the early chapters. ( )

The usual staggering erudition and easy style we expect from David Crystal made almost unreadable in this Penguin edition by skimped production - narrow margins, tiny type, dull paper. Very disappointing. ( )