The following chapter describes the varieties of English found in Canada’s eastern Maritime Provinces (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island), which arose from a unique mix of American Loyalist, British, Scottish, Irish, French and German settlers. These varieties have been traditionally stigmatised for their divergence from inland Canadian norms, though this is changing as younger speakers in the region conform to more prestige varieties further west. Conversely, some traditional speech features, like the use of ingressive pulmonic articulation with the discourse particle yeah↓, are being recycled by those same young people to signal both local solidarity and resistance to hegemonic discourses surrounding vernacularity. This chapter draws on original research, linguistic descriptions of the region and its English varieties, as well as comedic performances/metalinguistic commentary in both popular and social media.

Once confined to the margins of discussion about linguistic variation and change in the history of American English, recent years have seen an explosion of work on language contact. We review and synthesise recent work and present original evidence on how contact has shaped many facets of American English across many regions, reaching from the lexicon and phonology through syntax and pragmatics. We draw especially on features less widely discussed until now and look at how these enrich our broader understanding of contact in American English. We pay special attention to the challenges of identifying features that do and do not come from language contact and begin to trace the paths by which features have found their way into American speech and writing. Ultimately, we argue that, in some sense, many distinct forms of American English have been and are being shaped by contact.

Most sociolinguistic research in American cities has focused on particular speech communities or communities of practice within cities. But cities are sites of contact between speech communities, and a sociolinguistic description of a city qua city would have to examine the results of such contact. Drawing on research conducted in Pittsburgh, PA, this chapter considers the sociolinguistic outcomes of urban encounters: immigrants’ language contact and the founder effect, the varied effects of African Americans’ contact with the speech of white people, the language ideological effects of mobility with respect to a city, and the role of visual artefacts in the circulation of linguistic features and language ideology across speech communities.

The New Cambridge History of the English Language is aimed at providing a contemporary and comprehensive overiew of English, tracing its roots in Germanic and investigating the contact scenarios in which the language has been an active participant. It discusses the various models and methodologies which have been developed to analyse diachronic data concisely and consistently. The new history furthermore examines the trajectories which the language has embarked on during its spread worldwide and presents overviews of the varieties of English found throughout the world today.

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century immigration to Canada resulted in a layering of settlers and concomitant dialectal diversity throughout the vast non-urban areas of the country, particularly in Ontario. This chapter examines the long-standing dialectal diversity that has been present in the province since English-speaking settlement. As a Settler Colonial English, this diversity is not a result of contact with the many different Indigenous languages, already spoken for millennia in different parts of the province. Rather, dialect differentiation within Ontario stems from the temporal and geographically staggered transplantation of distinct Scots, Irish and English dialects from across the British Isles at different times since the first permanent English-speaking settlers arrived in the eighteenth century. In this chapter, we demonstrate historical dialectal variation in Ontario by way of an analysis of general extenders in data from early Ontario English.

With a focus on Western American English vowel systems, this chapter examines the formative influences on the Western US dialect region, framing the current uniformity in vocalic patterns as the outcome of koineisation. Using early written sources and dialect atlas projects, we trace the routes of early colonisation of and the dialect inputs into the region, focusing particular attention on California, Nevada and Oregon. We also draw empirically from acoustic vowel data from modern and historical recordings in an attempt to consider how the information we have about Western speech at different time points over the past 150 years fits with leading models of new dialect formation. Our account of the spread of English westward argues that levelling and simplification were set in motion in the mid-1800s in large part owing to the confluence of American English varieties brought with the earliest settlers. Further, it was likely the instability of the low vowel system across these dialects that laid the foundation for the modern Western koine.

The development of English throughout continental North America and the Caribbean, both its islands and the Rim in the past few centuries, form the focus of this volume. The chapters investigate the historical settlement of this vast area by English speakers from Britain and Ireland and focuses also on the varieties which arose in the context of colonial slavery in the Caribbean and the Southern United States. The manner in which language change has panned out since initial anglophone settlement at the beginning of the seventeenth century is a central concern as are the current cases of language change which can be observed, above all in the United States and Canada, which give testimony to the ever-changing nature of English in North America.

African American English (AAE) is arguably the most studied variety of English in sociolinguistics, and much of the formative work on the variety took place in cities, setting the stage for the direction of sociolinguistics in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This chapter provides an overview of the important early work on AAE in urban environments. Alongside a discussion of what we learned about the variety from early studies, the chapter will also explore how methods of study and the variables themselves have evolved. The chapter includes a discussion of differences within AAE that are conditioned not only by region, but also by finer-grained aspects of community and individual identity. The recent focus on a wider scope of variables, as well as speakers who were previously overlooked, has allowed for more detailed discussion of AAE as a flexible, evolving toolkit that speakers may use to construct and perform complex identities.

Puerto Rican English (PRE) in Puerto Rico (PR) and in the continental United States emerged, at the end of the nineteenth century, from the socio-economic and political relations between the territory and its overseeing country. From virtual non-existence before the US invasion, English has appeared in PR’s linguistic landscape and areas of daily life, particularly among educated, upper-class residents. Frequent changes in official and educational language policies have affected English use in schools: it has decreased in the public school system but has grown in private and bilingual schools. Circular migration and contact with other language varieties, as well as language attitudes, have influenced PRE in PR and in the United States. Puerto Ricans display a range of language dominance, from minimal English knowledge to English monolingualism, along with diverse phonological and morphosyntactic traits and bilingual practices. The global dominance of English and its linguistic hegemony in PR’s colonial context will continue to affect its interaction with Spanish in PR and the United States, surfacing as mutual influence, resistance and transformation.

There would appear to be sufficient evidence for regarding English-lexifier Atlantic creoles as forming a single family, especially given the lexical and syntactic parallels which have been shown in the pioneering work of Ian Hancock. In addition to the similarities in grammar and vocabulary, there is also a case to be made for phonological criteria justifying further subdivisions of the English-lexifier Atlantic creoles. The present study proposed that three main groups of these creoles can be posited based on pronunciation characteristics.

This chapter deals with the spread of English to the Caribbean Rim: socio-history and present sociolinguistic situation, language contacts and linguistic outcomes. One of the first regions settled by the English, it merits more scholarly attention than has been bestowed on it before. A detailed literature review as well as data from the author’s fieldwork are included.

This chapter deals with the interrelationships between forms of American English and Caribbean English and creoles, both past and present. Close demographic connections between the North American mainland and what was to become the Anglophone Caribbean have existed since the earliest days of colonial settlement. Later, American linguistic influence spread in the region through institutional links, occasional visits or migration by Caribbean nationals for work or education, and tourism as well as television. During the present age of globalisation, American English has extended its range and impact considerably, both worldwide and in the Caribbean. At the same time, individual Caribbean creoles such as Jamaican have also influenced the development of English in North America, by way of diaspora communities, the global success of reggae, dancehall and Rastafarianism, and the use of ‘Cyber-Jamaican’ on the web.

This chapter approaches the open class of words in Canadian English from historical, historiographical, structural, regional and social points of view. It seeks to give concise accounts of existing and ongoing work and identifies desiderata of research. Vocabulary in Canadian English has benefited from philological and lexicographical interest in the early phase of linguistics in Canada, and it is refreshing to see that open-class lexis is today garnering considerable attention again. This account aims to link the philological tradition around dictionary making and dialect geography with current sociolinguistic, lexicographical and New Media work on Canadian English words.

Dialectologists working in the mid twentieth century established a tripartite division of US regional dialects into North, Midland and South. This work documented the retention of traditional usages and focused on lexical variation. Despite the grounding of these dialect divisions in centuries-old settlement and migration patterns, they remain relevant to regional variation in American English today. This is especially true for the boundary separating the Midland from the North. This chapter examines the history of this remarkably stable boundary in American dialectology. The discussion reviews the evidence produced by early linguistic atlas researchers to establish the dialect boundary along the Atlantic Coast and to trace its extension westward. The current status of the Midland–North divide is explored in the light of sociolinguistic research suggesting that dialect differences on either side have been reinforced over the twentieth century.

With legendary regionalisms like ‘r-dropping’, fronted palm vowels, ‘broad-a BATH vowels, and other features, New England has played a key role in the historical development of English in North America. Historically, the six small states of New England (Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont) have had an outsized influence on American English. Their modern sociolinguistic and geographic boundaries still reflect colonial-era settlement patterns from centuries past. Many prior studies on New England English have focused on phonological patterns and changes, but scholars have also examined regional grammatical patterns, lexical variation and change, and also the continuing influence of local Native American words on English. In fact, modern linguists have access to ninety years of detailed fieldwork reports on regional New England dialect features, dating as far back as the 1930s and continuing to the present era. Using this wealth of intergenerational data, the present chapter takes a historical perspective that traces the roots and development of New England English into the present time.