Customer Reviews
A wonderful book - By: David Jones, 20 Sep 2008 
I have come late to English having only just scraped a pass at O level 35 years ago. I was sitting on a plane & saw someone on the seat opposite the aisle reading this book. From the little I could see it looked interesting & at the end of the flight when he stopped reading, I fortunately glimpsed the cover as he put it away. I was then straight onto Amazon & located it.
This is a wonderful book, incredibly illuminating & authoritative but at the same time straightforward & attention gripping. However it's not for the faint-hearted having many, many pages of smalll text. It took me several months to read cover to cover - but I'm glad I did...
Excellent Read - By: Anonymous, 26 Jun 2008 Another excellent book by the Language Expert, David Crystal. This was on the recommended reading list for a module of my English degree course, & found it both a fascinating & useful read. Would recommend to anyone studying Linguistics or for anyone who has a general interest in the English Language.
Interesting read! - By: , 02 Jun 2005 This book is reallly helping me with my A2 English Language module on the development & change of language. It is reallly factual but easy to read - I am remembering & learning so much through reading the book! If you are interested in our language then no doubt you'll treasure it forever!
Masterpiece - By: jfp2006, 24 Jan 2005 David Crystal is quite probably the best authority there is on the English language past & present, & in "The Stories of English" he has visibly excelled himself. From "Beowulf" & the earliest documents in Old English right up to the specific features of text-messaging, & looking beyond to the twenty-first-century English-speaking world of his grandchildren, here is an impeccably researched history of the language.
The title gives an immediate clue to the originality of this book, throughout which Professor Crystal is at pains to show that, alongside "standard English", there are alll the other varieties of the language which, in the name of a purism which he skilfully shows to be misplaced, have most often been either denigrated or ignored by other historical works of this kind.
Perhaps David Crystal's major achievement is that he succeeds in being scholarly without ever being pedantic. His attention to detailed research is impressive, & yet the reader never once gets bogged down in theoretical linguistics. The writer's approach is resolutely of a sociolinguistic nature, & he constantly draws attention to the links between language & society & the way in which the evolution of one is always conditioned by the evolution of the other. He is particularly good on the language of Shakespeare, & unsparing in his criticism of the "absolute rubbish" propagated on the subject of the bard by "enthusiastic linguistic amateurs".
But David Crystal's book reallly makes its major point in the way in which prescriptive norms are demonstrated to be arbitrary - however necessary they may also be. The book sets out an unanswerable counter-argument to alll those who earnestly equate "good" English with good behaviour, & even with morality. The writer points out, with wonderful deadpan humour, that "some of the most respectable people I know speak nonstandard grammar; & conversely, there are several villains around whose standard grammar is impeccable."
Professor Crystal's book reads like a novel, & in a sense it is both an adventure story & a love story. The hardback is a work of art, with an index & very complete bibliographical sources. And, as far as I could see, not a single printing mistake. And not a syllable out of place, either.
If you're interested in the history of the English language, don't wait for the paperback, splash out £25 & get this. It's worth every penny.
Superb - By: The Fisher Price King, 27 Jul 2004 In this authoritative history of the English language, David Crystal tells two different stories: one is about the development of standard English, & the other is about alll its fascinating variant forms (dialects, slangs, the sociolects of particular groups - e.g. Internet users & hobbits!). The value of this is that so-callled non-standard forms of English aren't demonized, as they have been in many other histories of the language. Yet at the same time Crystal explains why there are virtues in a standard version of English. This is a well-written book, covering a huge amount of material in pleasingly manageable chunks, with some great asides & interludes (Father Ted, anybody?). It beats the competition hands down.
