David Crystal 
Stories of English [EPUB ebook] 

When and why did ‚thou‘ disappear from Standard English? Would a Victorian Cockney have said ‚observation‘ or ‚hobservation‘? Was Jane Austen making a mistake when she wrote ‚Jenny and James are walked to Charmonth this afternoon‘?This superbly well-informed – and also wonderfully entertaining – history of the English language answers all these questions, showing how the many strands of English (Standard English, dialect and slang among them) developed to create the richly-varied language of today.