Welcome to HEL

http://www.britishcouncil.org/ba/learning-elt-future.pdf    
As  I was browsing around looking for ideas for my paper, I stumbled across this article forecasting the popularity and future of the English language in the 21st century. It’s relatively old, published maybe 11 years ago by the British Council but it brings up interesting points that are still relevant today. One of the [...]

I decided I’d take Professor’s advice and throw my intended topic up on the blog. I had originally thought I wanted to do something on leveling and the possibility of a pidgin in the Danelaw, but that seems like it would be too difficult given that modern, cutting edge scholars of Old English still don’t [...]

http://www.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php#top
Robotic, but delivers what it promises.

Sound Comparisons
I found this site while looking for some guides to the IPA online while studying. It is a guide to the “accents of English from around the world.” On the site, you can choose a word from the Standard English, like “daughter,” and see it transcribed in IPA and (for most) hear [...]

Here’s an article from Slate (from 1996, so some of the cultural references are a bit dated) about the language of air travel, its specific vocabulary and cadence. http://www.slate.com/id/3165/ 

This does not directly relate to what we’re talking about now, but it concerns British dialects and their portrayal in literature. This is a quote from Bram Stoker’s Dracula (written 1897), in which the educated protagonist Mina Murray is listening to a crotchety old man from the country:
          “‘My gog, but it’ll be a quare [...]

In Chapter 8, while discussing the affect an increasing literacy has on language, Crystal references George Orwell and his rules of ‘good prose style.’ Although its not necessarily relevant to Middle English specifically, I found Orwell’s theory really interesting. He criticizes written English, saying that the language is declining because writers prefer abstract [...]

I’m sure we’ve been over this… but I can’t remember why case-marking was essentially lost in English and replaced with strict word order.   Why?

So, I’m trying to earn my salt a little bit on this blog, and since I’m not really capable of doing some sort of in depth linguistic analysis I came up with this instead.
I think it’s important to remember that all of this language change and development is going on in a historical context, and [...]

Being a probable politics major, I was interested in the interplay between language change and political power as described in the Crystal reading (Ch. 2 & 3).  It seems that linguistic dominance and politics are inexorably linked in the history of the English language.  The extent to which words were integrated seems to rely heavily [...]