Mersea Island is a small island off the coast of north-east Essex, UK, which has a rich history of contact, ranging from Viking and Roman settlements to more modern influxes of evacuees and military personnel during both World Wars. The island itself also has a history of isolation, due to its only access road being cut off regularly by lunar tides. However, this isolation has been challenged over more recent years by various building projects, resulting in a large influx of non-islanders moving and settling on the island. This overview will present a range of phonological features across both the consonantal and vocalic systems of Mersea Island English as evidence from both older and younger Islanders to highlight traditional features and the direction of change within the community as a whole. A selection of morphosyntactic features which highlight more salient structures of Mersea Island English is then presented before a discussion of how we may wish to evaluate paths of change moving forward in relation to both socio-cultural and linguistic factors.

The Chinese are one of the longest established and largest immigrant groups in Britain. There are a number of mutually unintelligible regional languages that are spoken amongst the Chinese. A complex pattern of multilingualism is emerging in the community. Intergenerational language maintenance and language shift are key sociolinguistic issues that the communites are collectively addressing. Contacts between the different languages have resulted in structural innovation and change that impact on all the languages concerned.

Centuries of contact between Older Scots and the Scandinavian language of Norn, coupled with geographic isolation, has resulted in the highly distinctive dialects spoken in the Orkney and Shetland Isles today. In this chapter, we document the socio-historical context which led to the formation of these dialects, and look to a range of studies which describe these dialects’ lexical, phonological and morphosyntactic forms. We note forms shared with other varieties of Scots but concentrate mostly on the highly localised features not found in mainland Scotland. In addition to broad comparisons between Orkney and Shetland, we also document the dialect diversity within each location. Finally, we turn to bidialectalism, and specifically how speakers may have access to two ‘codes’ in their linguistic repertoire, where Standard Scottish English is used alongside localised vernaculars, and how this might impact on dialect attrition in the coming years.

This chapter reviews the long-standing debate on ‘standard’ and ‘non-standard English’ in education, highlighting differences in approach not just between policymakers and professional linguists but also within the academic community. It introduces a language ideological framework that treats ‘standard’ and ‘non-standard’ English as social constructions rather than linguistic fact, and presents research evidence to debunk common myths about ‘non-standard’ English that circulate in education (for example, that ‘non-standard’ speech will impede progress towards fully-fledged literacy). The chapter ends with reflections on the role sociolinguists have played in educational debates, with suggestions for future work. Ultimately, the chapter makes the case that sociolinguists should adopt a critical, language ideological approach in order to expose and challenge the hierarchies and educational inequalities reproduced through standard language ideology.

This chapter defines heritage languages and motivates their study to understand linguistic diversity, language acquisition and variationist sociolinguistics. It outlines the goals of Heritage Language Variation and Change in Toronto (HLVC), the first project investigating variation in many heritage languages, unifying methods to describe the languages and push variationist sociolinguistic research beyond its monolingually oriented core and majority-language focus. It shows how this promotes heritage language vitality through research, training, and dissemination. It lays out overarching research questions that motivate the project:

• Do variation and change operate the same way in heritage and majority languages?

• How do we distinguish contact-induced variation, identity-related variation, and internal change?

• Do heritage varieties continue to evolve? Do they evolve in parallel with their homeland variety?

• When does a heritage variety acquire its own name?

• What features and structures are malleable?

• How consistent are patterns across languages?

• Are some speakers more innovative?

• Can attitudes affect ethnolinguistic vitality?

• How can we compare language usage rates among communities and among speakers?

This chaper looks at the peculiar mixture of linguistic forms that are archaic and dialectal in Homer and compares them to the hybrid dialects that are employed in English-language popular music today. Sections 1 and 2 provide a detailed account of the main linguistic features of Homer’s Kunstsprache and separates its archaic components from its dialectal components. Section 3 looks at perceptions of dialect (and dialect imitations) in Archaic Greece. Sections 4-5 illustrate how ancient and modern critics interpreted Homer’s dialect, and introduces phase theory, along with remaining open questions therein. Section 6 introduces several contemporary case studies of singers adopting a non-native, hybrid dialect of English when performing. These include Adele, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Green Day, Alesha Dixon, the Arctic Monkeys, Iggy Azalea, and Keith Urban. Lessons won from these case studies are then applied to Homer.

In mainland China, Reform and Opening up in the last few decades has opened a floodgate of foreign infusion. Foreign businesses such as KFC, Starbucks, Walmart, McDonalds, and Carrefour are seen everywhere. There have also been many loanwords. Some of the loanwords have become so much a part of the Chinese lexicon that their foreign origin may not even be clear to all. Apart from the social and cultural implications, the influx of things foreign presents quite a challenge to Chinese with its non-phonetic script. Various accommodation strategies have been used to represent foreign words with Chinese characters, including meaning translation, phonetic transliteration, or a combination of both, resulting in varying degrees of semantic and phonetic approximation. Incidentally, the fact that the Rebus (phonetic loan) Principle is extensively used for phonetic transliterations, whereby Chinese characters are used only for their sounds without regard to their meanings, gives the lie to the persistent ideographic myth concerning Chinese characters.

Chinese can be found in most parts of the world. The signs in this chapter are mainly from the United States. A few are from Kyrgyzstan. Signs in the diaspora contexts are distinguished by the need to negotiate between Chinese and the local language(s), as Chinese is used to represent local contents. Both meaning-based translation and sound-based transliteration are used, as well as a combination of the two. Also notable are the dialectal elements. The language of the Chinese diaspora in North American is heavily Cantonese, as the earliest immigrants were from Cantonese speaking areas of China. Cantonese has also been adopted as sort of a lingua franca. Traditional characters are used as a rule, reflecting the dominance of traditional culture. The traditional vertical and right to left text orientation coexists with that of the modern horizontal and left to right format.

This chapter introduces the concept of accent, particularly in relation to dialects and varieties of English.The chapter first defines the word 'accent', and the relationship among accent, dialect, and variety. The chapter then focuses on how we understand and describe accents, and the social meaning that accents convey in different contexts. The chapter then discusses variation within different regional varieties of English, and the use of umbrella terms such as 'British English' or 'American English' to encompass a range of social, regional, and ethnic varieties. The chapter then describes the features of the book; the final section of the chapter has a series of exercises and tasks to guide you through a revision of the contents of the chapter.

Radio historians observe that Midwestern accents defined the sonic norms of broadcast speech in the United States, and that “BBC English” became a “supra-local accent” that transformed the speech patterns of a small group into an imperial standard. Does literary modernism follow the same model? This chapter takes up the theoretical writings around “broadcast modernism” to write a regionalist theory of poetic modernism in the US. I read backwards from Lorine Niedecker’s desire for “speech without practical locale,” to bring together Niedecker, Ezra Pound, Langston Hughes, and T. S. Eliot as Midwestern modernists whose compositions on, about, and for the radio produced work on speech that tune us into regional differences against the modernist ideology of radio’s “voice from nowhere”: the ambition of acoustic engineering, corporate infrastructure, and presidential speech. Anticipating the myth of the “neutral” Midwestern media voice, these poets’ work reveals the provincialism in modernism’s cosmopolitan desires.

This chapter explores short American fictions that are like jokes, drawing on Sigmund Freud’s contrast between the “tendentious” joke, which generates “pleasure by lifting suppressions and repressions,” and “innocent” humor, its pleasure based on “the liberation of nonsense.” In opposition to ideas of the classical American short story as a compact vehicle of epiphany, it argues for a countertradition of short fiction of “innocent” comedy, which features the linguistic slapstick generated by language learning and exposes the instability of language. It frames the immigrant Leo Rosten as an inheritor of Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, and O. Henry, all of whom draw on lexicography and language learning to explore the “innocent” humor of unstable language. Like Boris Eikhenbaum in his description of O. Henry, Rosten’s best-known protagonist, the English-language student Hyman Kaplan, asserts that Russian Jews such as himself are especially attuned to the comic potential of English.