Parliamentary Hansard records are texts that stand at an intersection between the representation of spoken discourse and the application of standardised written norms.While they are categorised as ‘verbatim’ accounts of what is said during parliamentary proceedings, they are also edited, official government publications, and are therefore likely to represent a normative, formalised version of the language that was used. Add to this the factors of changing standards over time, different varieties of English and evolving reporting methods, and they become a valuable historical record for charting shifting attitudes towards language prescription. This chapter analyses data from Australian and British Hansard, from 1901 to the present, to assess the degree to which prescriptive practices have been applied to the originally spoken text. It looks at language features that have been identified as being indicative of spoken or written style. These include use of contractions, split infinitives and singular agreement with plural nouns. The data show generally more acceptance of the informal option in Australia in recent times, but also in the early part of the twentieth century.

Up to at least the 1960s, English was seen as a world language integrated around two equipollent standards, British and American. Since then, in the wake of decolonisation, this bi-polar constellation has given way to models arguing for various pluricentric constellations. What tends to be overlooked, however, is the fact that the agents of standardisation and the sociocultural environment in which standardisation is taking place are markedly different today from what they were in the mid twentieth century. The power of educated elites to define linguistic standards has weakened considerably, while language technologies and software algorithms enforce homogenisation of usage in the written domain, promoting new norms that are not always in line with traditional notions of ‘good English’. In addition, the global spread of English has not only involved standard varieties, but also some non-standard ones. Removed from their vernacular home-bases, these non-standard forms have gained prestige and become available for new functions. This has produced the ‘standardisation paradox’ that Global English is facing in the early twenty-first century and that the present chapter will illustrate and analyse.

The rise of the #MeToo movement has prompted a public reckoning with sexual consent, with public discourse now squarely focused on issues of sexual coercion and culpability. However, the principle of consent has a much longer history and wider significance beyond recent events. Bolstered by a social contract model that prioritises individual personhood and the protection of private property, consent has been central to the development of modern law and liberal societies (Munro, 2008). As feminist legal scholar Vanessa Munro argues, in Western legal settings, it ‘demarcate[s] the terrain between acceptable and unacceptable intrusions upon property / bodies’ (Munro, 2008, pp. 923–4) and accredits the liberal subject with its defining features of individuality, rationality and autonomy. In the specific context of sexual violence, consent is endowed with significant power (Hindes, 2022): it is used to arbitrate legal disputes over sexual assault and violence, and determine whether violation has occurred.

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 dis

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 dis

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.

This chapter investigates the continuum which exists between vernacular speech and standard language and examines various issues which arise in this area. Key to the continuum of speech in any Western-style society is the notion of a supraregional variety which, on the one hand, embodies sufficient vernacular features to fulfil the identity function of language but, on the other hand, does not contain features which are stigmatised in a speech community. Supraregional varieties are dynamic entities and are thus subject to language variation and change. Such varieties are only occasionally explicitly codified. However, speakers in any speech community will be aware of stigmatised and non-stigmatised features (with regard to accepted usage in more formal situations) and can move along the continuum of relative vernacularity in given contexts.

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.

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.

Drawing on extensive consultations with relevant stakeholders in Uganda, this chapter seeks to understand how the international standardisation of transitional justice has impacted domestic transitional justice processes in Uganda, and notably victims’ roles therein. It zooms in on the increasingly sanitised involvement and participation of local stakeholders, including victims. The chapter shows how, despite the presence of language such as ‘local consultation’, ‘participation’, and ‘victims-centeredness’, a genuine intention among decision-makers to give meaningful effect to such principles has been missing. As such, formal ‘compliance’ with ideas about civil society and victim participation, as endorsed by international standards and guidelines about transitional justice, has not resulted in outcomes that met the expectations and demands of most local civil society and victim groups in Uganda. The chapter focuses mainly on the process surrounding the adoption of Uganda’s Transitional Justice Policy, but adds perspectives from other relevant frameworks and processes where particularly relevant.

This chapter discusses the Middle English period, considering the historical events that influenced the language and its speakers from 1066 to around 1500 and the development of the language during this period. The influence of French on Middle English is discussed, including lexical and orthographic changes. The chapter also considers the development of Middle English dialects and the movements towards a new standard form of the language towards the end of the period. Middle English phonology and inflexional morphology are outlined, together with some key syntactic features, and the chapter then provides specimen passages of very early Middle English and fourteenth-century English, together with commentary. The chapter closes with a discussion of Middle Scots, outlining key features of the language and its development and providing a specimen passage.

This chapter discusses standardisation as a major factor in sociolinguistic history. After a brief dicussion of basic concepts such as diglossia, Ausbau, Abstand and diaglossia, we introduce the Haugen model, including the key concepts of selection, codification, elaboration and acceptance. We go on to argue that the later introduced concept of implementation is crucial in analyses of the interaction of norms and language use in the language community. Focusing on this interaction, and based on case studies from English and Dutch, three scenarios are distinguished: prescriptive influence, prescriptive delay and concurrent prescriptivism. The chapter ends by situating the interaction of norms and usage into the wider framework of the total linguistic fact as developed by Silverstein.

Shifts in the perception of the role of language users in the history of standardisation in the early periods of the language are evident as the scholarly narrative develops across time. This chapter begins with the notions of standardisation in Old English. The main focus is on the Middle English period, and Samuels’s (1989 [1963]: 66) suggestion that the Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English could be used to classify the less obviously dialectal forms of language, and thus might offer a way to discover the sources of the emerging standard language in fifteenth century English writing. This chapter notes the long shadow cast by this aperçu. It then examines more recent work spearheaded by Wright (1994, 1996, 2000, 2005, 2013, 2017, 2020), which has re-evaluated the narrative of standardisation in early English, focusing on multilingualism and the rejection of a single ancestor of Standard English.

This chapter discusses the extent to which language contact between the indigenous inhabitants of England and the Germanic migrants (fifth to sixth centuries) may have influenced the evolution of English in its earliest stages. It then considers the possible consequences of contact with Norse in the Danelaw (eighth to eleventh centuries), the so-called Viking/Norse hypothesis. It furthermore addresses theories concerning the emergence of the first literary forms of language, associated with the Kingdom of Mercia and the School of Winchester and the tenth-century Benedictine Reform. Theories about the possible influence of the Mercian and West Saxon proto-standards on other dialects are also reviewed, since they may have obscured, at a vernacular level, the results of language contact with Scandinavian in the Old English period.

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.

This chapter examines the consolidation of attitudes and praxis in relation to the emergence of a supraregional accent of English. Engaging in detail with phonological history, it documents the increased salience of delocalisation in representations of speech from the mid eighteenth century onwards while exploring the intersection between formal prescription and private practice. An abundance of primary texts on the need for a normative model of speech was in existence by the late nineteenth century while popular culture, and an emerging national system, also addressed desiderata of this kind. The advent of the pronouncing dictionary, an influential sub-genre in the history of lexicography, is a further important strand in the attempted dissemination of one accent for all, though broadcast English brought other avenues by which paradigms of ‘received’ English were both implemented and encouraged. If the social, cultural and linguistic hegemonies of a ‘standard’ accent were originally embedded in formally democratic models, the chapter also provides a critical examination of both the rhetoric and praxis of ‘received’ English in this respect, alongside its legacies in Present-Day English.

This chapter gives an overview of dictionaries, broadly conceived to include monolingual and bilingual wordlists for readers at all levels, in the history of English from the beginnings of Anglo-Saxon literacy to the present day. It argues against a reductive view of dictionaries as primarily agents of standardisation and authority, expressions of the ‘dismal sacred word’. Its arrangement is roughly chronological, beginning with Anglo-Saxon glossography and the lexicography of later medieval English, before turning to the bilingual and monolingual English dictionaries of the early modern period; to the monolingual dictionaries of the eighteenth century; and to the relationship of lexicography to two very important aspects of Late Modern English, namely its pluricentricity and its use as an acquired language. It concludes with a last look at the relationship of English lexicography with the ‘dismal sacred word’.

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.