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.

This chapter examines the transformative work of Danielle Dumile, the masked rapper who went by the stage name DOOM (among other aliases), and who was known for his complex lyricism and innovative personae. Adrian Matejka considers the MC’s use of persona through the dual lenses of hip-hop and poetry, highlighting the ways in which DOOM’s lyrics borrow from and enhance these twinned literary traditions. Drawing parallels between DOOM’s innovative lyricism and the tradition of persona poetry, Matejka considers how contemporary poets – particularly Black American poets – adopt various masks to explore history, culture, and identity. This longer tradition is related back to DOOM, whose layered personae subverted mainstream rap in the early 2000s. Matejka frames the rapper’s work as an enduring testament to persona’s power in mythmaking and cultural commentary.

Given data’s characteristics as a nonrivalrous, inexhaustible resource, some interpretation is necessary to apply Ostrom’s design principles to the challenge of data governance – starting with the question of boundaries. Building upon the Governing Knowledge Commons framework, this chapter argues that boundaries around data resources can be drawn through the intentional development and application of values statements. Since the potential value of data often increases in relation to the number of its users and potential uses, values statements set normative expectations around the kinds of processes and outcomes that are considered desirable – what do we think is good, and how do we agree to do this work? These statements functionas a kind of boundary object that can give shape to a community’s identity and, in turn, aid in the development of new institutional strategies to protect that identity. After considering this function in the context of examples – ranging from abstract signifiers such as “open data” and “smart cities,” to bundled declarations such as the CARE principles, to specific examples of environmental data commons – this chapter concludes by offering practical guidance for the development of values statements through democratic writing processes and collective choice-making.

The chapter discusses the confluence of material objects during the 1810s, especially when Mount Tambora in Indonesia erupted in 1815 spewing ash into the stratosphere, and when Thomas Bruce (1766–1841), the 7th Earl of Elgin, sold the Parthenon marbles to the British Parliament for £35,000 in 1816. While these two events were continents apart geographically, they are interconnected materially and politically. Marble rock, ash, and potato, an assemblage of disparate objects, mark the tumultuous 1810s as a decade in which matter matters significantly to humanity.

On the eve of disfranchisement, African Americans in different states – and different parts of states – found themselves in very dissimilar political circumstances.Disfranchisement’s consequences thus also varied substantially. In some areas voting was relatively unfettered, while in others approaching a polling place may have risked serious physical harm. Even where voting was feasible, African Americans faced starkly different alternatives at the ballot box. In some states, Republicans continued to seek office and provided a real,meaningful vehicle for African Americans to pursue their programmatic goals. In others, the choice that African Americans faced at the ballot box – if there was a choice – was between different varieties of white supremacist Democrat.

This chapter examines funk music as a central artery of rap music and hip-hop culture. It charts a funk current that crests and flows throughout hip-hop’s fifty-year span such that, what Maner calls the funk impulse – the percussive, kinesthetic energy that undergirds and drives Black sound and Black life – is rendered audible. After charting the patterns of sampling that developed in the early stages of hip-hop, the chapter moves on to the evolution of the funk impulse in the contemporary era, from renderings on album covers to live stage performances. James Brown, Public Enemy and the Bomb Squad, George Clinton, and Parliament-Funkadelic, Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, and OutKast are all discussed in detail.

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.

This chapter characterises the beginning of the 1810s as a transitional moment for both early feminist thought and cultural conceptions of intellectual disability. Through a sustained reading of Lucy Aikin’s critically underexamined Epistles on Women (1810), the chapter argues that the long, combative poem articulates an intersectional appeal to feminine-coded weakness, idiocy, and disability. The opening question of the poem, ‘when was ever weakness in the right?’, pits a utopian matriarchal future against the overwhelming misogyny and brutality of the masculinist past. Aikin’s revisionist history begins in Eden with Eve’s assiduous care for the ‘moping idiot’ Adam and ends in the modern era with the new ideal of feminine friendship supplanting compulsory ideologies of heteropatriarchal marriage. Throughout, Aikin creatively develops a compelling feminist aesthetics and ethics grounded in the complex trope of idiocy and neurodiversity.

This chapter uses the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to illustrate and advance the idea of the expert knowledge commons. The IPCC was established in 1988 as an intergovernmental body of the United Nations, charged with advancing scientific knowledge about climate change in order to inform public policy decision-making. As an institution and instrument of authority grounded in scientific expertise, the IPCC has come to play a critical role in advancing political, cultural, and economic awareness of the character of climate change. The IPCC has been the subject of a great deal of research, none of which has focused directly on the manner in which its authoritative status rests both formally and informally on multiple layers of shared knowledge, information, and data. This chapter uses the IPCC’s governance of that shared knowledge to motivate and illustrate a model of expert knowledge commons.

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.

Chapter 7 discusses lawsuits in which spelling and punctuation were at the basis of the dispute. One involved the Salesforce Company, which uses the trademark SALESFORCE written as a single word, as opposed to the two-word SALES FORCE, which is generally used as a descriptive compound for a group of salespeople responsible for selling the goods or services of a company, i.e. any company. It is shown, on the basis of various corpora sensitive to spellings and word separations, that SALESFORCE has indeed achieved unique reference and source identification. The chapter then discusses MOVIEGUIDE, which was similarly claimed to be a trademark, but on this occasion semantic and corpus evidence showed that the two-word MOVIE GUIDE and the one-word MOVIEGUIDE were used interchangeably, both as generic terms. Finally, a lawsuit is discussed in which the dispute centered around who exactly was covered by insurance in the phrase THE NAMED INSURED: X, Y as a result of the comma between X and Y.