Early 19th centuryGrimm's Law (discovered by Friedrich von Schlegel and Rasmus Rask, later elaborated by Jacob Grimm) identifies relationships between certain consonants in Germanic languages (including English) and their originals in Indo-European. The formulation of Grimm's Law marks a major advance in the development of linguistics as a scholarly field of study.

1803 The Act of Union incorporates Ireland into Britain, creating the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

1806 The British occupy Cape Colony in South Africa.

1810William Hazlitt publishes A New and Improved Grammar of the English Language.

1816 John Pickering compiles the first dictionary of Americanisms.

1828 Noah Webster publishes his American Dictionary of the English Language. Richard Whateley publishes Elements of Rhetoric.

1840 The native Maori in New Zealand cede sovereignty to the British.

1842 The London Philological Society is founded.

1844 The telegraph is invented by Samuel Morse, inaugurating the development of rapid communication, a major influence on the growth and spread of English.

Mid 19th century A standard variety of American English develops. English is established in Australia, South Africa, India, and other British colonial outposts.

1852 The first edition of Roget's Thesaurus is published.

1866 James Russell Lowell champions the use of American regionalisms, helping to end deference to the Received British Standard. Alexander Bain publishes English Composition and Rhetoric.

The transatlantic telegraph cable is completed.

1876 Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone, thus modernizing private communication.

1879 James A.H. Murray begins editing the Philological Society's New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (later renamed the Oxford English Dictionary).

1884/1885Mark Twain's novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn introduces a colloquial prose style that significantly influences the writing of fiction in the U.S. (See Mark Twain's Colloquial Prose Style.)

1901 The Commonwealth of Australia is established as a dominion of the British Empire.

1906 Henry and Francis Fowler publish the first edition of The King's English.

1907 New Zealand is established as a dominion of the British Empire.

1919H.L. Mencken publishes the first edition of The American Language, a pioneer study in the history of a major national version of English.

1920 The first American commercial radio station begins operating in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

1921Ireland achieves Home Rule, and Gaelic is made an official language in addition to English.

1922 The British Broadcasting Company (later renamed the British Broadcasting Corporation, or BBC) is established.

1925The New Yorker magazine is founded by Harold Ross and Jane Grant.

1925 George P. Krapp publishes his two-volume The English Language in America, the first comprehensive and scholarly treatment of the subject.

1926 Henry Fowler publishes the first edition of his Dictionary of Modern English Usage.

1927 The first "speaking motion picture," The Jazz Singer, is released.

1928The Oxford English Dictionary is published.

1930 British linguist C.K. Ogden introduces Basic English.

1936 The first television service is established by the BBC.

1939 World War II begins.

1945 World War II ends. The Allied victory contributes to the growth of English as a lingua franca.

1946The Philippines gains its independence from the U.S.

1947 India is freed from British control and divided into Pakistan and India. The constitution provides that English remain the official language for 15 years. New Zealand gains its independence from the U.K. and joins the Commonwealth.

1949 Hans Kurath publishes A Word Geography of the Eastern United States, a landmark in the scientific study of American regionalisms.

1950Kenneth Burke publishes A Rhetoric of Motives.

1950s The number of speakers using English as a second language exceeds the number of native speakers.

1957Noam Chomsky publishes Syntactic Structures, a key document in the study of generative and transformational grammar.

1961Webster's Third New International Dictionary is published.

1967 The Welsh Language Act gives the Welsh language equal validity with English in Wales, and Wales is no longer considered a part of England. Henry Kucera and Nelson Francis publish Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English, a landmark in modern corpus linguistics.

1969Canada officially becomes bilingual (French and English). The first major English dictionary to use corpus linguistics--The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language--is published.

1972A Grammar of Contemporary English (by Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik) is published. The first call on a personal cell phone is made. The first email is sent.

1978The Linguistic Atlas of England is published.

1981 The first issue of the journal World Englishes is published.

1985A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language is published by Longman.

1988 The Internet (under development for more than 20 years) is opened to commercial interests.

1989 The second edition of The Oxford English Dictionary is published.

1993 Mosaic, the web browser credited with popularizing the World Wide Web, is released. (Netscape Navigator becomes available in 1994, Yahoo! in 1995, and Google in 1998.)

1994Text messaging is introduced, and the first modern blogs go online.

1995 David Crystal publishes The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language.

1997 The first social networking site (SixDegrees.com) is launched. (Friendster is introduced in 2002, and both MySpace and Facebook begin operating in 2004.)

2000 The Oxford English Dictionary Online (OED Online) is made available to subscribers.

2002 Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum publish The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Tom McArthur publishes The Oxford Guide to World English.

2006 Twitter, a social networking and microblogging service, is created by Jack Dorsey.

2009 The two-volume Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary is published by Oxford University Press.

2012 The fifth volume (SI-Z) of the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE ) is published by Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

 

Bibliography

 

• Algeo, John. The Origins and Development of the English Language, 6th edition. Wadsworth, 2009.
• Baugh, Albert C., and Thomas Cable. A History of the English Language, 5th edition. Prentice Hall, 2001.
• Bragg, Melvyn. The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language. Hodder & Stoughton, 2003.
• Crystal, David. The English Language. Penguin, 2002.
• Gooden, Philip. The Story of English: How the English Language Conquered the World. Quercus, 2009.
• Hogg, Richard M., and David Dennison, editors. A History of the English Language. Cambridge University Press, 2006.
• Lerer, Seth. Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language. Columbia University Press, 2007.
• McArthur, Tom. The Oxford Companion to the English Language. Oxford University Press, 1992.
• Millward, C.M., and Mary Hayes. A Biography of the English Language, 3rd ed. Wadsworth, 2011.
• Mugglestone, Linda. The Oxford History of English. Oxford University Press, 2006.
• Nist, John. A Structural History of English. St. Martin's Press, 1966.