This chapter examines key ideas concerning the dialect and metre in which Pindar’s poems were written, as well as the story of the transmission of his works from his day, through antiquity and the Middle Ages, then down to our own times.

Language change in American English started when the initial speakers of English landed in North America. During the foundational stage, founder dialects were established in regions such as Tidewater, Virginia, Boston, Philadelphia, Charleston and New Orleans, which still maintain distinct varieties. As migration patterns emerged, dialects expanded largely along an east-to-west route that is still evident to this day, but more recent changes have reflected different migratory routes, such as the south–north migration route of African Americans and the more recent movement of Northern transplants to large urban areas of the South. We consider recent shifts in vowel systems, including the development of vowels systems in the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, the Northern California Vowel Shift and the weakening of the Southern Vowel Shift in Southern metropolitan areas. Finally, we examine the intersection of social and interactional factors with socio-regional space as these factors have nuanced the advancement of change in progress.

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 Also included are previously unpublished linguistic maps from the archives of the Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects, prepared by the Survey’s director, David Parry.

This chapter focuses on Price’s art songs and their biographical resonances. Brought into focus are settings of texts by poets such as Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906), Georgia Douglas Johnson (1880–1966), and Langston Hughes (1901–1967). Dunbar inspired numerous early twentieth-century composers of African descent, including Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Harry T. Burleigh, Will Marion Cook, R. Nathaniel Dett, Nora Holt, and William Grant Still. Hughes’s and Douglas’s poetry became a source of inspiration for new generations of Black composers during the Black Renaissance era of the interwar period. Price joins a long list of esteemed composers who engaged with a Black literary canon in their vocal works. Furthermore, Price’s, her predecessors’, and her peers’ settings of Black poetry continued trends in German Romanticism that explored the marriage of music and poetry and positioned this union as a vehicle for national expression and spiritual transcendence. With these settings, Price therefore worked toward a consolidation of a Black aesthetic in the classical solo voice traditions – one that told a great deal of her own story, too.

This chapter explores the role of linguistics in language teacher preparation. Against a profound demographic shift currently underway in the US, it provides a rationale for preparing ESL and bilingual teachers who are well-equipped to work with diverse students in K-12 contexts. Crucially, the chapter explores two key points: the value of linguistic analysis and an equity-based approach to language teaching. Linguistic analysis allows teachers to recognize patterns in the language of their students; in doing so, teachers can isolate recurring errors, recognize where their students are in the learning process, and better target their teaching to address the errors and move students forward. The chapter also shows how linguistics training helps teachers understand language variation, dialects, and the role of society, especially for languages with less social power and prestige. It argues that teachers’ awareness of harmful language ideologies helps combat societal inequities that use language as a proxy for discrimination and subjugation. The chapter ends with suggestions for further reading and discussion questions for teachers and teacher educators.

This chapter explores the accuracy of private transcription services when transcribing Black English and Standard American English. Courts and lawyers in the US regularly rely on transcripts from such services, but third-party verification of their accuracy, especially with respect to their quality when faced with nonstandard language varieties, is lacking. This study draws on experimental methods to contrast the quality of transcription services offered by transcribers and AI route. The quantitative results show that transcription by humans and AI resulted in more mistakes when transcribing Black English than when transcribing Standard American English. Furthermore, a qualitative analysis reveals that these mistakes often changed or obscured meaning in legally relevant ways. If these results are generalizable, many transcripts currently in circulation, and crucial both to justice at the trial level and appellate review, contain disproportionately more legally important mistakes for Black English speakers. Given that Black English speakers are a highly overrepresented population in the US criminal system, the chapter proposes ways of redressing transcription shortcomings.

Chapter 1 introduces the concept of linguistics and the linguists who study it, as well as the idea of language varieties, dialects, and idiolects. We provide readers with tips on how to use the book and a short summary of the rest of the toolkit.

A detailed commentary which covers matters of literary and historical interest in book VII in the context of Herodotos’ History as a whole. Issues treated include style, dialect, language, text (where necessary), political, religious and social history, both Greek and Persian, prosopography, ethnicity and geography.

This chapter focuses on language variation and change. It discusses criteria used to distinguish dialects and languages, discusses standard and vernacular dialects, and previews various types of dialectal variation, including geolects, genderlects and sociolects. In addition, it examines language change and the intrinsic and extrinsic factors that are conducive to it. This chapter also addresses aspects of variation and change in Esperanto, Lojban and Tolkien’s Elvish languages. In addition, it provides conlanging practice and a set of guided questions to incorporate aspects of variation in a conlang, and exemplifies dialectal variation and historical change in the Salt language.

How we find a voice to tell our story. Variations in first-person narrators; reflecting background and personality in speech. Engaging with the challenges presented by dialogue in historical fiction; accommodating regional accent and dialect.

Chaucer’s works were written during the late fourteenth century, a period which saw considerable changes in the functions of the English language as it came to replace French and Latin as the languages of written record. As well as being an important source for the scholarly understanding of late Middle English, Chaucer’s works shed light on the status of English and its variety of registers and dialects, enabling scholars to gain a deeper awareness of the sociolinguistic connotations of its different forms and usages. The Canterbury Tales, with its array of pilgrims drawn from a variety of professions, social classes and geographical regions narrating a series of tales reflecting a wide range of genres, is a valuable source of evidence for historical pragmatics. This chapter shows the way in which Chaucer’s text offers insights into the conventions of social interaction, including forms of address, politeness and verbal aggression, and the use of discourse markers.

Framing nineteenth-century American realism within William Dean Howells’s dialect movement, which encouraged authors from Mark Twain to Stephen Crane to capture characteristic accents from every corner of the country, this chapter argues that America’s “native-born” speech came to serve as the correlative of “native-born” citizenship on the page. As a literary solution to a legal battle over American belonging, the dialect movement produced not only a distinctively American national canon but also facilitated the rise of the modern nation-state, demonstrating how diverse ethnic populations could be made to speak with one voice: the voice of the people. Yet as illustrated by a close reading of Howells’s 1890 A Hazard of New Fortunes, there remained one kind of accent that could never be assimilated: the voice of a poor man. As a closely-inspired allegory of the 1886 Haymarket Affair scapegoating German socialist August Spies, Hazard demonstrates that a poor man, speaking as a poor man on behalf of the principles of international socialism, could never be made to count as a good American because the engine of the nation-state relies on the difference between rich and poor to make it run.

From the end of the Civil War, writers and critics have both championed and questioned the aptness of realist literary aesthetics for representing the lived reality and political aspirations of black Americans. In writing their works, black writers contended simultaneously with the conventions of blackface minstrelsy and the views of major realist critics like John William De Forest and William Dean Howells, who tended to locate black authenticity in uneducated, dialect-speaking characters. In response some black writers resorted to idealized and genteel modes to assert the reality of sophisticated black characters. Did black linguistic difference and cultural difference limit or enable writers’ expression of literary complexity? From Charles Chesnutt and Paul Laurence Dunbar in the late nineteenth century, to James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ralph Ellison in the middle decades of the twentieth, and through Houston A. Baker, Jr., and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., at the end of the century, black writers and scholars, like their white counterparts, have explored the literary possibilities of vernacular speech and struggled to connect everyday reality to high literary style.

We will look at attitudes and value judgments which speakers and communities have about English dialects and discuss their social relevance of language in general. We will see that language is not only a means to share information but an essential part of social life which helps us organize ourselves and define our identity. There are different levels of usage (regional, social, ethnic, individual) and that variation has regional, social and individual dimensions. We start with a short discussion of general attitudes about language varieties, look at social prejudice based on language usage, find out why some varieties are stigmatized whereas others have high prestige and get a first glance of perceptions about standard and non-standardized varieties. Looking at examples from English around the world, we take a look at perceptual dialectology to demonstrate how views toward dialects affect our ives – not forgetting their negative side effects.

It follows from the usage-based view of language adopted in most strands of Construction Grammar that the constructicons of speakers of what is considered to be one and the same language will differ along social, or ‘lectal’, lines. This chapter explains the inherent theoretical importance of lectal variation for Construction Grammar and surveys existing construction-based work on synchronic language variation. Four major research strands are discussed: (i) studies aimed at the analysis of the form and/or meaning poles of constructions from specific lects; (ii) comparisons of the properties of a given construction or a set of related constructions across different lects; (iii) quantitative studies of grammatical alternations which include lectal variables in their research design; and (iv) studies of social variables involved in the propagation of constructional changes through communities of speakers. The chapter also identifies a number of challenges and open questions.

The language of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry is notable for its imagistic intensity, for its intricate sonic patterning, and sometimes for its cryptic ambiguity. This chapter surveys several nineteenth-century contexts for Hopkins’s idiosyncratic diction. His interest in philology underlies his imitation of alliterative Anglo-Saxon verse and of the medieval Welsh system of versification known as cynghanedd, which involves complex structures of internal rhyme and consonant repetition. Additionally, like his contemporaries William Barnes and Thomas Hardy, Hopkins draws on regional dialect to capture the essences of certain landscapes, creatures, individuals, and trades. And given his predilection for neologizing and at times for elevating sonic gorgeousness over communicative clarity, he may also be read alongside Victorian nonsense writers such as Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. Ironically, Hopkins’s interest in the deep roots of English drives his radical linguistic innovation – and his obscure vocabulary can allow him to channel modes of divinely inspired expression.