Varieties of English in the U.S. and Canada display fascinating developments from colonial times up until the twenty-first century. To throw light on the linguistics of North American Englishes and their socio-historical contexts, this volume brings together research from various traditions, including corpus linguistics, variation studies, dialectology, historical sociolinguistics, historical pragmatics, language ideology, and the enregisterment framework. In the ten chapters of the volume, a wide variety of sources, published and unpublished, containing evidence of past language use in the U.S. and Canada are introduced and exploited for novel insights. Among the research questions addressed are the following: how to best model the emergence of new varieties of English in North America? Are morphological Americanisms historical retentions, post-colonial revivals, or progressive innovations? What is distinctly Canadian in the context of North American Englishes? How can synchronic dialects be used to examine trajectories of change in the history of Canadian English?

The present volume brings together leading scholars studying language change from a variety of sociolinguistic perspectives, complementing and enriching the existing literature by providing readers with a kaleidoscopic perspective of aspects of change in English from around 1700 until the present day. The volume presents a collection of in-depth studies on a broad spectrum of phonetic, lexical, grammatical and discourse variation, drawing on historical corpora, dictionaries, metalinguistic commentary, ego-documents, spoken language and survey data.Apart from advancing our knowledge of processes of language change in varieties of English, including British English, Irish English, Australian English, South African English, American English and Canadian English, the individual chapters contribute to the theoretical debates on variation and change in Late Modern as well as Present-day English.

Varieties of English in the U.S. and Canada display fascinating developments from colonial times up until the twenty-first century. To throw light on the linguistics of North American Englishes and their socio-historical contexts, this volume brings together research from various traditions, including corpus linguistics, variation studies, dialectology, historical sociolinguistics, historical pragmatics, language ideology, and the enregisterment framework. In the ten chapters of the volume, a wide variety of sources, published and unpublished, containing evidence of past language use in the U.S. and Canada are introduced and exploited for novel insights. Among the research questions addressed are the following: how to best model the emergence of new varieties of English in North America? Are morphological Americanisms historical retentions, post-colonial revivals, or progressive innovations? What is distinctly Canadian in the context of North American Englishes? How can synchronic dialects be used to examine trajectories of change in the history of Canadian English?

The present volume brings together leading scholars studying language change from a variety of sociolinguistic perspectives, complementing and enriching the existing literature by providing readers with a kaleidoscopic perspective of aspects of change in English from around 1700 until the present day. The volume presents a collection of in-depth studies on a broad spectrum of phonetic, lexical, grammatical and discourse variation, drawing on historical corpora, dictionaries, metalinguistic commentary, ego-documents, spoken language and survey data.Apart from advancing our knowledge of processes of language change in varieties of English, including British English, Irish English, Australian English, South African English, American English and Canadian English, the individual chapters contribute to the theoretical debates on variation and change in Late Modern as well as Present-day English.