Overview

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 In the ten chapters of the volume, a wide variety of sources, published and unpublished, containing evidence of past language use in the U.S. and Canada are introduced and exploited for novel insights.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?

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9789027210876

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Reviews

The co-editors chose a very interesting topic to explore, the rise of early North American English. They solicited nine chapters from ten scholars with expertise in this area. The essays were grouped into four different thematically based parts: Varieties in Focus, Towards General American English, Ideology and Beyond, Beyond the Borders: Canadian English. These groupings added real texture to the book, something that would have been lost if the chapters had simply been added randomly. The individual chapters were very well researched and clearly written, and tables (where applicable) contained useful statistical information, information that was effectively integrated into empirical findings in subsequent discussions. While the authors provide extensive information on how American English became a full-fledged variety of English, one of the more interesting facets of the book is how the authors gathered empirical information upon which they based their analyses. -- Charles F. Meyer, University of Massachusetts Boston, in English Language and Linguistics (March 2024).

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