Regional dialects are a matter of common knowledge for most Americans, and while people often share the name for a dialect, there is less agreement about where the dialect is spoken, who speaks it, or what features it has. Traditional American dialects follow long established patterns, but they owe more to perceptions than to what people actually say in different places. The complex system of American English gives rise to the possibility to notice what people perceive to be dialects.

This chapter examines English in the Midlands of England. It explores the structure of Mercian Old English, moving on to commonalities and differences across the Midlands region. It then discusses some of the features of Middle English in the area and investigates the ongoing complexities surrounding the processes of standardisation and the place of Midlands English in such processes. Finally, the chapter reviews dialect data from present-day Midlands English by looking at contemporary variation in both the East and West Midlands. It examines what makes Midlands English distinctive from the varieties of English in the north and the south in phonological, grammatical and lexical terms, and looks at similarities and differences between the East and West Midlands.

This chapter presents the processes that have resulted in dialectal fragmentation of Slavic languages. It starts with a discussion of early differences in Proto-Slavic, most notably those in reflexes of palatalizations. It then goes on to discuss the variation before the split of the common Slavic community into three branches. This is followed by the presentation of early East Slavic tribal dialects. Next, early lexical differences across and within Slavic languages are considered. The discussion continues by addressing inter-Slavic areal features and prosodic continua. Finally, external factors of fragmentation are discussed (economic, political), alongisde contacts with non-Slavic languages and sociolinguistic factors.