HDEL - Helpful Websites

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; make sure your source has some authority. The web is a morass of redundancies (and often trash) in which it can be hard to find an original, authoritative idea. Please let me know about any problems on this page.

General Resources

Of course, the HEL Timelines for the course should be your key resource here.
Another timeline, 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 much interesting material to browse through.
The Ethnologue seeks to catalogue and describe all of the world's languages.
Learn the phonemic alphabet from SIL (full IPA with sounds), and from the IPA itself. NOTE that some textbooks, such as Millward, use a slightly different phonetic alphabet that varies from the IPA for several consonants.
You may need to install a font or two on your computer to type the IPA or non-English characters. I recommend Cardo font, the Junicode font, or the Unicode fonts on this page.

Nifty Blogs

David Crystal writes a blog.
John McWhorter writes (well, it seems by now, wrote) a column for The New Republic. He now contributes to Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language and (often) pop culture from Slate.
Lingua Obscura is published by JSTOR.
Word Roots is the blog for the site Vocabulary.com. The site is all about ways to discover and learn new words, and the blog discusses word histories.
The Oxford Words Blog is by the group that publishes the OED.
Lingua Franca considers language trends, not just in academe.
Articles on the Cultures and Languages section of Aeon consider language and myriad forms and many contexts.
Separated by a Common Language comments on American vs. British varieties of English.
LanguageHat blogs on all sorts of linguistic topics, and his page contains links to much more.

Podcasts

I've mentioned Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language and (often) pop culture from Slate.
A Way with Words is a radio show about language new and old that you can listen to in podcast form. The shows are broken up into clips so you can pick and choose what you want to learn about.
The History of English Podcast by Kevin Stroud includes a number of fascinating episodes. He spends a lot of time on each moment, often using an historical text as a platform to describe word histories. As I write this there are 97 episodes, and he's up to the Magna Carta, during Early Middle English period. The same podcaster also produced a podcast about the History of the Alphabet.

Dictionaries

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 link is on our course's D2L homepage.
The on-line Webster's Dictionary and Thesaurus focuses on American English. You can look up a word and its etymology, but note that this is not the Unabridged Webster's.
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.
You can find another PIE lexicon at the Linguistics Research Center at UTAustin.
Here is another Online Etymological Dictionary for looking up PIE word roots: a wise researcher will use this and and the above resources.
Bosworth & Toller is the most complete 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. (Here is another on-line version.)
The Old English Translator can give you OE versions of PDE words, and vice-versa.
The Middle English Dictionary (MED) is housed at Michigan. Here is a new, more user-friendly interface to use to search it.

Databases

The BYU Corpora collect immense sets of data about various Englishes around the world. There are some videos on The Grammar Lab on YouTube that explain how to use it. There is a bit of a learning curve to these, but they are well worth your time.
The Google Books corpus of American or British English. BYU has developed this search tool on top of the dataset that Google has made available from scanning books, which it used to create its N-Gram viewer. It allows for more complex sets of searches.
Search Google's N-Grams here directly.
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.
Note the resources on Academia Prisca.
The Proto-Indo-European Demonstration, from UT Austin (with some good examples)
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 slide show of archeological relics from Indo-European Europe, with a connection to an article about them.
"What We All Spoke When the World was Young": a New York Times article on languages before Indo-European and the comparative method.

Germanic, Latin, and other close relations

The latter sections of the Archaic Timeline for the course are your first resource.
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.
Whitaker's Words will parse and define any Latin word form.
PBS has a good page about Vikings, with links to maps, videos, and some information about Scandanivian runes.

Old and Middle English

You can learn Old English (or just take a lesson or two) from Murray McGillivray or King Alfred's Grammar book. Peter Baker's pages require an account.
You can hear Old English aloud from Jeremy Smith, who 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. Another can be found here.
The Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English and the Linguistic Atlas of Later Middle English map forms of various ME words, among other helpful features.
Here is a Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots, also from the Institute for Historical Dialectology.
The Middle English Compendium at the University of Michigan. You can look up word definitions, and examples of use in a vast array of Middle English texts.
On Chaucer and his contemporaries, see the Language pages on the Geoffrey Chaucer website from Harvard. The METRO project gives introductions and short lessons about the Gawain-poet and other contemporaries.

Early Modern English and PDEnglish in Britain

The Great Vowel Shift—speak it, hear it, live it. Here is another very good explanation from the Geoffrey Chaucer website.
Jeremy Smith also has a great set of Old, Middle and Early Modern texts to listen to and to read.
Find out a lot on David Crystal's site about Original Pronunciation, or "OP." He (with his son Ben, an actor) describes it, shows evidence for how it worked, and includes audio recordings. Or, take some lessons to speak with a Proper Elizabethan Accent.
The Lexicons of Early Modern English collects information from many Early Modern dictionaries.
Here's an American's guide to British English.

American Englishes

Take a Dialect Quiz to discover something about how you speak and hear English. I am definitely similar to where I grew up in eastern PA, but I also show some influence from where my grandparents lived, in the South.
American Varieties, a set of pages on American dialects by PBS; these pages are great.
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.
Here is the American Dialect Society's homepage.
Here is the Dictionary of Regional American English. Note this recent article about the Dictionary, since it now seems to be fading out.
A fun site on modern American slang is Slangcity. You also probably know about the Urban Dictionary.
Pittsburghese an'nat for fun; Pittsburghese also needs learned about. Or listen to these people. Or this guy.
Via our library you can read a journal named American Speech that is well worth a search.

Want to Speak an Accent?

These sites have files you can listen to. You might also put some key terms into YouTube.

The BBC has a great page for examples of UK Accents.
IDEA (International Dialects of English Archive) has a wonderful set of sound files from all over the world.
Here is the Speech Accent Archive from George Mason U. Pretty nifty help here.