This chapter examines English in the Midlands of England. It explores the structure of Mercian Old English, moving on to commonalities and differences across the Midlands region. It then discusses some of the features of Middle English in the area and investigates the ongoing complexities surrounding the processes of standardisation and the place of Midlands English in such processes. Finally, the chapter reviews dialect data from present-day Midlands English by looking at contemporary variation in both the East and West Midlands. It examines what makes Midlands English distinctive from the varieties of English in the north and the south in phonological, grammatical and lexical terms, and looks at similarities and differences between the East and West Midlands.

This chapter discusses lexical, phonological and morphosyntactic features of Northern Irish English, tracing their origins in dialects of English and Scots as well as Irish, and untangling some of the processes that resulted in specifically Northern Irish varieties of English which are separate from those in the south of Ireland. It also explores in detail a number of phonological and morphosyntactic features, differentiating between rural and urban forms of English in the province of Ulster. A distinction is also made between Ulster Scots, the heritage forms of English deriving from the original seventeenth-century settlers from Scotland, and Ulster English, which goes back to varieties taken by English settlers, largely from the north and north-west of England, to more central parts of Ulster. The sociolinguistic integration of recent immigrants to Ulster is also reviewed.

Language does not change in a vacuum; it always takes place in a social context. The relationship between that context and linguistic change is complex, ranging from large-scale societal influences on usage to fine-grained shifts in face-to-face interaction. This chapter reviews a number of social factors governing language change, each illustrated with examples from both historical and present-day varieties of English in the British Isles. The examples will show that, despite enormous historical change over 1,500 years, the underlying social processes that shape language – such as contact, networks, prestige, identity – remain remarkably stable.

The roots of London English go back – in the textual record – to the Middle English period and already in the 1300s exhibit features which reveal diverse and multilingual influences, e.g. from medieval French and Latin. The examination of morphological features characteristic of this urban variety in its early stages is helpful in constructing a linguistic profile for early London English. Data sources for this include guild certificates, accounts and company records, with London English in later centuries being recorded by orthoepists (in the 1600s) who list sounds characteristic of speech in the capital which later fed into supraregional varieties in the south of England in general. These phonological traits, and many which were specific to London, are attested in literary documents in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Scots and Scottish Standard English (SSE) encompass a wide range of socially indexed varieties, which are bound together as ‘Scottish’, and distinguished from other varieties of English, by a particular set of vowel duration patterns, the Scottish Vowel Length Rule (SVLR). In this chapter, we exploit recent technological advances for automated speech corpus analysis to provide the first large-scale analysis of vowel timing in 234k tokens from Scottish SPADE, a new meta-corpus of naturally occurring speech from more than 700 speakers of regional Scots and SSE. We confirm that the SVLR is now largely limited to /i ʉ/, and show evidence consistent with subtle weakening over the twentieth century. However, at the same time, our analysis also reveals a new and unexpected general Scottish pattern of very short vowels (an Anti-Voicing Effect) where lengthening occurs in other accents of English, which serves to maintain a clearly distinctive phonological character for Scottish English.

A key figure in establishing a “black musical idiom” and an American musical identity, pianist-composer Florence Price was groundbreaking in her efforts to create a compositional style that incorporated Black vernacular songs. This chapter focuses on her two fantasies in G minor (1933) and F♯ minor (1949) and Violin Concerto No. 2 (1952) in the context of Price’s cultural network and context, with specific attention given to her contemporary Clarence Cameron White (1880–1960) and to Minnie Cedargreen Jernberg (1888–1957), the dedicatee of Price’s second violin concerto.

This chapter discusses the standards of form Price established in her Piano Concerto, Violin Concerto No. 1 in D Major, and her chamber works created through incorporation of African American forms, procedures, and harmonies. Contextualized within what the author calls New Negro modernism, Price’s concertos and chamber works reinforce our understanding of her style and introduce us to her unique approach to conversational balance, form, virtuosity, and orchestration within these genres.

During the 1930s and 1940s, the Black press provided some of the most detailed accounts of Florence Price’s compositional activity. The Black press presented a counterinstitution to mainstream media and, as such, reported on Price with the awareness that her accomplishments would be experienced vicariously through a readership that encompassed much of the nation’s Black demographic. In comparison, coverage of Price’s work in the white-authored press is less extensive, and often superficial in tone – though it, too, offers crucial information about Price’s career. This chapter charts the relationship between Price and the Black press across multiple contexts, from her childhood in Little Rock through the apex of her compositional career to the final years of her life. In doing so, it highlights a perpetual tug-of-war that emerges in her critical reception: namely, a discourse that concomitantly exceptionalizes and de-exceptionalizes Price, emphasizing her distinctiveness as much as her embeddedness within Black institutional life.

This chapter focuses on Price’s art songs and their biographical resonances. Brought into focus are settings of texts by poets such as Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906), Georgia Douglas Johnson (1880–1966), and Langston Hughes (1901–1967). Dunbar inspired numerous early twentieth-century composers of African descent, including Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Harry T. Burleigh, Will Marion Cook, R. Nathaniel Dett, Nora Holt, and William Grant Still. Hughes’s and Douglas’s poetry became a source of inspiration for new generations of Black composers during the Black Renaissance era of the interwar period. Price joins a long list of esteemed composers who engaged with a Black literary canon in their vocal works. Furthermore, Price’s, her predecessors’, and her peers’ settings of Black poetry continued trends in German Romanticism that explored the marriage of music and poetry and positioned this union as a vehicle for national expression and spiritual transcendence. With these settings, Price therefore worked toward a consolidation of a Black aesthetic in the classical solo voice traditions – one that told a great deal of her own story, too.