This chapter explores the archive strand of the Manchester Voices project, focusing on the analysis of historical speech recordings from Greater Manchester, particularly oral history interviews conducted in the 1980s in Oldham. Originally intended as a comparison to contemporary data, these recordings became central during the Covid-19 lockdown. The analysis focuses on rhoticity (the pronunciation of postvocalic /r/), a feature now rare in most of England but variably present in the archive data. Using both acoustic and auditory methods, the team tracked rhoticity across six speakers, revealing intra-speaker variation linked not only to linguistic context but also to social meaning. The chapter uses Lectal Focusing in Interaction to explore how shifts in rhoticity relate to speakers’ orientations toward tradition, modernity, and personal identity. The findings suggest that rhoticity can index alignment with older values or ways of life, while non-rhoticity may be linked to modernity and change. This chapter highlights how variation in archived speech can offer insight into past social meaning and ongoing processes of language change.

This chapter introduces language history and language change in an indirect way. By exposing common misconceptions about language change it introduces basic concepts of language history and change. The questions asked (and answered) include:(1) Is language change bad? Is it corruption/degeneration/decay?(2) Are the causes of language change laziness, or even immorality, and, if not, what are they?(3) Is change faster in some languages than others? Is change different in some kinds of languages than it is in other sorts of languages?(4) Are some languages “primitive” and therefore subject to different kinds of changes from the sorts of changes found in more “civilized” tongues?(5) Does language change affect written languages differently from unwritten ones?(6) Does size matter? For example, is English a better language because it has a really big dictionary? Better put, where do words come from, and in what ways, if any, is English vocabulary special?(7) Do kinds of societies or cultures determine the features a language will have or the kinds of changes languages can undergo to bring these features about?

The models posited in Chapter 2 are applied to the problem set out in Chapter 1. Sources in Greek, Elamite, and Old Persian, taken together, give every reason to believe that mass nonnative acquisition of Persian was underway from the reign of Darius I onward. The cooperation of multiethnic groups of armed forces, work forces, and especially domestic staff, such as concubines and eunuchs, with their Persian-speaking masters evidently played a large role in the formation of Middle Persian. Contrary to a widespread assumption, Aramaic turns out not to be a lingua franca of the Achaemenian Empire, except at the level of provincial administration, but rather Persian was probably the best candidate for such a role. Middle Persian arose from Old Persian through a process of semicreolization as the term was defined carefully in Chapter 2.

Language change in American English started when the initial speakers of English landed in North America. During the foundational stage, founder dialects were established in regions such as Tidewater, Virginia, Boston, Philadelphia, Charleston and New Orleans, which still maintain distinct varieties. As migration patterns emerged, dialects expanded largely along an east-to-west route that is still evident to this day, but more recent changes have reflected different migratory routes, such as the south–north migration route of African Americans and the more recent movement of Northern transplants to large urban areas of the South. We consider recent shifts in vowel systems, including the development of vowels systems in the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, the Northern California Vowel Shift and the weakening of the Southern Vowel Shift in Southern metropolitan areas. Finally, we examine the intersection of social and interactional factors with socio-regional space as these factors have nuanced the advancement of change in progress.

The New Cambridge History of the English Language is aimed at providing a contemporary and comprehensive overiew of English, tracing its roots in Germanic and investigating the contact scenarios in which the language has been an active participant. It discusses the various models and methodologies which have been developed to analyse diachronic data concisely and consistently. The new history furthermore examines the trajectories which the language has embarked on during its spread worldwide and presents overviews of the varieties of English found throughout the world today.

African American English (AAE) is arguably the most studied variety of English in sociolinguistics, and much of the formative work on the variety took place in cities, setting the stage for the direction of sociolinguistics in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This chapter provides an overview of the important early work on AAE in urban environments. Alongside a discussion of what we learned about the variety from early studies, the chapter will also explore how methods of study and the variables themselves have evolved. The chapter includes a discussion of differences within AAE that are conditioned not only by region, but also by finer-grained aspects of community and individual identity. The recent focus on a wider scope of variables, as well as speakers who were previously overlooked, has allowed for more detailed discussion of AAE as a flexible, evolving toolkit that speakers may use to construct and perform complex identities.

The New Cambridge History of the English Language is aimed at providing a contemporary and comprehensive overiew of English, tracing its roots in Germanic and investigating the contact scenarios in which the language has been an active participant. It discusses the various models and methodologies that have been developed to analyse diachronic data concisely and consistently. The new history furthermore examines the trajectories the language has embarked on during its spread worldwide and presents overviews of the varieties of English found throughout the world today.

The relative malleability of adults’ first language grammar, and thus the contribution of the post-adolescent individual to historical language change, is a contested issue in linguistic research. The argument revolves around the extent to which it is possible for post-adolescent individuals to modify the grammatical system of their native language(s). This chapter summarises the contribution of several areas of linguistics to this debate, highlighting in particular some historical sociolinguistic studies of English. We then review the evidence from over forty-six longitudinal linguistic panel studies, confirming that some adults can adjust their native repertoires across the life-course, even into old age. Yet many questions remain to be answered with regard to the nature of post-adolescent linguistic lability. We discuss several questions of particular importance for the study of generational language change.

Language does not change in a vacuum; it always takes place in a social context. The relationship between that context and linguistic change is complex, ranging from large-scale societal influences on usage to fine-grained shifts in face-to-face interaction. This chapter reviews a number of social factors governing language change, each illustrated with examples from both historical and present-day varieties of English in the British Isles. The examples will show that, despite enormous historical change over 1,500 years, the underlying social processes that shape language – such as contact, networks, prestige, identity – remain remarkably stable.

The concluding chapter summarizes the results and emphasizes the impact of the findings on future heritage language research and studies on bilingualism and language change in general: It stresses the necessity of including grammatical and pragmatic contact phenomena and discusses the importance of the interplay of extralinguistic factors and various types of linguistic developments: acquisition context, impact of schooling and literacy, contact with different registers and speakers. It explains individual processes in heritage language speakers, such as entrenchment processes, co-active activation of languages in the bilingual brain, as well as language awareness and metalinguistic knowledge. In addition, the role of normativity in diaspora communities, the challenge of relic varieties and the role of Standard German as language of schooling are discussed. Moreover, the chapter includes general observations on language maintenance in German heritage communities. It emphasizes the implications for future research: implications for the development of the German language in general, implications for the theory of language contact and implications for heritage language research.

In this concluding chapter we consider our results in the larger frameworks of multilingualism and language change and show that these areas cohere. We consult an ongoing program of study of the acquisition of multilingualism and report results documenting both structural constraint on the multilingual course of acquisition of relativization and the integration of principles of language-specific grammar. The results reported in this book reflect general properties of language acquisition and are not limited to the child or to monolingual contexts alone. We relate our results regarding the nature of language change in acquisition to that of language change in historical contexts and argue that a gradual integration of linguistic knowledge culminates in the creation of a linguistic system over time in both contexts. Finally, we consult a more refined notion of “recursion,” and in keeping with recent theoretical developments in the implementation of recursion in Universal Grammar, we reject a claim that the developmental results in this book reflect an absence of recursion in early child language. We describe the implications of our results on the acquisition of relativization for our understanding of the Language Faculty in the human species.