This chapter provides an overview of the language of religious texts in Old, Middle and Early Modern English. We divide religious language into three spheres: Bible language, the language of prayers and the language of texts of religious instruction and discussion. We then discuss the language of religious texts against the background of the impact of the language of the vernacular Bible, particularly before 1500. We argue that, prior to the publication of the King James Bible, there was no specific ‘religious register’ in Old and Middle English, and even in Early Modern English a typically ‘religious style’ is found only as an additional layer in religious texts, which, by and large, follow the general standardising tendencies of the language at the time.

To study the history of spoken English is to study its extant vestiges in written texts. This chapter draws upon work that connects speech and writing in historical English to present a framework for contextualising written documents and the particularities of their relationships to spoken language. It examines how written English represents spoken English through different styles and genres of text and across different chronological periods. A late medieval deposition might provide certain clues to the English spoken at the time owing to the non-standard orthography and the regional morphosyntax. By contrast, a contemporary poem might provide different clues to the twentieth-century English spoken in the Caribbean owing to the representation of local English through lexical, syntactic and orthographic means. Neither of these is a perfectly faithful record of speech, however, and each reflects different constraints of genre, style, writing practices and pragmatic pressures in the Englishes that they depict.

The New Cambridge History of the English Language is aimed at providing a contemporary and comprehensive overiew of English, tracing its roots in Germanic and investigating the contact scenarios in which the language has been an active participant.

The chapter is divided into two parts, focusing on historiography and methodology, respectively, and linked by a survey of the functions of punctuation over time. The historiographical part offers a discussion on the principles of written language, the fundamental representational principles and functional designs in the history of English orthography, and the system and status of Present-Day English orthography in terms of the main historical lines as seen from structural as well as sociolinguistic viewpoints. The emphasis in the methodological part is on the development of new approaches and methodologies based on the expanding digitisation of historical texts that have grown in interdisciplinary ways out of the traditional philological paradigm – research primarily using large digital datasets and corpus-driven methodologies, as well as exploring the data in innovative ways to chart sociolinguistic networks.

This chapter explores material language practices and their interaction with language ideologies. It investigates how oral, literal, and digital forms co-constitute discourses of normativity and prestige. Through observations of literacy practices, teaching, media, and participants’ reflections, the chapter studies materialisations of language and their ideological implications. The dominance of English writing in formal and institutional contexts contrasts with the variable use of oral Kriol, which resists standardisation. Efforts by the National Kriol Council to create a standardised orthography reveal tensions between fostering linguistic legitimacy and maintaining the anti-standard nature of Kriol. Digital communication amplifies these dynamics, bringing to the fore non-standardised writing that reflects local linguistic realities. Kriol’s oral and multimodal characteristics, perceived as spontaneous, creative, and resistant to disciplinary norms, challenge Western-centric ideologies that prioritise fixed standards. This shows that material language practices are culturally specific. A consideration of the role of materiality in language ideologies challenges universalised epistemologies.

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.

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.

Issuing central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) is being considered by many central banks around the world. This chapter advocates the introduction of an Asian digital common currency (ADCC) as a multilateral synthetic currency coexisting with local currencies of the region. Using DLT, the issuance of ADCC is relatively simple. We need an international organisation to support central banks. One of the main roles of the organisation would be to issue ADCC bonds. The organisation would receive government bonds from central banks and issue ADCC denominated bonds backed by the government bonds as assets. Another role of the organisation would be to provide ADCC data to central banks. This process would hence be similar to how central banks today receive physical banknotes manufactured at the printing bureau. The standardisation and interoperability should be managed by the organisation. The ADCC would then be issued by the central bank of each country as its liability backed by the ADCC denominated bonds because ADCC is not the legal tender of each central bank and distributed to the national economies through commercial banks to be used for cross-border payments as well. The ADCC would also contribute to the development of Asian financial markets.

What is ‘early Latin’? The main contention of the present volume is that this question does not have a single answer. Rather, ‘early Latin’ is one of those ubiquitous labels (like ‘old’ or ‘archaic’ Latin) which have been used by classical scholars to denote different linguistic entities, and above all to describe a variety of linguistic features, in an often confusing and potentially contentious way. ‘Early Latin’ is above all a linguistic construct, which evokes frameworks of periodisation (often diverging), and posits a distinction between a supposedly discrete and cohesive linguistic variety (‘classical Latin’) and another one, equally discrete and cohesive, belonging to an earlier time period (‘pre-classical Latin’, a notion which has often carried negative value judgments since antiquity). Far from aiming to replace one theoretical framework with another, the studies presented here contribute, through a fresh analysis of specific linguistic phenomena and stylistic trends, to challenge the myths of periodisation and standardisation, and to expose the limited usefulness of evolutionary models to explain language change.

Safe and effective health care underpinned by a sound evidence base is considered the gold standard of quality and compassionate care. Evidence-based practice remains a broad term that is frequently used but not always understood. This chapter explores what evidence-based practice is, why it matters, and the barriers that can hinder its implementation in practice. It is vital that operating department practice is informed, supported, and guided by evidence-based practice.

This chapter outlines how historical data can be used for research on language attitudes, concentrating on the field of historical sociolinguistics. It first discusses methodological challenges when working with historical data. Since historical (socio-)linguists cannot elicit data, they rely on the written and typically fragmented data available, which provide limited access to the attitudes of individuals. Furthermore, the boundaries between language attitudes and language ideologies are less sharply drawn in historical sociolinguistic research than in research on present-day data. Attitudes and ideologies are usually not addressed separately and often set in other linguistic contexts, such as language standardisation, linguistic purism, and prescriptivism. The second section of the chapter provides an overview of promising text sources that can be utilised to study language attitudes in the past, including normative texts, ego-documents, and statistical accounts, discussing both their potentials and drawbacks. The third section explains how these sources can be analysed, focussing on discourse-analytical and corpus-linguistic methods. To illustrate the main points made in this chapter, two case studies (one on German and one on Dutch) are presented. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of emerging trends in historical sociolinguistics, particularly the move towards studying language attitudes in multilingual settings.

Chapter 2 provides an overview of some fundamental theoretical questions – the when, the what, the who and the how – about spelling standardisation in Early Modern English. Spelling represents one of the most complex facets of linguistic standardisation and, for this reason, its essence escapes most of the theoretical labels that have been proposed so far for standardisation more broadly. Because of the complexities inherent to Early Modern English spelling, I suggest, we should intend the spelling system of Early Modern English as something in the process of standardising. The chapter also proposes the idea that, despite the complexities involving developments towards standardisation, Early Modern English spelling was not random and haphazard. In the closing section, a case is made for exploring large-scale patterns of development in Early Modern English spelling, and their relationship between theoreticians, schoolmasters, authors, readers and printers.

This chapter traces the practice of concluding peace treaties in Early Modern Europe, characterised by the increasing standardisation of clauses, as well as the influence of the concept of legal (or formal) war alongside that of just war. While just war retained an important role in the justification of war, treaty-making practice tended to rely on legal war, which produced a dualist logic in both war-waging and peace-making. Over time, the settlement of territorial conflicts moved from pre-existing claims and rights to conquest as a basis; dynastic legitimacy was subordinated to the raison d’etat. Increasingly standardised amnesty and restitution clauses, retractions of letters of reprisal, and provisions on prisoners of war likewise bore the influence of the legal war concept. Finally, to deal with the ever wider disruption caused by war, separate FCN treaties emerged alongside peace treaties. Later on, the 1919 Treaty of Versailles marked a brief return to a discriminatory concept of war, but its longer-lasting impact was on collective security and compensation of war damage for citizens.