Persian was not the only language transformed by the demographic upheaval consequent to the formation of the Persian Empire. Other languages of the Iranic family, particularly Parthian and Bactrian, were reduced in ways quite similar to Middle Persian. Although we lack texts in those two languages contemporary with the Achaemenian Empire, this chapter argues that their uncanny similarity with Middle Persian in grammatical restructuring was due to similar demographic conditions and probably also by convergence through multilingualism. Counterexamples of Iranic languages later documented on the fringes of or outside of the former Persian Empire show that they were not affected by the same changes. The conditions prevailing in the Persian Empire were likely responsible for the similarity in type shared by Middle Persian, Parthian, and Bactrian.

Final reflections on the meaning of the transformation of ancient Persian, from Old to Middle Persian, put these events in the context of growing human mobility, migration, and population contact from the first millennium BCE until today, with its effects on language. This study has also unexpectedly shed light on the role of conquered people, particularly enslaved people in the domestic spaces of the Persians. Such people have left very little trace otherwise, but their role in the shaping of the Persian language and culture is remarkable. Their effects on Persian culture are still evident in the reduced morphology of Persian until toay. Prospects for new research linguistic history along these lines come into view.

Most sociolinguistic research in American cities has focused on particular speech communities or communities of practice within cities. But cities are sites of contact between speech communities, and a sociolinguistic description of a city qua city would have to examine the results of such contact. Drawing on research conducted in Pittsburgh, PA, this chapter considers the sociolinguistic outcomes of urban encounters: immigrants’ language contact and the founder effect, the varied effects of African Americans’ contact with the speech of white people, the language ideological effects of mobility with respect to a city, and the role of visual artefacts in the circulation of linguistic features and language ideology across speech communities.

The New Cambridge History of the English Language is aimed at providing a contemporary and comprehensive overiew of English, tracing its roots in Germanic and investigating the contact scenarios in which the language has been an active participant. It discusses the various models and methodologies which have been developed to analyse diachronic data concisely and consistently. The new history furthermore examines the trajectories which the language has embarked on during its spread worldwide and presents overviews of the varieties of English found throughout the world today.

The development of English throughout continental North America and the Caribbean, both its islands and the Rim in the past few centuries, form the focus of this volume. The chapters investigate the historical settlement of this vast area by English speakers from Britain and Ireland and focuses also on the varieties which arose in the context of colonial slavery in the Caribbean and the Southern United States. The manner in which language change has panned out since initial anglophone settlement at the beginning of the seventeenth century is a central concern as are the current cases of language change which can be observed, above all in the United States and Canada, which give testimony to the ever-changing nature of English in North America.

Puerto Rican English (PRE) in Puerto Rico (PR) and in the continental United States emerged, at the end of the nineteenth century, from the socio-economic and political relations between the territory and its overseeing country. From virtual non-existence before the US invasion, English has appeared in PR’s linguistic landscape and areas of daily life, particularly among educated, upper-class residents. Frequent changes in official and educational language policies have affected English use in schools: it has decreased in the public school system but has grown in private and bilingual schools. Circular migration and contact with other language varieties, as well as language attitudes, have influenced PRE in PR and in the United States. Puerto Ricans display a range of language dominance, from minimal English knowledge to English monolingualism, along with diverse phonological and morphosyntactic traits and bilingual practices. The global dominance of English and its linguistic hegemony in PR’s colonial context will continue to affect its interaction with Spanish in PR and the United States, surfacing as mutual influence, resistance and transformation.

The Caribbean is a vast geopolitical region that stretches for a span of 2,754,000 square kilometers and includes approximately 7,000 island land masses. Linguistically speaking, the Caribbean hosts an extraordinarily wide variety of languages and dialects. The sheer magnitude of inhabited islands and the accompanying geographical and social variation within each island locale sets the Anglophone Caribbean apart for other insular areas of the English-speaking world such as Ireland or the South Atlantic. English is the third most widely spoken language in the Caribbean, following Spanish and French. It is the official language of twelve Caribbean as well as of the seven British Overseas Territories in the region. This chapter provides an overview of the sociolinguistic histories and features of the English varieties of the Caribbean region and demonstrates that there are significant traits that serve to define the region. Additionally, it demonstrates that there are differences between the speech of the European-identifying and African-identifying populations of the Caribbean.

The English language has been attested in Ireland since the late twelfth century but did not become widespread until the beginning of the seventeenth century when vigorous planting of English settlers took place. Distinct forms of Irish English began to develop which were a mixture of diverse dialectal inputs from England and transfer phenomena from Irish as the native population began to switch to the language of the colonisers. Almost as the same time as planting of English settlers started there was a movement out of Ireland, either by deportation or voluntary emigration, largely due to economic circumstances. This led to areas in overseas anglophone regions showing centres of Irish emigration, e.g. Appalachia with eighteenth-century Ulster Scots or the north-eastern coast of the USA with nineteenth-century southern Irish Catholics. At these locations the linguistic impact of Irish English was slight but traces can be found still which testify to this input.

The New Cambridge History of the English Language is aimed at providing a contemporary and comprehensive overiew of English, tracing its roots in Germanic and investigating the contact scenarios in which the language has been an active participant. It discusses the various models and methodologies that have been developed to analyse diachronic data concisely and consistently. The new history furthermore examines the trajectories the language has embarked on during its spread worldwide and presents overviews of the varieties of English found throughout the world today.

In its history, the phonology of Irish English went through a number of stages in which features arose and subsequently declined. Many of the traits to be seen in the textual record for early modern Irish English were lost by the nineteenth century, with others being retained, such as the incomplete long vowel shift and dentalisation of stops before R. The early twentieth century saw a change in supraregional Irish English given the endonormative reorientation which set in after independence in 1922. Language contact between Irish and English has been a consistent theme in Ireland’s history and has led to a prolonged language shift, which culminated in the accelerated switch in the mid nineteenth century with the vast majority of the population being native speakers of English by the onset of the twentieth century. The language shift also resulted in many instances of grammatical transfer from Irish to English, a small number of which remained emblematic of Irish English and have survived to this day.

The city dialect of Liverpool has a unique profile in the context of other urban varieties in Britain. It is well known for such features as stop lenition and the NURSE–SQUARE merger, along with TH-stopping, these traits in combination forming a set which is not replicated elsewhere. The present study examines the historical background to Liverpool English, its geographical position in relation to the counties of Cheshire to the south and Lancashire to the north. In addition, the role of immigration to the city, especially that of Irish people in the nineteenth century, is discussed and the role which this input may have played in determining the developmental course for Liverpool English is evaluated. Finally, the current position of local speech in the city is examined and possible future pathways are indicated.

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.

The concluding chapter summarizes the results and emphasizes the impact of the findings on future heritage language research and studies on bilingualism and language change in general: It stresses the necessity of including grammatical and pragmatic contact phenomena and discusses the importance of the interplay of extralinguistic factors and various types of linguistic developments: acquisition context, impact of schooling and literacy, contact with different registers and speakers. It explains individual processes in heritage language speakers, such as entrenchment processes, co-active activation of languages in the bilingual brain, as well as language awareness and metalinguistic knowledge. In addition, the role of normativity in diaspora communities, the challenge of relic varieties and the role of Standard German as language of schooling are discussed. Moreover, the chapter includes general observations on language maintenance in German heritage communities. It emphasizes the implications for future research: implications for the development of the German language in general, implications for the theory of language contact and implications for heritage language research.

This chapter addresses the theoretical reflections on language contact, language attrition and other processes of cross-linguistic influence in minority and migrant settings. It starts with a definition of the term language attrition and the various factors that are responsible for attrition processes, such as L1 use and exposure, input and intergenerational transmission. The chapter also discusses the term “incomplete acquisition” and focusses on bilingual experience and different heritage language constellations. The second part of the chapter offers a novel approach to language contact based on cognitive grammar and usage-based assumptions. This includes a lexicon-syntax continuum based on different cognitive schemas that affect transfer processes. After defining the theoretical basis, the chapter proposes a typology of transference based on this model, distinguishing between full transference (form and meaning transference), meaning transference and structural transference. Further discussion is dedicated to reduction and restructuring processes that occur independently from the typological closeness of or distance from the contact language. The final section describes the consequences of the aforementioned phenomena for heritage language research focusing on the interdependence of individual and societal language change.