This chapter reviews varieties of British English that have developed in South Asian communities around the United Kingdom. There is no single British Asian English; rather, the term can be used to describe a diverse range of regional sub-varieties. South Asians are the largest ethnic minority in the United Kingdom, with large concentrations in urban areas across England, including London, Birmingham, Leicester and Bradford. In addition to large demographic numbers, a reason for the emergence of distinctive varieties in South Asian communities is the historical presence of English in South Asian countries, reinforcing systematic divergences from British English speech norms. The chapter reviews the history of British South Asian communities in recent decades, and then describes an array of features of these regional varieties: phonetics and phonology, lexicon, and grammar, as well as at the level of discourse and conversational interaction, where systematic signals of identity and ideology can be observed in speech style variation and code-switching.

This section provides an overview of the English varieties spoken on the Channel Islands with a focus on the two largest islands of Jersey and Guernsey. Politically associated with the English Crown since the Norman Conquest, but primarily Francophone until the nineteenth century, Channel Island English has been shaped by a long history of linguistic contact between insular Norman French, standard French and several English varieties. Anglicisation became almost complete, however, in the second half of the twentieth century. Although the Channel Islands have not been studied extensively or continuously, the existing studies have revealed the great extent to which contact with Norman French has coloured the English spoken on Jersey and Guernsey. Despite the survival of some unique dialect features, these studies also show that processes of standardisation and levelling are well under way in Channel Island English, influenced by factors such as ongoing dialect contact, identity issues, education and changing social network structures. After a brief account of the socio-historical setting and today’s linguistic situation on the Islands, more recent research on variation and change in Channel Island English is presented, including a description of its most important phonological and morphosyntactic features.

This chapter provides a brief sociolinguistic description of two Celtic languages that have experienced language death and revival: Cornish and Manx. First, their distinctive sociolinguistic position as revived languages is reviewed. There follows a structured discussion of the factors contributing to each language’s historical decline and more recent revival movement, followed by an overview of the current position of each language in terms of demographics and language policy provisions. We note that while both languages are revived, differences in timescale have left speakers with different concerns regarding reconstruction as a spoken vernacular, although both Cornish and Manx are affected by similar debates around purism and authenticity. More broadly, we emphasise that the fate of both languages is inextricably linked with the wider political landscape, and that the efforts of volunteer activists at a grassroots level are currently paramount in ensuring their visibility, in a context where more official sources of support are often unreliable.

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.

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.

In this chapter we examine a number of present-day varieties of Scots and Scottish Standard English (SSE). We begin by describing the Scots–SSE continuum, with its roots in earlier socio-cultural developments. We then turn to the present day, examining the attitudes towards different varieties of Scots across geographic and social dimensions. The main part of the chapter focuses on recent research on the many varieties of Scots, providing a detailed picture of the phonological and morphosyntactic forms found therein. In terms of phonology, Scots and SSE overlap, but remain divergent, especially given a number of phonological changes in Scots over the twentieth century, and continued Scots regional variation. The analysis of morphosyntax shows a core of forms shared across most varieties, including SSE, and these are largely stable. A number of other ‘home-grown’ forms are increasing in use across Scotland. Overall, our analysis shows that Scots is maintaining its own distinctive pathway in the twenty-first century.

A thousand years ago, Irish Gaelic was spoken by the entire population of Ireland. Today, it is spoken by a few thousand people. The first part of this chapter discusses how this language shift came about, focusing on historical changes in population due to various waves of colonisation. The second section describes a number of linguistic features which make Irish Gaelic distinctive. At the morphophonological level, these include consonant and vowel alternations and initial mutation, and at the syntactic level, (mainly) VSO word order and the two verbs to be: the copula and the substantive verb.

Observing that a linguistically principled characterisation of standard English remains elusive, this chapter explores the indeterminacy surrounding standard English, as well as reasons why a broad consensus on what it comprises is challenging to achieve. This indeterminacy is particularly acute with regard to the concept of standard spoken English, where uncertainty has been exacerbated by the failure of the prescriptive grammatical enterprise to acknowledge systematic structural differences between written and spoken English as well as formal and informal speech. Although linguistic accounts stress that standard English is best conceptualised as an abstraction to which actual usage conforms to a greater or less extent, there remains a gulf between academic and public understanding of the standard language. This disconnect facilitates the perpetuation of obfuscatory ideologies which inform public discourse about standard English. These include tenacious beliefs in the infallibility of its norms and its putative superiority to non-standard varieties, which are routinely dismissed as ‘incorrect,’ ‘vulgar’ and ‘uneducated’, when not altogether discounted as English. Empirically accountable analyses of naturally occurring discourse furnish an indispensable corrective to highly idealised prescriptive accounts of usage, which often fail to capture many of the implicit regularities of actual speech.

This chapter provides the first overview of regional variation in the frequency and sociolinguistic distribution of discourse-pragmatic items in England. We outline methodological and conceptual reasons for the historically limited knowledge of regional discourse-pragmatic variation, before addressing this gap by synthesising findings from individual research projects. We focus on comparing the distribution of selected discourse-pragmatic items from across different clause and utterance positions: general extenders, grammatically dependent negative-polarity question tags, invariant tags, focus markers, backchannel responses, attention signals, intensifiers, discourse like and quotatives. Notwithstanding acknowledged challenges in comparing results from individual studies, our overview reveals both striking cross-variety parallels in the distribution of these items, which we tentatively attribute to communicative factors, as well as robust patterns of regional variation, which we cautiously ascribe to regional socio-demographic differences that promote either linguistic conservatism or innovation.

This chapter outlines the linguistic properties of Welsh and its historical and sociolinguistic context. It sketches the main features of Welsh phonology, including vowel, diphthong and consonant phoneme inventories, focusing on issues involving vowel length, the complex set of diphthongs, and voiceless nasal consonants, including major dialect differences. Mutation, changes in word-initial consonants triggered by morphosyntactic features, is a characteristic of Welsh that has drawn considerable attention, and both phonological and morphosyntactic aspects of the phenomenon are discussed. In morphology, topics of interest include extensive regular vowel alternation and the formation of the singular–plural distinction. Mildly synthetic verbal morphology sits alongside another typologically significant property, inflection of prepositions for person and number. Major features of Welsh syntax include head-initial and VSO word order, restrictions on finite verbs in complement clauses, an elaborate system of clause-initial particles, and marking of predicate adjectives and nominals with a dedicated predicative particle. A final section looks at current sociolinguistic issues, including changes in the traditional diglossic relationship between literary and spoken Welsh, and changes that are often attributed to language contact and revitalisation.

This chapter considers the history, political context, and linguistic characteristics of Scottish Gaelic. Gaelic has been spoken in Scotland since approximately 400 CE and was a majority language of Scotland around 1000 CE. Today, Gaelic is a minority, endangered language undergoing revitalisation. Currently, there are around 58,000 speakers in Scotland, and 1,500 in Canada. Around half of speakers in Scotland live in the north-west Highlands and islands, but many also live in Lowland cities such as Glasgow and Edinburgh due to migration and revitalisation policies. Gaelic’s linguistic features are substantially different from English and, along with other Celtic languages, are quite different from many other Indo-European languages. For example, Gaelic is a VSO language and retains morphological complexity such as case and gender. Phonological features include contrastive palatalisation, pre-aspiration, and some dialects have lexical pitch accents. In some morphophonological contexts, consonants undergo mutation. Recent sociolinguistic developments including language revitalisation have led to new linguistic structures emerging. This chapter outlines some of these developments such as new varieties of Gaelic in urban settings, and dialect levelling in traditional areas among Gaelic-immersion school pupils.