The New Cambridge History of the English Language
history books about the English language
The New Cambridge History of the English Language (2025–6) is a completely new version of the previous work The Cambridge History of the English Language, published in six volumes under the general editorship of Richard M. Hogg between 1992 and 2001. It has been prepared under the general editorship of Raymond Hickey.
The new history is organised differently from the original work and consists of some 172 chapters by 227 contributors. The chapters are about 25 pages in length, thus allowing them to be used as reading material for a particular week in a course on the history of English. In addition, there are seven ‘long view’ chapters which summarise developments on levels of language throughout the entire history of English.
Volumes of the new history of the English language
Volume I: Context, contact and development (ed. Laura Wright and Raymond Hickey)
Volume II: Documentation, data and modelling (ed. Erik Smitterberg and Merja Kytö)
Volume III: Transmission, change and ideology (ed. Joan Beal)
Volume IV: Britain, Ireland and Europe (ed. Raymond Hickey)
Volume V: North America and the Caribbean (ed.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “The New Cambridge History of the English Language” is history books about the English language. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Cambridge, History and English, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “history books about the English language” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q140354645. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2025, 1992 and 2001.
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This entry incorporates text from “The New Cambridge History of the English Language” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.