Over a half century of sociolinguistic work has addressed various aspects of the speech of African Americans, often called African American Language (AAL) or African American English (AAE). While linguists were studying AAL for educational and theoretical linguistic purposes, demographic changes in the United States, including the Great Migration of African Americans, in combination with long-standing segregation, were creating situations in urban environments that helped establish and fortify what we know of as AAL in twenty-first-century America. The current chapter focuses on the twentieth-century development of AAL, using evidence from the Corpus of Regional African American Language (CORAAL; Kendall and Farrington 2021), a publicly available corpus of conversational speech, with data from several African American communities, including the Lower East Side of New York City (Manhattan), Princeville, NC; Rochester, NY; Valdosta, GA; and Washington, DC, to highlight the influence of the Great Migration on AAL and the development of regional sound patterns.

Language change in American English started when the initial speakers of English landed in North America. During the foundational stage, founder dialects were established in regions such as Tidewater, Virginia, Boston, Philadelphia, Charleston and New Orleans, which still maintain distinct varieties. As migration patterns emerged, dialects expanded largely along an east-to-west route that is still evident to this day, but more recent changes have reflected different migratory routes, such as the south–north migration route of African Americans and the more recent movement of Northern transplants to large urban areas of the South. We consider recent shifts in vowel systems, including the development of vowels systems in the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, the Northern California Vowel Shift and the weakening of the Southern Vowel Shift in Southern metropolitan areas. Finally, we examine the intersection of social and interactional factors with socio-regional space as these factors have nuanced the advancement of change in progress.

This chapter examines Canadian English from a nationwide point of view, complementing the regional views of the following chapters in this part. It begins with a brief statement of the current demolinguistic status of Canadian English, then reviews the history of English-speaking settlement that led to its establishment, growth and geographic diffusion. This review supports a discussion of the relation between settlement history and the most important linguistic features of modern Canadian English, especially its phonetic and phonological characteristics. A particular focus is on the relative contributions of eighteenth-century American Loyalist settlement and early nineteenth-century British immigration, as well as the later diffusion of those features to Western Canada. Examples of regional variation in vocabulary and pronunciation are then briefly presented, before the chapter concludes with a selective review of previous research on Canadian English.

Taking as a point of departure the seminal study of Newfoundland English by William Kirwin (2001), the current chapter examines afresh the role of regional inputs from south-west England and south-east Ireland in determining the linguistic ecology of English in Newfoundland, Canada’s most easterly province. The chapter reassesses Kirwin’s achievement in identifying relevant dialectal input and offers a consideration of the sociolinguistic status of the early English speakers on the island and the development of independent forms of English with the advent of permanent settlement there. The geographical distribution of settlers also represents a focus with the concentration of speakers in the capital St John’s and on the surrounding parts of the Avalon Peninsula. Features from all linguistic levels – pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary – are scrutinised, with the examination of vocabulary resting on the Dictionary of Newfoundland English with a view to determining the probable British/Irish sources of Newfoundland-specific lexis, independent developments in this part of Canada notwithstanding.

While the origins of African American English (AAE) have been the focus of debate among linguists for nearly a century, such interest has been aimed primarily at the vernacular end of the continuum, with dialectologists pointing to the retention of features from early British English, while creolists trace the origins to a Gullah-like creole spoken on the US plantations. Though no consensus has been reached regarding the origins of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), a focus on the socio-historical evidence suggests that diverse ecological conditions likely yielded a range of linguistic outcomes within the context of the plantation economy. The modern-day development of African American Standard English (AASE), on the other hand, may be traced to the first half of the twentieth century, as the African American middle class emerged in racially segregated neighbourhoods, where increased economic opportunity was met by systemic efforts to disenfranchise upwardly mobile African Americans.

This chapter considers the English of the Southern United States with a focus on the ways in which past and present settlement histories, social structures and economic realities are reflected in the language and language variation of the region.  Despite persisting ideas of geographic and social insularity, the American South is a large region that has and has always contained great diversity. This chapter begins with identifying where is the American South, what are its subregions and what role regionality plays in variation. Further, we outline what are some of the traditional linguistic features that are associated with the South. A discussion of research into variation and how different social factors and groups follows. We conclude by looking forward to needed research.

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.