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 metapages and resources for language study
The HEL Homepage
from Dan Mosser at Virginia Tech; his on-line textbook is wonderful. His pages should be your first go-to site.
The Yamada Web Guide
to Language Resources on the web, organized by language. There
are a lot of them . . .
The Lingust List, a large directory
of Linguistics resources.
Dictionaries
The on-line Webster's
Dictionary and Thesaurus: look up a word, including its etymology. NOTE that Bailey Library subscribes to the Oxford English Dictionary for you to access on line. Some other
on-line dictionaries (and thesauri). Save these words!
Pre-history
Indo-European:
a short discussion
The Indo-European Home Page
from Berkeley
The Proto-Indo-European
Demonstration, from UT Austin (with some good examples)
The Perseus Project contains on-line versions of Greek and Latin dictionaries (among many other tools), which can help to look up word roots
English language, history, texts, and dialects.
Vikings
invade the Web!
The
newly formed Society for Medieval
Languages and Linguistics is an excellent place to begin for Medieval
studies; it has links to resources for any Medieval language you might
want to look into.
A
project to edit the
Ormulum,
an Early Middle English text with a unique phonetic spelling system, from
the Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Middle
English Texts on line at the University of Virginia Electronic
Texts Center
The Middle English Compendium
at the University of Michigan. Unfortunately, the Middle English
and Old English dictionaries aren't free any more, 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.
Psalm
23, in several different Middle English Dialects, compiled by Juris
Lidaka.
Here is the Bodleian Library at Oxford, which has some manuscript images to browse.
Celtic languages: all you ever wanted to know about Welsh.
How to speak with a Proper
Elizabethan Accent: lessons!
The Great Vowel Shift--speak
it, hear it, live it.
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 slang in
Britain overall, and here's a page on Britspeak.
A Phonological Atlas of American English. This is a fascinating project. It records the linguistic isobars which delineate American dialects.
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.
Two good and authoritative sites on modern American slang are Slangcity and Doubletongued.
Pittsburghese an'nat.
Pronunciation Practice. These sites have files you can actually listen to. You might also put some key terms into YouTube.
The BBC has the very best page ever for examples of UK 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.
This site will actually help you cultivate your Pittsburgh accent without making fun of you.
For an ideal to strive for, watch some videos by amiableAmyWalker.
Some HEL Syllabi from other schools. These are helpful because they collect authoritative links and resources, and give great ideas about projects for papers.
Alan
Baragona's HEL Page from VMI
Edwin
Duncan's HEL Page from Towson U
Susie
Marie-Harrington's HEL Page, from Indiana University-Purdue University,
in Indiana
Dan Mosser's HEL course from Virginia Tech
Various and sundry web stuff that doesn't seem to fit in above.
Are you hotforwords?
Intelligence is sexy. See www.kissthisguy.com: musical mondegreens!
The Dialectizer
Michael Quinion's World Wide Words,
with a wide wange of weird facts about English
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.