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.

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.