Websites relating to the English language in particular

ABC News (Australia)
https://www.abc.net.au/news/tok-pisin/
For readers interested in pidgin and creole varieties of English, the ABC News website has a section devoted to news articles written in Tok Pisin.

BBC Voices archive
https://www.bbc.co.uk/voices/
Although now archived, this is a useful site for exploring dialect variation, and contains a wide variety of recordings of regional accents from different parts of the British Isles.

British Library: British Accents and Dialects
https://www.bl.uk/british-accents-and-dialects
This section of the British Library website contains a wealth of articles, along with many examples (including sound recordings) of accents and dialects across the United Kingdom.

British Library: Online exhibitions
https://www.bl.uk/discover-and-learn/online-exhibitions#
Among the British Library’s online resources are various exhibitions relevant to historical English, all containing helpful articles and links to original manuscripts and publications.

British National Corpus
http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk
Only subscribers can use the full range of functions and examples, but non-subscribers can use a simpler search facility to explore 50 examples at a time. The home page gives guidance on advanced search functions offered by other universities.

Collins Dictionary
https://www.collinsdictionary.com
A free online dictionary, based on the vast Collins corpus of written and spoken language in use. The thesaurus is particularly useful for examining synonymy and there are some engaging blogs about language use and the compilation of dictionaries.

Dictionary of Old English (University of Toronto)
https://doe.artsci.utoronto.ca/pages/index.html/
An ongoing project using all surviving manuscripts to record the vocabulary of English from 600 to 1150, with letters A to I now available. Users can get up to 60 hours free access a year.

English-Corpora.org
https://www.english-corpora.org/corpora.asp
Originating from the Brigham Young University collection, this now independent collection of corpora, created and overseen by Professor Mark Davies, runs to thousands of texts and billions of words. With material from British, American and other dialects of English, it enables users to explore discourse in a variety of ways, particularly looking at patterns in the use of lexis and grammar in relation to register and genre. Access is free following registration, and there is plenty of guidance on how to search and analyse the resources. This collection can also be used for exploring language variation and change, as covered in Chapters 12 and 13.

The Gersum Project
https://www.gersum.org
A collaboration between the Universities of Cambridge, Cardiff and Sheffield to explore the influence of Old Norse vocabulary on English. You can browse the website for examples or search the database.

Internet Grammar of English (University College London)
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/internet-grammar/
An easy-to-use online grammar course for undergraduates, also containing a very full glossary. The IGE is also available as an app for Apple and android devices.

Lexico
https://www.lexico.com
Lexico describes itself as ‘a collaboration between Dictionary.com and Oxford University Press to help users worldwide with everyday language challenges’. The site answers all sorts of interesting questions about English words as well as offering useful lists and articles.

Middle English Compendium (University of Michigan)
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary
The compendium’s main component is a searchable ME dictionary, which provides definitions, spelling variations and quotations.

OriginalPronunciation
http://www.originalpronunciation.com/GBR/Home
Professor David Crystal’s engaging website ‘devoted to the production or performance of works from earlier periods of English’. It includes various articles about evidence for early pronunciation as well as some recorded examples.

Oxford English Dictionary Blog
https://public.oed.com/blog/#
The blog section of the OED contains a wealth of articles exploring, amongst other things, how changing social contexts affect words and their meanings.

Oxford English Dictionary
https://www.oed.com
An invaluable resource which is expanding all the time. It now includes a historical thesaurus, for instance. Although full access to the dictionary requires a subscription, most university and public libraries provide free access for their members.

Oxford Text Archive (University of Oxford)
https://ota.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/repository/xmlui/
This site gives you access to a wealth of transcribed historical texts (such as the Corpus of Early English Correspondence), free to download, although some require prior permission.

Speech Accent Archive (George Mason University)
http://accent.gmu.edu
This archive enables users to listen to a wide variety of both ENL and ESL speakers reading the same paragraph, so is ideal for comparing accents. Phonetic transcriptions of the recordings are also provided.

A Thesaurus of Old English (University of Glasgow)
https://oldenglishthesaurus.arts.gla.ac.uk
An ‘inside-out dictionary’, enabling users to search by meaning for Old English words and build an awareness of semantic fields and cultural values during this period.

VARIENG (University of Helsinki)
https://www2.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/varieng
Helsinki University’s research unit for studying variation, contacts and change in English hosts on its website a Corpus Resource Database (CoRD) which provides information about and access to a host of relevant corpora for studying historical English. Of particular interest are the various atlases of historical English and the collections of historical texts.

World Wide Words
http://worldwidewords.org
A fun and accessible site compiled by Michael Quinion, who wrote many of the entries for The Oxford Dictionary of New Words. Although no longer being updated, the site contains a wealth of short articles about the origins of words and about current usage.

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Websites relating to language and linguistics in general

All About Linguistics (University of Sheffield)
http://all-about-linguistics.group.shef.ac.uk
This website has pages for all the main branches of linguistics, and the morphology section has some helpful tips for drawing tree diagrams of words.

The Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures (APiCS)
https://apics-online.info
A fascinating resource for anyone interested in learning more about these hybrid languages.

Ethnologue
https://www.ethnologue.com
An online survey of the world’s languages.

The Foundation for Endangered Languages
http://www.ogmios.org/index.php
The online newsletters provide an interesting insight into the kind of work being done to protect endangered languages.

International Phonetic Association
https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org
This website includes access to charts of the IPA symbols.

Macquarie University / Speech
https://www.mq.edu.au
Access to a vast array of resources for studying speech and acoustics is provided by the linguistics department of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. (Go to the main website and search ‘speech resource pages’.)

Semantics Archive
https://semanticsarchive.net
Supported by the Linguistic Society of America, this large collection of papers on semantics is well worth browsing.

UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database
http://web.phonetik.uni-frankfurt.de/upsid.html
This URL is an interface to the UPSID website at the University of California via Frankfurt University.

UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger
http://www.unesco.org/languages-atlas/
This interactive atlas enables you to search languages by country or by degree of endangerment. Current information about their status is also provided.

World Atlas of Language Structures Online (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig)
https://wals.info
Edited by Matthew S Dryer and Martin Haspelmath, this provides extensive data about a wide range of global language features and their distribution.