The web is a morass of trash in which you can find the occasional jewel. Sites which describe language, however, seem to be one of the places in which the web is especially rich. In part this attests to the fact that studying our differences is absolutely fascinating. Note that this list of sites is by no means comprehensive; with a little bit of surfing, you will be able to find much more. BE CAREFUL, however! Make sure your source has some authority behind it!
Here is how to get to the Electronic Reserves page for this course.
General resources
Of course, the HDEL Timeline for the course should be your key resource here. After this, the HEL Homepage from Dan Mosser at Virginia Tech; his on-line textbook is wonderful. His pages should be your next go-to site. You can link to my timelines from the homepage; here is another one, within a very helpful HEL course website, by Elly van Gelderen at Arizona State University. The site also has a great glossary. Studying the History of English, a site from Duisberg-Essen University (though in English), has some interesting material to browse through, though it is heavy on image and light on explanation. The Ethnologue seeks to catalogue and describe all of the world's languages. Learn the phonemic alphabet with this video (great), from fənɛtıks (great), with Phthong (for transcription), from Paul Meier (full IPA, with sounds), from SIL (full IPA with sounds), and from the IPA itself. NOTE that our textbook, Millward, varies from the IPA for several consonants. Here are fonts for characters in many languages, including the IPA, so you can type them on your computer and read them on the web.Dictionaries and Etymologies
NOTE that Bailey Library subscribes to the Oxford English Dictionary on line for you. Get used to this as your first go-to dictionary. The on-line Webster's Dictionary and Thesaurus: look up a word, including its etymology, though this is not the Unabridged Webster's. Bosworth & Toller is the definitive Old English dictionary. Use it to look up word roots, but of course you'll have to know the Old English version of the word first. You might do this with the Old English Translator first. The Online Etymology Dictionary is a great source for etymologies and word histories and all sort of other linguistic information. The Urban Dictionary displays in all of its glory the plasticity and creativity of English.Pre-history: Indo-European and before
The Archaic Timeline for the course is your first resource. "Linguists Debating Deepest Roots of Language": an article on Nostratic--a posited language which preceded Indo-European--and how we decipher early languages. "What We All Spoke When the World was Young": another New York Times article on languages before Indo-European and the comparative method. World's Farmers Sowed Languages as Well as Seeds: this New York Times article discusses what has become a prevailing theory, that the spread of agriculture carried with it the spread of early language. Indo-European: a short discussion with lots of information This is an amazing resource: a full Proto-Indo-European Etymological Dictionary; you can download the entire known lexicon of IE and derivational forms so that you can see the correspondences between IE languages. The Proto-Indo-European Demonstration, from UT Austin (with some good examples) Here is a great video introduction to The Indo-Europeean family of languages by Ed Duncan For more information you can go to the Linguistics Research Center at UTAustin for lots of information about PIE and its descendants Here is a great video introduction to The Indo-Europeean family of languages by Ed Duncan Here is a slide show of archeological relics from Indo-European Europe, with a connection to an article about them.Germanic, Latin, and other close relations
The Archaic Timeline for the course is your first resource. Ed Duncan lists seven distinctive features of Germanic. Learn some Old Norse by looking at the texts on the Old Norse Teaching Texts page. PBS has a good page about Vikings, with links to maps, videos, and some information about Scandanivian runes. The Perseus Project contains on-line versions of Greek and Latin dictionaries (among many other tools), which can help if you are looking up word roots. Learn Grimm's and Verner's Laws from a great set of videos: here is Part 1, here is Part 2, and here is Part 3.
Old and Middle English
You can learn Old English (or just take a lesson or two) in several places: from Peter Baker, from Murray McGillivray, and from King Alfred's Grammar book. You can hear Old English aloud on Michael Drout's Anglo-Saxon Aloud page--all of the poetry has been recorded, and he's starting on some prose. Jeremy Smith also has a great set of Old, Middle and Early Modern texts to listen to. Translate PDE into Old English with the Old English Translator. The Old English Coursepack from Oxford has a great set of editions with lots of extras, like maps, recordings, translations, and bibliography. Here is an edition of Beowulf in hypertext. Compare the same text in several different languages to learn about changes in syntax and vocabulary: here is Psalm 23, in several different Middle English Dialects, by Juris Lidaka; here is the parable of the Prodigal Son in Old, Middle, and Early Modern, and PD Englishes (to read and to listen to), by Edwin Duncan; and here is the Lord's Prayer in a number of Germanic languages. A project to edit the Orrmulum, an Early Middle English text with a unique phonetic spelling system The Middle English Compendium at the University of Michigan. Unfortunately, the Middle English and Old English dictionaries aren't free, but there are other resources on the site, including the possibility of doing word searches through their vast corpus of Middle English works on line. On Chaucer, see the Languages page on the Geoffrey Chaucer website from Harvard. The Great Vowel Shift--speak
it, hear it, live it. Here is another explanation from the Geoffrey Chaucer website.
English, from the Early Modern Period to Today
Jeremy Smith also has a great set of Old, Middle and Early Modern texts to listen to and to read. How to speak with a Proper Elizabethan Accent: lessons! Or listen to Pronouncing Shakespeare. The The Early Modern English Dictionaries Database collects information from many Early Modern dictionaries. Here is a page on London Slang. This kind of speech--almost a cant--is what makes English just so much fun. Here's a page about British English overall. A Phonological Atlas of American English. This is a fascinating project. It records the linguistic isobars which delineate American dialects. Here is the Linguistic Atlas of the US. American Varieties, a page on American dialects by PBS. Here is the American Dialect Society's homepage. Here is the Dictionary of Regional American English. A Bibliography of American English Regional and Ethnic Dialects. This is just a list of sources, but a great place to search through for help. Ebonics Information Page, from the CAL (Center for Applied Linguistics). Because this has been a highly politicized issue, there is a lot of mis-information out there on the web about this. I've picked this site because it is founded in an objective, informational approach, created after a 1997 scuffle over language in schools. Any discussion of dialect and linguistic authority which ignores linguistic history will be fundamentally mis-informed. Here is 
A Short Grammar Sketch of AAVE by linguist Jack Ridnell. Two good and authoritative sites on modern American slang are Slangcity and Doubletongued. Pittsburghese an'nat for fun; Pittsburghese also needs learned about. Or see these. In our library is a neat journal named American Speech which is worth a look.
Pronunciation Practice. These sites have files you can actually listen to for your accents project. You might also put some key terms into YouTube.
The BBC has a great page for examples of UK Accents. The British Library has a page of archival sound recordings; the drop-down menu includes a choice to search among accents. IDEA (International Dialects of English Archive) has a wonderful set of sound files. The Audio Archive for the alt-english-usage newsgroup contains a good set of files. Here is the Speech Accent Archive from George Mason U. Pretty nifty help here. Varieties of English is also pretty fab. For an ideal to strive for, watch some videos by amiableAmyWalker.
Various and sundry web stuff that doesn't seem to fit in above.
Michael Quinion's World Wide Words, with a wide wange of weird facts about English. Schott's Vocab is a blog which contains all sorts of great observations about words and word histories. See www.kissthisguy.com: musical mondegreens! You can see lots of old books--with great examples of early langauge--at the Rare Book Room.
The Dialectizer Are you hotforwords? Intelligence is sexy. Save the words! The Media History Project collects a variety of information on topics from paleolithic cave painting to modern cinema. Lots of great links about orality and literacy: it's on a Pitt law professor's website, but he seems to be cool anyway.