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.

One of the recurring themes in medieval agricultural manuals, which are mainly based on ancient agronomic knowledge, centres around the correlation between the geography of a region and the effects of this geography on the growth of various plant types and their specific requirements. In Filāḥa al-Nabaṭiyya (Nabatean Agriculture), compiled in 291/903 in Lower Mesopotamia, Ibn Waḥshiyya (d. 318/930) proposed two reasons to explain this relationship. First, he argued that everything in the world possesses a nature (ṭabʿ ) composed of the four elements of fire, air, water and earth. The differences between the nature of each region and each plant explain, for instance, why the dust that covers a vine's leaves is harmful to the plant in ‘the whole clime of Bābil (Babylonia)’, while it might be beneficial in another region. His second explanation contends that the unique properties (khuṣūṣiyyāt) of each region are connected to its position ‘in respect to the rotation of the sun and the other stars which rotate in the sphere (al-falak)’. While the present book does not aim to provide an in-depth analysis of the various cosmological and philosophical aspects of agricultural manuals, such examples attest to the perception of agriculture as a human engagement with nature which is strongly dependent on the geography. A primary explanation for this concern, as mentioned by Ibn Waḥshiyya, is the recognition that the most crucial factors influencing plant growth include water, air, the ‘warmth of the sun’ and notably, soil. However, as several scholars have emphasised, the scholarly literature on gardens of Islamicate regions has often overlooked the relationship between gardens and their surrounding landscapes.This oversight is particularly evident in the conceptualisation of ‘the Islamic garden’, which as Petruccioli pointed out, ‘has been considered a specific, self-contained entity removed from its context – its surroundings, the city, and the environment’.

Problem: The idea of continuity in garden traditions

Studies on ‘Islamic’ garden history have followed two paradigms whose generalising and essentialist character has drawn criticism from various scholars over the years. The first argues that the concept and types of gardens in the Islamic period – drawing on extant examples only from the fifteenth century onwards – were of ancient Persian origin, thus presupposing the idea of a continuous tradition. The second paradigm brings together gardens from different regions with Islamic rulers as ‘Islamic’ gardens, foregrounding a religious attribute for gardens in an extremely large and disparate geographical area including Arab Spain, North Africa, Syria, Iraq, Iran and the adjacent Persian-speaking regions up to India, despite the diversity of their regional and cultural traditions.

The idea of an ancient ‘Persian’ origin of ‘Islamic’ gardens and its continuity into the early modern period has been voiced since the beginning of the twentieth century. It mainly relates to the interpretation of the term chahārbāgh, found in the Persian textual sources from the fifth/eleventh century onwards, as a formal type of garden, indicating a garden divided into four quarters by two cross-axial water courses or paths. It is argued that this type can be traced back to pre- Islamic Iran, continued throughout the medieval Islamic periods and was transferred to other Islamic-ruled regions as well. Some scholars have also related the fourfold layout and chahārbāgh to the mythical Garden of Eden, from which, according to some traditions, such as the book of Genesis, four cosmic rivers, two of which were the Euphrates and Tigris, flowed towards the four corners of the earth.

As an intricate interplay of architecture and nature, a garden comes to life through its plants, living creatures, and the sensory experiences of scents and sounds. In comparison to a garden's solid structures, however, even fewer physical traces of the organisms that once populated it have survived over the centuries. Archaeozoological and archaeobotanical findings, in some cases, can help to identify certain varieties of living creatures and discern the plantings within a garden or the locations of certain plants. Environmental studies, including soil analysis, also provide valuable insights into whether an area was exposed to sunlight or shaded, featured high-growing or low-growing vegetation, and embraced a dense or sparse plantation. However, so far, no such investigations have been carried out in the Abbasid palace gardens of Lower Mesopotamia. Nor has archaeological evidence regarding horticulture, such as soil contours that could reveal the potential remains of flowerbeds, been recorded thus far. Furthermore, unlike ancient Mesopotamia, no representations of the royal gardens, depicting their plants or living creatures, are known to exist from the Abbasid period. Consequently, literary evidence remains the only source of knowledge regarding the flora and fauna of the Abbasid palace gardens in Mesopotamia. Nevertheless, the textual sources also come with their own set of limitations. They do not provide a comprehensive list of all plants or living creatures that existed in the royal gardens, nor do they offer details of planting arrangements or density. These sources, however, offer vivid glimpses into various species in the royal gardens and shed light on the types of plants and animals that were particularly appreciated. They also contribute to our understanding of how two main factors – prestige and climatic conditions – influenced the choice and organisation of plants within these gardens.

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.