1603: Union of the English and Scottish crowns under James the I (VI of Scotland). He presided over the translation of the "Authorized Version" of the Bible.1604: Robert Cawdrey published the first English dictionary, Table Alphabeticall.1607: Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in the New World, was established.1611: The Authorized, or King James Version, of the Bible was published1642-1658: Civil war in England led to the parliamentary Commonwealth of Oliver Cromwell after the execution of Charles I, 1n 1649.1660: The Stuarts were restored to power when Charles II reclaimed the throne.

1666: The Great Fire of London. End of The Great Plague.1688-1689: The "Glorious Revolution" secured the Protestant succession. The Bill of Rights established the principle of parliamentary supremacy and excluded Roman Catholics from the succession.1702: Publication of the first daily, English-language newspaper, The Daily Courant, in London.1707: the Act of Union between England and Scotland, creating the country of Great Britain. 1750: The establishment of the East India Company started the development of the British Empire which would eventually become the largest and most populous in history1755: Samuel Johnson published his dictionary.1760s-1830s: The period of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, transforming the economy and the social order.

- a gradual, organic, slow process

- grew up from below, from the everyday practice of language users, particularly of English authors

- no official institution & no publication which regulate the language

- books that can be regarded as codifications of the current standard usage:

e.g. the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English, Fowler’s Dictionary of the English Usage

- important milestones:

1. 1653 John Wallis: Grammatica linguae Anglicanae - formulated the distribution of the auxiliaries “shall“ and “will“ in the conjugational paradigm of the English future tense

2. 1761 Joseph Priestley: Rudiments of English Grammar- declares that the decisive part in solving the problems of the correctness of language belongs to the usage current in that language= custom of speaking is the only standard of any language

3. 1755 Samuel Johnson: The Dictionary of the English Language

1755: Samuel Johnson: Dictionary of the English Language

- subjective definitions (e.g. of the items Tory and Whig; “oats” = ‘a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people’)

- some highly abstract, unnatural definitions e.g. the word “cough” = “a convulsion of the lungs, vellicated by some sharp serosity”

- he Latinized the written form of many English words - result of his classical education and his admiration of Latine.g. he decided to spell the word “receipt” with a “-p-” after the model of Latin “receptum”

- over 40,000 words, richness in documentary quotations