This chapter offers a new outlook on the history of Scots, a minority language related to English, up to 1700. Scots and its history have been a subject of pioneering work in historical linguistics, especially in historical dialectology and digital approaches to language change. The chapter takes stock of previous scholarship and the extra-linguistic events which shaped the linguistic situation in Scotland from the medieval period till the early eighteenth century. It then highlights problematic areas and questions related to constructing a narrative for a history of an unstandardised minority language, with special focus on defining Scots as a language of written communication, its family tree, periodisation and status, as well as metalinguistic perspectives. The discussion finishes with an overview of the most recent research on various aspects of structure and language use, and a summary of available resources for the study of historical Scots.

The relative malleability of adults’ first language grammar, and thus the contribution of the post-adolescent individual to historical language change, is a contested issue in linguistic research. The argument revolves around the extent to which it is possible for post-adolescent individuals to modify the grammatical system of their native language(s). This chapter summarises the contribution of several areas of linguistics to this debate, highlighting in particular some historical sociolinguistic studies of English. We then review the evidence from over forty-six longitudinal linguistic panel studies, confirming that some adults can adjust their native repertoires across the life-course, even into old age. Yet many questions remain to be answered with regard to the nature of post-adolescent linguistic lability. We discuss several questions of particular importance for the study of generational language change.

In its history, the phonology of Irish English went through a number of stages in which features arose and subsequently declined. Many of the traits to be seen in the textual record for early modern Irish English were lost by the nineteenth century, with others being retained, such as the incomplete long vowel shift and dentalisation of stops before R. The early twentieth century saw a change in supraregional Irish English given the endonormative reorientation which set in after independence in 1922. Language contact between Irish and English has been a consistent theme in Ireland’s history and has led to a prolonged language shift, which culminated in the accelerated switch in the mid nineteenth century with the vast majority of the population being native speakers of English by the onset of the twentieth century. The language shift also resulted in many instances of grammatical transfer from Irish to English, a small number of which remained emblematic of Irish English and have survived to this day.

This chapter presents a sociolinguistically focused overview of the history of Received Pronunciation (RP). The sociolinguistic community for whom it is a vernacular is a small one numerically but its form of speech had an outsized historical and sociolinguistic impact for over a century. Fundamental sociological and historical changes have since upended the sociolinguistic status of the elite sociolect in Great Britain and across the world. In attempting to place RP within the overall history of the English language, its development as a vernacular has often been overshadowed by, and confused with, its status as a standard accent in certain contexts and settings. The present discussion will distinguish between vernacular and standard, and focus on the variation and change of a vernacular elite sociolect over time, with an emphasis on the evolutions that took place in the period after the Second World War in Great Britain.

This chapter discusses the perceptions of English variation from the earliest available commentary to the present day. Historical commentary on English variation from various sources is discussed and contrasted with contemporary accounts of the perception of variation in English. The chapter discusses commonalities in the perception of regional variation over time, examining three overarching themes: the presence of a linguistic hierarchy; the focus on the ‘best’ forms of English in areas (and occupations) proximal to the centres of power, and general concerns about language change.

The city dialect of Liverpool has a unique profile in the context of other urban varieties in Britain. It is well known for such features as stop lenition and the NURSE–SQUARE merger, along with TH-stopping, these traits in combination forming a set which is not replicated elsewhere. The present study examines the historical background to Liverpool English, its geographical position in relation to the counties of Cheshire to the south and Lancashire to the north. In addition, the role of immigration to the city, especially that of Irish people in the nineteenth century, is discussed and the role which this input may have played in determining the developmental course for Liverpool English is evaluated. Finally, the current position of local speech in the city is examined and possible future pathways are indicated.

This chapter considers the history of Scots dictionaries in relation to their purposes and the dominant contemporary perceptions of the Scots language. The twenty-first-century Scots Dictionary for Schools (Scots Abc) mobile phone application encourages literacy and creativity in Scots. Thomas Ruddiman’s glossary (1710) assisted readers of Gavin Douglas’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, Eneados (1513). In his Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language (1808–1825), John Jamieson followed the Vernacular Revivalists, seeking to preserve and celebrate the language. A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (1931–2002) includes lexis shared with England, while the Scottish National Dictionary (1931–1976, 2005) focuses on distinctive use. Although the online Dictionary of the Scots Language (2004) is a major achievement, there is more work to be done. Twentieth-century dictionaries prioritised rural over urban vocabulary, and the diversity of language in Scotland invites debate. This chapter proposes that Scotland would benefit from a new resource, the ‘Dictionary for Scotland’.

The dialects of Southwest England subsume the varieties spoken in Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire, plus parts of bordering counties. Traditionally, these dialects were highly distinctive. Cornwall historically presents an interesting case of language shift, with recent attempts at Cornish revival implying a sense of local pride and identity. Data from popular sources indicate that modern Southwest English is enregistering traditional dialect features such as rhoticity or pronoun exchange to serve as markers of indexicality for younger and urban speakers. Dialect levelling has resulted in less pronounced differences between regions being preferred, but local identities within the Southwest remain clearly distinct through the maintenance of vernacular features. Features of urban varieties are often highlighted as salient nowadays, paralleling developments elsewhere in the world, moving away from a more area-based description of dialects. The historical influence of what is still widely known as West Country English beyond the Southwest was noticeable in South-East Ireland and in Newfoundland.

This chapter considers the recent history of spoken London English, from the latter half of the nineteenth century to the present. Focusing on the variety furthest from the standard, the chapter begins with an overview of the traditional dialect of Cockney, prevalent in London at the beginning of this period and associated with the densely populated, working-class neighbourhoods of the ‘East End’ of London. It then considers important socio-historical and demographic changes that have taken place in London since the mid twentieth century and that have had linguistic consequences. In the final sections, the focus shifts to two large-scale sociolinguistic studies conducted between 2004 and 2010 and describes the emergence and characteristics of Multicultural London English (MLE), arising as a result of language contact and group second language acquisition. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the role that language attitudes may play in the entrenchment of this new urban London English vernacular.

Cyprus has always been a multilingual island and home to a complex mixture of different nationalities and ethnic groups. As the result of British colonisation, English gained ground on the island until the division of the Republic of Cyprus (RoC) in 1974. This division led to a separation of the two major ethnic groups, Greek and Turkish Cypriots. This has drastically changed the sociolinguistic grounds for the development and status of the English language. This chapter is the first to assess the status, roles and functions of English in both parts of Cyprus in a joint fashion. Our account suggests that English in Cyprus is heterogeneous: its use and functions depend on speaker and age groups and differ between the two parts. We trace its complex sociolinguistic development in both parts and discuss the repercussions for the World Englishes paradigm.

This chapter explores the importance of England’s traditional dialects for understanding the history of the English language more generally. These dialects are now largely moribund as a result of dialect levelling, standardisation and dialect death but were recorded in considerable detail by linguists in the late nineteenth and early to mid twentieth centuries, and were represented in literary dialect and, especially, dialect literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The chapter discusses the nature of these dialects, the data we have for them, and gives examples of the kinds of things we can learn about the history of English from their study. The history of English has always been one of dialect variation, and the history of the language cannot be properly understood without an analysis of England’s traditional dialects.

This chapter focuses on the history of English in Gibraltar, its current sociolinguistic landscape and position within theoretical models of analysis, and the attitudes of speakers towards the drastic changes taking place. In recent years English has become dominant among younger generations of speakers, indicating a steady shift in Gibraltar towards monolingualism, a process in which, we argue, globalisation plays an essential role. The chapter also reports on the ongoing and challenging compilation of the Gibraltar component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GBR), and presents a quantitative analysis of morphosyntactic features which occur in the print publications included in ICE-GBR.

This chapter focuses on the history of English speaking in Wales and on the character of Welsh English and its varieties. After a short examination of the terms ‘English in Wales’ and ‘Welsh English’, the chapter proceeds with an outline historical account of anglicisation in Wales considered in relation to topography and geology, and charting the geographical spread of English speaking and the growth of speaker numbers. This is followed by a brief survey of academic research on dialects of Welsh English from the earliest work at the end of the seventeenth century to the present day, and from shorter works on specific localities and features to national surveys. The chapter ends with a descriptive synopsis containing overviews of the phonology, grammar and lexis of Welsh Englis with a concise discussion of a selection of features from each level. Also included are previously unpublished linguistic maps from the archives of the Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects, prepared by the Survey’s director, David Parry.

In this chapter we provide a description – phonological, morphosyntactic and lexical – of contemporary East Anglian English, accounting for its historical evolution, drawing from empirical analyses of a range of corpora of informal spoken English from across the region, and supported by vowel plots from speakers in four different urban centres in East Anglia: Norwich, Ipswich, Colchester and Wisbech. For the purposes of this chapter, we define present-day East Anglia as including the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk as well as northern and eastern Cambridgeshire and north Essex, a definition established on linguistic grounds by Trudgill (2001). Following a sociolinguistic history of East Anglia, our description of the local variety highlights diachronic change and contemporary variability within the region, the advent of innovation from outside, as well as geographical evidence of dialect levelling within.