Keeping in touch is a volume that is associated with the language variation of emigrant correspondence and vernacular correspondence across the English-speaking world in history. It features studying language variation through incorporating and analyzing instances of emigrants’ letters, which provides a new research direction for historical sociolinguistics.

This volume contains twelve chapters, which are divided into four parts. Chapter 1, by Raymond Hickey, introduces the nature, importance, and linguistic analysis of emigrant correspondence and explores the relationships between memories and self-identities such that the episodic memories of emigrants in their homeland can help define their self-identities. The conclusion is drawn that a wide range of emigrants’ letters can help explore the evolution of English varieties over the past two hundred years.

Part 1 focuses on ‘The language of emigrant correspondence’. Chapter 2, by Angela Bagwell, Samantha Litty, & Mike Olson, encapsulates the transfer of German to Wisconsin English through a German-American family of four generations in the nineteenth century, which has an everlasting and powerful influence on the formation of the English variety. In chapter 3, Stefan Dollinger figures out the transformation from shall to will with a multiple perspective comparison and concludes that the spread of first person will is primarily the result of colloquialization and mass schooling. In chapter 4, Marina Dossena investigates the grammatical flexibility and self-identity of Scottish emigrant correspondence in the nineteenth century.

Part 2, ‘The language of the Irish emigrant experience’, probes into the varieties of Irish emigrants’ English. Chapter 5, by Emma Moreton & Chris Culy, analyzes female Irish emigrants’ letters and explores what women emigrants wrote about and how they retained relationships with their families and friends in their home country. Chapters 6 and 7, by Kevin McCafferty and Carolina P. Amador-Moreno respectively, analyze the features of Irish emigrant correspondence to prove that the use of some vernacular terms by emigrants is somehow integrated into the culture of the host country. In chapter 8, Hickey discovers that one of the major changes in Irish English is aspectual, that is, Irish English retains the order of questions from main clauses. Chapter 9, by Dania Jovanna Bonness, finds that a typical feature of Irish English is the use of discourse marker like.

Part 3 discusses ‘Vernacular correspondence’. Chapter 10, by Lucia Siebers, analyzes African American vernacular letters, which reveal that father and daughter share similar dialect characteristics. Alexander Kautzsch, in chapter 11, studies morphosyntactic characteristics in early African American English, which show that letters are relatively more standard in emigrants’ letter language than in transcribed speech. In chapter 12, Stephanie Hackert presents that the most important language restriction is the membership in a particular morphological verb category.

In a nutshell, each part of the book has unequivocal key points, which proceeds in an orderly way to lead readers to explore the English language variation in emigrant correspondence. This book is an essential reading for scholars and educators in the fields of historical sociolinguistics, which can enlighten them to conduct further investigations.