In The language of daily life in England (1400–1800), Arja Nurmi, Minna Nevala, and Minna Palander-Collin present a collection of historical explorations into the language of personal written correspondence in England. The book is divided into three sections—“Variation and social relations”, “Methodological considerations in the study of change”, and “Sociohistorical context”—and is largely inspired by the Corpora of Early English Correspondence. In Section 1, Paivi Pahta and Arja Nurmi consider multilingual code-switching in the letters of eighteenth-century musician Charles Burney, comparing his usage with that of two of his correspondents to reach conclusions about identity, social status, and intimacy. In Ch. 2, Minna Palander-Collin examines the letters of Nathaniel Bacon, focusing on self-mention and addressee inclusion, and ultimately concludes that Bacon's letters to peers and inferiors evince more first- and second-person pronouns than letters to superiors. Palander-Collin integrates this information into an argument that the maintenance and creation of social relationships can be directly linked to personal pronoun use. Also considering referential terms, Minna Nevala considers the eighteenth-century letters of the Lunar men of Birmingham, and deduces social motivations and effects in the referential terms used for individuals.

In Section 2, Annie Sairio considers Elizabeth Montagu's eighteenth-century Bluestocking social network and argues for a network strength scale to examine ties within the social nexus. Terttu Nevalainen then explores Lady Katherine Paston's letters to her son, considering historical notions of childhood and the linguistic nuances of guardian language. Using Paston and her son as a case study, Nevalainen concludes that child-directed language in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries can be identified by key features related to elements such as politeness and lexical choice. The last article in the methodology section, by Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, is a diachronic analysis of three individuals in which the author relates linguistics changes in personal grammar with larger trends in language use at the time. Raumolin-Brunberg concludes that idiolect evolves, even in adults, along with broader discourse trends.

In Section 3, Mikko Laitinen studies the use of the phrase “you was” at a time when it was not yet fully replaced by its paradigmatic alternative “you were”. In chapter 8, Samuli Kaislaniemi uses the historical records of the East India Company to examine the Japanese lexical borrowings of six English merchants, considering the merchants' language as it relates to previous models of linguistic borrowing and presenting a sociological view of the merchants' daily life. Drawing on research into possessive constructions and applying it to the identity work of John Paston II in Paston's letters dated 1461–1479, Teo Juvonen completes the book's collection with a hypothesis about the semantic importance of possessive constructions. Tying the works together and adding coherence to the volume, the editors provide an introductory chapter that reviews methodology and previous work of relevance to the historical study of England's daily language.