Australia has a comparatively recent history of European settlement and English language development. Yet, it is already quite distinct. The different mixes of original dialects that came in during the early years, as well as the physical separation from other English-speaking regions, have allowed this distinctiveness to flourish. Regional variation within Australian English is still minor compared to other varieties, although local differences have been increasing. Contact with languages other than English has also been adding to the complex multilinguistic reality that is modern-day Australia. Recent years mark the rise of new multicultural identities for Australian English speakers in the form of migrant ethnolects and varieties of Aboriginal English. Such ethnically marked ways of speaking are no longer the consequence of second language learning but relate to attitudes around identity and cultural heritage.

This chapter looks at changes in the first quarter of the twenty-first century and discusses possible future developments. The role of social media, migration, and travel in the rapid global spread of new features is discussed, as is the levelling of local and regional varieties and the rise of multicultural varieties in large cities. The Oxford English Dictionary is used to illustrate patterns of lexical innovation and changes of meaning in this period. Recent changes in the nature and status of Received Pronunciation are outlined. Sections devoted to recent changes in pronunciation and grammar are followed by discussion of possible future trends.

The occurrence of not-contraction (e.g. she isn’t) in three genres in CONCE is examined in detail. In an overall quantitative analysis, not-contraction is compared with uncontracted forms as well as operator contraction (e.g. she’s not). Other potential factors accounted for include the operator itself, gender, word order (e.g. is she not vs. is not she), and no-negation as an alternative negating strategy. A multifactorial, variationist analysis of contexts where not-contracted and uncontracted forms are the main variants demonstrates the importance of factors such as genre and tense. The results provide solid evidence of colloquialization in Drama and Fiction, where not-contraction becomes more frequent; they also reveal that women may have used contraction less than men, which is expected considering the stigmatization of not-contraction, and that the uncontracted is not she pattern in questions may have been used as a more acceptable way of rendering spoken contractions in writing.

This chapter outlines the three aims of the book: to resolve the stability paradox; to reconcile an idiolect-centred perspective on language change with corpus-linguistic methodology; and to carry out four case studies of colloquialization and densification. Some limitations in scope are also addressed, and the structure of the remainder of the book is outlined.

In this chapter, the units linked by the co-ordinator and are shown to correlate with orality: oral genres use more super-phrasal (e.g. clausal) co-ordination, while higher proportions of phrasal co-ordination characterize literate genres. A development towards more super-phrasal co-ordinationcan thus indicate colloquialization. Analyses demonstrate that newspapers, parliamentary debates, and letters written by men exhibit this very trend in diachrony, while women’s letters unexpectedly develop in the opposite direction. The latter change, however, is shown to be a result not of anti-colloquialization, but of an increased reliance on the sentence as a unit of written discourse in letters by women; main clauses are increasingly placed in separate sentences or separated by semicolons rather than being linked with dashes and co-ordinators, which was a feature of several women’s idiolects in the early nineteenth century. Sentence-initial and, which was a proscribed feature, is the focus of a separate study and is shown to increase in frequency in speech-based and speech-purposed writing. Overall, the results point to colloquialization in several genres.

In the final chapter, the three aims of the book are returned to and discussed from a holistic perspective. The book ends with a few concluding remarks.

In this chapter, the idiolect-centred approach to language change is reconciled with historical corpus linguistics as a methodology. The issue of what corpus-based studies can and cannot tell us is discussed in terms of the granularity of the analyses. The two types of change in focus in the case studies, colloquialization and densification, are introduced. The two main ways of operationalizing frequency in syntactic studies, namely variationist and text-linguistic approaches, are contrasted. Finally, the two corpora on which the case studies are based, CONCE and CNNE, are introduced; CNNE and its relationship to the newspaper market in nineteenth-century England is discussed in some detail, as CNNE is a new corpus and as the newspaper trade underwent far-reaching changes during the period covered by the corpus. The importance of considering a wide variety of genres owing to the increasing linguistic genre differences that characterize Late Modern English is emphasized.