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Drawing on the resources created by the Institute of Historical Dialectology at the University of Edinburgh (now the Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics), such as eLALME (the electronic version A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English), LAEME (A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English) and LAOS (A Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots), this volume illustrates how traditional methods of historical dialectology can benefit from new methods of corpus data-collection to test out theoretical and empirical claims. In showcasing the results that these digital text resources can yield, the book highlights novel methods for presenting, mapping and analysing the quantitative data of historical dialects, and sets the research agenda for future work in this field. Bringing together a range of distinguished researchers, the book sets out the key corpus-building strategies for working with regional manuscript data at different levels of linguistic analysis including syntax, morphology, phonetics and phonology. The chapters also show the ways in which the geographical spread of phonological, morphological and lexical features of a language can be used to improve our assessment of the geographical provenance of historical texts.

Taking a broad sociolinguistic perspective, the book explores a comprehensive set of tensions which emerged from the dislocated and deterritorialised position of the Russian language in the contemporary world. It examines the contexts within which Russian speakers’ identities are being shaped in various locations across the globe, the shifting attitudes towards the Russian language outside the metropolis, the emerging new varieties of Russian, and the use of the Russian language as soft power in the transnational russophone media. In order to discuss problems posed by the current stage of globalisation of Russian, a number of non-metropolitan spaces are sampled: chapters take the reader to locations which include both the post-Soviet states, namely Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia and Belarus, and the countries of the traditional; West’ - Italy, the US, and Israel.

This book focuses on the closely allied yet differing linguistic varieties of Birmingham and its immediate neighbour to the west, the industrial heartland of the Black Country. Both of these areas rose to economic prominence and success during the Industrial Revolution, and both have suffered economically and socially as a result of post-war industrial decline. The industrial heritage of both areas has meant that tight-knit and socially homogeneous individual areas in each region have demonstrated in many respects little linguistic change over time, and have continued to exhibit linguistic features, especially morphological constructions, peculiar to, or now restricted to, these areas. At the same time, immigration from other areas of the British Isles over time, from Commonwealth countries and later from EU member states, together with increased social mobility, have meant that newly developing structures and more widespread UK linguistic phenomena have spread into these varieties. The book provides a clear description of the structure of the linguistic varieties spoken in the two areas.