34 INTRODUCTION: KEY BASIC CONCEPTS
‘I’ (‘ic’), accusative pronoun ‘me’ (‘mê’), genitive pronouns ‘mine’ (‘mën’) and ‘our’
(‘ìre’). The possessive apostrophe in modern English (‘Peter’s book’) preserves the
genitive singular endings ‘-es’ for masculine and neuter nouns (see Table A8.1
above), with the apostrophe indicating that the ‘e’ has been omitted. (Given this com-
plicated history, it is no wonder the possessive apostrophe is so often wrongly used
in modern English.)
The case system was generally lost in favour of a more fixed word-order for sev-
eral reasons. The gradual influence first of Norman French, and in the later medieval
period Orléans French, brought a ruling class speaking a non-case language. A huge
number of French words were borrowed by English in this period, largely but not exclu-
sively in the domains of law and administration, cuisine and fashion, education and
manners, architecture and medicine. Many of these words would have seemed odd
with inflectional endings.
Furthermore, Danish influence in the form of Viking invasions and settlement in
the east of England before the Norman Conquest and the speakers of the diverse Old
English dialects produced a contact situation in which many of the root words were
very similar but the inflectional endings were variable: it was natural that these
different endings tended to be assimilated towards a single form. Given these other
factors, the typical Germanic stress on first syllables also meant that inflectional endings
came to be assimilated towards an undifferentiated mid-vowel /e/.
At the same time, many inflectional forms were altering. The northern ‘-s’ suffix
for third person verbs began to spread to the south, displacing the original ‘-e2’, now
spelled ‘-eth’. (Caxton did not in fact have a ‘2’ block on his Dutch-imported print-
ing press, and used ‘Y’ instead, giving rise to the ‘Ye Olde Englishe’ characterisation:
‘Ye’ was never pronounced /ji/ but always /qe/). The King James Bible form (‘My cup
runneth over’) was already archaic by 1611. Standard plural ‘-s’ was being used in pref-
erence to the Old English ‘-en’ (‘children’, ‘oxen’) or zero (‘sheep’, ‘fish’). And weak
past inflections (‘hanged’, ‘looked’, ‘spelt’) were more productive than strong forms
(‘brought’, ‘ran’, ‘hung’).
Towards Modern English

world has created many more forms of the language than could have existed only within
the British Isles. All of these other world Englishes have diverged along their own his-
torical paths. Many of the speakers of these forms (Americans, Indians, Australians,
and others) have returned and changed British English too. The effects of mass
migration, globalisation, and the dominance of English as an international language
continue to produce innovation and change (see strand 10). It remains to be seen whether
diversity or convergence is the dominating trend in the future.
SOCIOLINGUISTICS
Defining sociolinguistics
Even if this book is the very first time that you have ever heard of the disciplinary
term sociolinguistics, there is every chance that you will have engaged in discussions
and reflections upon sociolinguistic topics on many different occasions. In fact, socio-
linguistics is unavoidably all around us. In our everyday lives we are constantly
engaged in sociolinguistic acts and processes, and most of us have been involved at
some time in a conversation about accent and dialect, or ‘correct’ English, or the state
of the education system, and so on. So, what is sociolinguistics?
Broadly speaking, sociolinguistics can be defined as investigating the interplay
between language and society. Researchers who work in this field of language study
are commonly known as sociolinguists. One of the crucial areas which sociolinguists
focus upon is how we vary our language use in different social contexts, referred to
as variationist sociolinguistics.
Think about how you vary your style of speaking depending upon what social
context you are in, who you are talking to and other factors, such as who could poten-
tially overhear you. Compare the following:
q The language that you would use as an interviewee in the public setting of a job
interview, whilst being interviewed by a panel of three company directors, with
A9
36 INTRODUCTION: KEY BASIC CONCEPTS
an informal conversation in the private setting of your home with three long-term
friends from your local regional area.

into contact with one another.
Furthermore, the traditional focus upon regionality expanded to include a com-
bined focus upon social variation, with the social identity categories of age, sex, socio-
economic class and ethnicity being examined for patterns of variation. Younger and
older, male and female speakers from different socio-economic backgrounds and
ethnicities emerged as important and fruitful subjects of research.
The modern discipline of sociolinguistics has grown at a rapid rate. At the end
of the first decade of the twenty-first century there is now a broad range of well-
established sociolinguistic sub-disciplines, which sit both within and alongside
the more traditional approaches to language variation and language change. These
sub-disciplines include, amongst others: language and ethnicity, language and gender,
language and age, multilingualism, language planning and policy, language attitudes
and World Englishes (the subject of strand 10). Certain areas of pragmatics also cross
SOCIOLINGUISTICS 37
over into sociolinguistics, as mentioned in A3. A prime example of this is studies on
the sociolinguistics of politeness, for instance when linguistic politeness is examined
from the perspective of the social variable of gender.
Key terms
Within sociolinguistics a key distinction is made between the terms accent and
dialect, which is often blurred in everyday conversations and popular culture publi-
cations. Accent refers to pronunciation. Dialect is a more encompassing term which
refers to lexis and grammar as well as pronunciation.
One of the key features of the language system which sociolinguists examining
regional variation will study is accent. Sociolinguistic researchers who explore accent
variation thus also tend to be trained phoneticians, often referred to as socio-
phoneticians (D1). Another significant area of interest continues to be in investigations
of dialect.
Whilst traditional research and initial modern-day sociolinguistic studies tended
to focus upon accent and dialect and thus on investigations at the phonological,
lexical and grammatical level, it is important to emphasise that sociolinguistic study can

about language usage. Markers are very important to academic sociolinguistic study,
as they are features with clear social significance, firmly associated with particular social
groups and speech styles. Rhoticity, defined in A8, is a good example of a marker of
the social status of the speaker. Some people, for example in south-west and north-
west England, regard it as a prestigious feature that marks them out from other groups;
while some of those other groups might regard it as a stigmatised feature. Elsewhere,
for example in most of North America, rhoticity is seen as a prestigious variable mark-
ing social status; similarly, notable exceptions exist amongst some other groups (see
A12 and B9 for further discussion).
How many markers can you think of for your own local area? Again, consider
who uses them and whether you use them yourself. Why/why not? If you use them,
in what contexts do you use them/ hear them being used? What attitudes do you have
towards these markers?
Finally, indicator refers to features which are below the level of consciousness and
can only be spotted by trained sociolinguists. These features are therefore not
expected to occur as topics of everyday conversation about language usage. Crucially,
there is no social encoding associated with these variants – individual speakers will
use the same language feature regardless of context or whom they are speaking with.
So, whilst different groups may use indicators differently, such forms are not associ-
ated with any social indexing. In certain parts of North America, some speakers will
pronounce the vowels in ‘cot’ and ‘caught’ exactly the same in all settings, whereas
others will not. There is no consequence for speakers either way in terms of any positive
or negative social evaluation – merging these vowel sounds is not socially encoded.
It is important to note that there can be slippage between these three different
categories over time: indicators can become markers, which in turn can then become
stereotypes.
Communities, networks and practices
By searching for sociolinguistic speech patterns and examining differing speech styles
sociolinguists quickly discovered that an analytical apparatus was required in modern-
day sociolinguistics in order to explain how individuals interact with one another as

for a more detailed illustration).
The speech community can be seen as a rather abstract concept. Speakers can be
geographically disparate and researchers can have very limited contact with them.
In contrast with the speech community are two other approaches, known as social
networks and communities of practice.
The social networks model focuses on the frequency and different types of con-
tact that a specific cluster of individuals share. It then examines how the closeness
of the social ties that exist between speakers will influence their language usage.
Researchers who follow a communities of practice model examine particular groups
of individuals who physically come together to engage in a specific, regular activity.
Shared sociolinguistic practices and goals develop over time between these groups of
people. Examples of communities of practice can include sports teams, friendship groups,
colleagues in a workplace and students in a seminar. Close-knit communities tend to
sustain particular linguistic identities and features.
There are values in all three of these different frameworks for conceptualising groups,
depending upon what sociolinguists are aiming to analyse. The speech communities
approach is useful if analysts want to survey language usage in broad populations of
people. The social network approach is useful for observing how the social closeness
or social distance of a particular network affects language usage. The communities of
practice model is useful for observing how a specific group develops shared language
practices, as well as how membership categories are co-constructed and how member-
ship can change over time.
WORLD ENGLISHES
World Englishes is a recently emergent area of sociolinguistic study. It is a field which
has grown rapidly since the early 1980s, reflecting the spread of English as an inter-
national language, initially highlighted in A8. The expansion of different varieties of
Englishes around the world has been intensified by English as the global language of
A10