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.

As a background to the disagreements and disputes over meaning in subsequent chapters this book begins with a chapter showing how meanings are created and communicated successfully in the normal case. It breaks down the process of assigning meanings to increasingly larger pieces of language, starting with individual words and issues that arise in defining lexical meanings in dictionaries, then word combinations and compounding, then whole clauses and their phrasal attachments and syntax. It turns next to the general issue of ambiguity and considers how this is normally resolved in context. Literal and conventional meanings are often enriched by various inferential processes such as “implicatures.” and these are summarized. The last content section discusses how words and phrases make reference to, and identify, entities in the outside world. The chapter ends with a reading sampler in linguistics and the language sciences for nonspecialists.

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.

Black disfranchisement in the American South constitutes the most severe instance of democratic backsliding in American history. But Black disfranchisement was not a single instance of anything – rather, each of the ex-Confederate states took its own unique path to disfranchisement. In much of the Border South, as I discuss in the previous chapter, disfranchisement occurred in the midst of relatively competitive two-party systems and reflected an effort to secure Democratic Party control of these states. In some Deep South states, especially Alabama and Louisiana, which I explore in Chapter 6, disfranchisement was inseparable from the “Populist Moment” in the South. In this chapter, I focus on two Deep South states – Mississippi and South Carolina – in which disfranchisement occurred in the midst of nearly pure one-party politics.

This chapter explores the role of Human Impact Units (Hu) and regenerative authentication credits in transforming environmental, social, and governance (ESG) governance into a more transparent and equitable knowledge commons. The authors argue that current ESG valuation models, particularly those rooted in carbon-centric methodologies, fail to capture the full spectrum of ESG impacts and often lead to “greenwashing.” By shifting the focus to noncarbon-based valuation mechanisms, such as the Hu and RACs frameworks, the chapter demonstrates how ESG efforts can be more accurately monetized, fostering greater trust and transparency in ESG claims. The authors build the theoretical foundation by proposing the concept of “ESG as knowledge commons” for managing environmental commons, and suggest that “truth” serves as the shared resource, documented through blockchain. Specifically, RACs utilize a blockchain-based framework to ensure data permanence and immutability while allowing for controlled transparency. This research underscores the permanence of truth, enabled by the network’s immutability. Overall, RACs offer an alternative governance model to traditional ESG approaches, leveraging the polycentric nature of blockchain networks to effectively address the uncertainty inherent in the ESG industry.

Rap has long enjoyed a generative relationship with spoken-word poetry, one that can be traced back to the politicized orientations and aesthetic preferences that distinguished the Black Arts poetry and early spoken word of the late 1960s/early 1970s. However, this chapter argues that differences between rap and spoken-word poetry are as salient as similarities. Rap’s relationship to the spoken word only starts to acquire political and strategic importance at the point at which gangsta rap – with its hyper-profanity and alleged nihilism – comes to prominence. Amid the antiblack racism and structural dislocation of Reagan’s America, rap in the spoken word can be seen as emblematic of hip-hop’s intra-cultural politics of uplift versus negativity. Yet, despite such claims, this does not suffice to settle the matter of the elevated and profane within rap. For in rap, carnality, irreverence, and high-mindedness are the alternating currents and tensions that make hip-hop penumbral, the goad to its intra-politics.

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.

Looking to politically committed artists, this chapter asks how hip-hop has been shaped in both its form and its substance by a revolutionary critique of racial capitalism. After setting out the antinomies of Black capitalism and Black Marxism via listening to a song by Kendrick Lamar, the chapter demonstrates how hip-hop codifies its own forms of racialized and proletarian radicalism. To so do, and moving in roughly chronological order, it listens to a handful of songs by Public Enemy, The Coup, and Noname, reading their lyrical content and describing their musical form as a response to the interlock of race and class under capitalism.

I begin my empirical exploration by studying three states whose disfranchisement-era politics are characterized by relatively meaningful levels of inter-party competition. States that I study in subsequent chapters were politically dominated by the Democratic Party even before disfranchisement – usually on the back of violence and fraud. While historians argue that African Americans continued to vote and exert political power in those states (e.g., Kousser 1999, 20), it is quantitatively almost impossible in those states to distinguish between voter suppression and voter apathy, and between an engaged Black electorate and stolen Black votes. But perhaps the most concrete, indisputable evidence of African Americans’ continued political influence after the Redemption period is the sustained relevance of the Republican Party in Florida, North Carolina, and Tennessee up until institutional disfranchisement. In these states, Republicans were sufficiently strong to resist until the complete abrogation of Black voting rights.

This chapter explores the influence of Jamaican music and culture on the origin and development of hip-hop in the US. With roots reaching back to Jamaican sound systems and Nyabinghi drumming, hip-hop inspires a new flowering of Afrofuturism as Black resistance to colonial authority. The example of Jamaica’s Maroons, Afro-Caribbean freedom fighters, clarifies its strategy of cultural resistance: to seize and secure space for a Black future of living free. As hip-hop’s early innovators – DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and Rammellzee, among others – adapt the Jamaican sound system to new colonial territories, they use music, dance, raps, and tags as weapons to create spaces of freedom in the oppressive world of the Bronx in the mid 1970s. This legacy of Afrofuturism informs the ensuing history of hip-hop, half a century of Black musical creativity that extends from Brother D and the Sugar Hill Gang through X Clan, Public Enemy, and NWA to Dr. Octogon, Deltron 3030, Janelle Monáe, Ras G, and beyond.