All of the contributions in this special issue respond to a somewhat paradoxical situation: lexis (or vocabulary) is probably the area of linguistics that is most accessible and most salient for a non-specialist audience, but at the same time it presents some uniquely difficult challenges for systematic scholarly linguistic analysis. This is especially the case for approaches that focus on statistics or quantification of data, such as are typical of modern work in sociolinguistics. For this reason, it often seems that lexis is the Cinderella that is excluded from the ball, a topic that modern sociolinguists tend to steer clear of because of the methodological difficulties. This special issue will try to investigate the background to this problem, and suggest some possible solutions.

Taking as our starting-point the results of an investigation conducted on data collected in the 1950s for the Survey of English Dialects (SED) (Glauser, 1985), in this paper we look at data collected between forty and fifty years after the SED to examine variation in the semantic fields BOYS/GIRLS; SONS/DAUGHTERS. Glauser's SED data consisted of single-word responses mainly from older male informants to questions such as: ‘Children may be of either sex: they're either….boys, or …. girls.’1 (Orton, 1962: 89), but we have examined data from two more recent sources – the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (DECTE) and Burbano-Elizondo's (2008) study of linguistic variation in Sunderland – in order to ascertain which words occur in these semantic fields. Whilst Glauser's observation that lad is elicited more frequently than lass is borne out, we find that, in the sense of ‘sexual partner’, where these words do not appear in the SED data, lass is used more frequently than lad in the more recent data from Tyneside and Sunderland. We also find that, whilst there is no clear correlation between use of the words lad and lass and the social class of speakers, males use both these words more than females.

This paper presents preliminary findings from the lexicographic strand of a British Library (BL) project to document variation in British English. Voices of the UK (VoUK) is the first attempt to present significant amounts of raw data emerging from a nationwide survey of spoken English in the UK since the 1950s. The data derive from the BBC Voices Recordings: a set of group conversations about language, accent and dialect recorded in locations across the UK by BBC Local Radio in 2004 and 2005. The recordings capture speakers from all walks of life exploring their responses to an identical set of prompt words. The result is a large, rich but targeted corpus of lexical variation.

The study of meaning and changes in meaning has enjoyed varying levels of popularity within linguistics. There have been periods during which the exploration of meaning was of prime importance. For instance, in the late 19th century scholars considered the exploration of the etymology of words to be crucial in their quest to find the ‘true’ meaning of lexemes (Geeraerts, 2010; Malkiel, 1993). There have also been periods where semantic analysis was considered redundant to linguistic investigation (Hockett, 1954: 152). In the past 20–30 years semantics has enjoyed a period of revival. This has been mainly led by the advances in cognitive linguistics (and to some extent, historical linguistics) as well by the innovations associated with the development of electronic corpora and computational methods for extracting and tracing changes in the behaviour of the lexicon (cf. Geeraerts, 2010: 168ff, 261ff). However, there are still areas of linguistics which hardly involve lexis in their theoretical and epistemological considerations. One such area is sociolinguistics.

In a widely cited paper, Schneider (2003) offers a model of the developmental phases undergone by new Englishes. One important feature of this model is reference to exonormative and endonormative standards, and Schneider suggests (2003: 264) that Singapore currently finds itself at stage four on this developmental journey – a stage at which local norms may be beginning to gain acceptance and literary creativity in English by local writers is abundant. In this paper I would like to provide a few examples of distinctively Singaporean use of English and raise the question of when (if ever) Singapore will move to an endonormative, Singaporean English, as the standard variety taught in schools.

The longstanding vernacular literary pedigree of the county of Lancashire has made it home to a large body of regional writings comparable only to those of the neighbouring Yorkshire. Both past and present scholarship have acknowledged this fact, arguing that the literary tradition of the dialect may be taken as a source to get some insight into the linguistic history of the county. Research so far concentrated on the linguistic mining of Lancashire literary texts has shown that they provide valuable guidance to approach the language of bygone times, especially in terms of phonology and morphology (see Brunner, 1920; Haworth, 1920, 1927; Whitehall, 1929; Shorrocks, 1988, 1992, 1999; Wagner, 1999; Ruano-García, 2007, 2010b). To my knowledge, there is however little research that has attempted to evaluate the lexicographic potential of these documents, and their contribution to Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary (henceforth EDD), so as to further our understanding of lexical variation in regional Englishes of the Late Modern English period (LModE).