This chapter presents an overview of relative clauses and relativisation processes from Old English to Contemporary English, as well as in varieties of English around the world. It centres on adnominal restrictive relative clauses and addresses the factors determining the distribution of relativisers used to introduce the relative clause. Of particular interest will be the changing frequency of each relativiser over time, and the changing weight of the relevant predictors used, focusing on those of a semantic, morphosyntactic, social or stylistic nature. Also included will be a micro-analysis of recent changes in relation to relative constructions and individual relativisers, especially in less formal language, such as the demise of which in favour of that and the specialisation of who with human antecedents in subject function. Already widely reported in both standard and World Englishes, these innovations are likely to become part of the grammatical core of standard English.

In this chapter, I argue for the importance of two models in explorations of orality in the history of English: communicative immediacy and ‘oral/conversational diagnostics’, within the framework of oral vs. literate/production styles. Based on the two models, I identify certain (sub)registers and genres as reference points for assessing the nature of orality reflected in historical linguistic data. In addition, I use the major conclusions of the ‘bad’ data debate, foundational for historical pragmatics, as a springboard for a selective survey of research focused on interjections, speech acts, and specific discourse domains and genres such as wills, courtroom discourse and letters. Potential directions for future research and new data sources are also provided to indicate gaps in the coverage of historical oralities in English.

Linguistic colloquialisation and democratisation are said to be responsible for some of the recent changes in inner-circle varieties of English. Thus, colloquialisation is said to be the process that explains changes such as an increase in the use of the future marker be going to, an increase in the frequency of not negation to the detriment of no negation, and an increase in the use of contractions, among others. Democratisation is claimed to be at the root of an increasing use of non-sexist language, including the use of neutral professional terms (e.g. fire-fighter instead of fireman), the use of gender-neutral or inclusive third-person singular pronouns (singular they, or coordinate he or she, rather than generic he), a decline in the use of deontic modal must and a parallel increase of the semi-modals have to and need to. This paper explores these six markers in two Asian Englishes spoken in India and Hong Kong from a genderlectal perspective using ICE-India and ICE-Hong Kong. The results show that (i) colloquialisation and democratisation are global tendencies; (ii) that Hong Kong English is closer to Inner-Circle varieties of English than Indian English regarding these two phenomena; and (iii) that Indian women are clear leaders of the six changes related to colloquialisation and democratisation.