The chapter deals with segmental and suprasegmental features of English spoken by residents of England without a recent migration history – though two major new varieties, British Asian English and Multicultural London English, are briefly discussed. While the emphasis is on the period since the turn of the twenty-first century, the chapter also deals with changes since the 1960s. The chapter begins with a presentation of recent technological advances, such as magnetic resonance imaging and innovative quantitative cartographic techniques. This is followed by a discussion of consonants, vowels, rhythm, stress, intonation and voice quality. The chapter goes on to show how some features are involved in levelling at the national or regional level, while other local and regional features are maintained. Using older dialectological sources as well as contemporary sociolinguistic methods, four regions are discussed, those centred on London, Newcastle, Liverpool and Manchester. The evidence shows similarities (a general reduction in variation) and differences (maintenance of differences between neighbouring cities). Levelling in the South East involves a shift of vowels towards Received Pronunciation-like variants, while consonants do not take part in this change; the exception is the rapid loss of traditional h-dropping. Finally, the influence of standardisation is discussed.

Multilingualism played an important role in the development of Standard English, but previous generations of scholars downplayed the multilingual element in its history to the extent of ignoring late medieval institutional code-switching altogether. In the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, code-switched record-keeping was routine practice, from prestigious institutions to private individuals, although no history of English mentions it and very little of it is published. In this chapter, I firstly establish my claim that multilingualism led to Standard English by showing that Standard English is the descendant of coalesced supralocal Englishes that adopted both the written conventions of Anglo-Norman and much of its content-word stock when code-switching practices were reversed. What this means is that instead of a Medieval Latin grammatical matrix containing Anglo-Norman and English words, fifteenth century scribes switched to an English grammatical matrix containing code-switched Anglo-Norman and English words. Standard English was the eventual outcome of this reversal. I then track the “monolingual origin” story, still repeated in textbooks today – namely, the story that Standard English supposedly developed mainly from the dialect of the “East Midlands”, or “Central Midlands”, or “Chancery English”, or a mixture of the above, depending on the textbook. I show that the “monolingual origin” story goes back to the early 1870s and consider the reasons for why the monolingual-source explanation prevailed for so long.