Copyeditors and proofreaders are some of the heaviest users of dictionaries, consulting them regularly in the course of their work, though little has been written on the influence of dictionaries on editors or of editors on dictionaries. Editors consult dictionaries on matters of spelling, capitalization, compounding, meaning, end-of-line hyphenation, and more. They may also disallow new forms or senses not found in a dictionary. Further, style manuals typically dictate not only which dictionary to use but how to use it, particularly on matters of spelling variants. Dictionaries thus become prescriptive tools in the hands of editors, despite lexicographers’ descriptive approach. There may also be something of a feedback loop between editors and lexicographers: because editors are gatekeepers of publishing, they have an outsized influence on what appears in print and thus what is recorded in dictionaries and therefore regarded as correct. Through dictionaries, copyeditors may therefore play an underappreciated and largely unexplored role in shaping standard English.

The Isles of Scilly are an archipelago twenty-eight miles off the south-west coast of England, with a population of c. 2,000 people. The current indigenous population is believed to have descended from 1571, when the islands were repopulated by a member of the aristocracy who leased the islands from the British Crown. The islands’ leasing continued until 1920, when all but one island reverted to the Duchy of Cornwall. Metalinguistic commentary from the sixteenth century onwards suggests that Scillonians are perceived as more cultured, better educated and better spoken than their mainland counterparts. By drawing on oral history data, this vignette will explore the accuracy of these perceptions. To do so, it examines the extent to which phonetic features of Scillonian English relate to traditional varieties of Cornish English, on the one hand, and standard English, on the other. In explaining the patterns of linguistic variation found on the islands, consideration is given to the presence (or not) of the Cornish language on the islands, dialect contact, the ‘feudal-like’ system of governance, the peculiarities of education practices, and the identity factors that affect how and why different groups of Scillonians use distinctive linguistic variants.

This chapter reviews the long-standing debate on ‘standard’ and ‘non-standard English’ in education, highlighting differences in approach not just between policymakers and professional linguists but also within the academic community. It introduces a language ideological framework that treats ‘standard’ and ‘non-standard’ English as social constructions rather than linguistic fact, and presents research evidence to debunk common myths about ‘non-standard’ English that circulate in education (for example, that ‘non-standard’ speech will impede progress towards fully-fledged literacy). The chapter ends with reflections on the role sociolinguists have played in educational debates, with suggestions for future work. Ultimately, the chapter makes the case that sociolinguists should adopt a critical, language ideological approach in order to expose and challenge the hierarchies and educational inequalities reproduced through standard language ideology.

The myth that schools must regulate writing starts as English shifts to schools (away from home instruction), and schools shift to English (away from classical languages). Its consequences include making English regulation common and desirable, and making language variation a threat. Diverse ways of writing persist, but they aren’ studied in school. Closer to the truth is that language diversity and language knowledge are human rights, but school writing focuses only on a narrow part of a continuum of common ways of writing.

Multilingualism played an important role in the development of Standard English, but previous generations of scholars downplayed the multilingual element in its history to the extent of ignoring late medieval institutional code-switching altogether. In the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, code-switched record-keeping was routine practice, from prestigious institutions to private individuals, although no history of English mentions it and very little of it is published. In this chapter, I firstly establish my claim that multilingualism led to Standard English by showing that Standard English is the descendant of coalesced supralocal Englishes that adopted both the written conventions of Anglo-Norman and much of its content-word stock when code-switching practices were reversed. What this means is that instead of a Medieval Latin grammatical matrix containing Anglo-Norman and English words, fifteenth century scribes switched to an English grammatical matrix containing code-switched Anglo-Norman and English words. Standard English was the eventual outcome of this reversal. I then track the “monolingual origin” story, still repeated in textbooks today – namely, the story that Standard English supposedly developed mainly from the dialect of the “East Midlands”, or “Central Midlands”, or “Chancery English”, or a mixture of the above, depending on the textbook. I show that the “monolingual origin” story goes back to the early 1870s and consider the reasons for why the monolingual-source explanation prevailed for so long.

This book explores how English sentences are constructed. In this introduction, we explain our approach. We describe the current status of English as a global language, why it holds this status, and why it might not be the best choice. We characterize Standard English as a large dialect cluster, mentioning the British and American subvarieties, along with other dialects, while deploring dialect prejudice. Differences between spoken & written English, formal & informal style, and the grammarian’s purposes of describing & advising are addressed.

In the book, we introduce and define many technical terms for grammatical concepts, and here we justify some of our terminological decisions, noting that even familiar terms like noun and verb will be clearly defined, though often in ways new to the reader. We provide examples to show why.

Though many think language is about words, we focus on sentences and the discoverable constraints about how English sentences can and can’t be structured, constraints that every English speaker recognizes. The most interesting thing about grammar is that these constraints aren’t stipulated rules. They can be discovered through investigation.

This chapter provides an historical perspective on the emergence of the African American middle class and the role of language in its development, as well as theories about the origins and development of African American English. Operational definitions are provided for several key concepts, including terms relating to socioeconomic status and language.

The Standard English third-person singular -s of present-tense verbs may not be of much consequence in international communication today, but its history reveals interesting parallels with processes that are typical of ELF. Drawing on research on historical corpora and databases, this chapter draws attention to the fact that Standard English is an accumulation of features that were adopted by speakers of English in different periods and from a variety of origins – just as in English used in international communication today, but by a smaller speaker population and from a more limited feature pool. The case study traces the spread of verbal -s back to Late Middle and Early Modern English, and reconstructs the processes that it underwent regionally and socially, and from speech to writing. The alternative expressions that could have been selected instead include the suffixless variant, commonly found in ELF today.

Building on Ramazani’s notion of the ‘translocal’, this chapter maps the multiple voices and ‘mobile positionings’ of an early generation of poets from the Caribbean, South Asia, and Africa who were performing and publishing in 1950s and 1960s Britain. Though some, such as Kamau Brathwaite (Barbados), Wole Soyinka (Nigeria), or Louise Bennett (Jamaica) did not settle in Britain permanently, their respective explorations with a variety of literary/vernacular/oral influences and forms had significant impact on the themes and writings of later generations of British-born diasporic poets. The main emphasis in this chapter lies on the richness of these individual contributions, which derived from diverse contexts as well as a range of different literary, cultural, and political influences. It also shows how their respective visions – whether Lord Kitchener’s calypsonian evocation of London, Louise Bennett’s vernacular colonisation of Britain in reverse, Wole Soyinka’s sardonic commentary on the ‘colour bar’, the hybrid influences of Dom Moraes’s quiet modernism, or E. A. Markham’s various personae – coincided and made a series of significant waves across the landscape of British poetry.

This chapter seeks to evaluate how student users of English are viewed beyond the English-as-school-subject curriculum, both in and out of classrooms. In particular, it exposes some of the tangible effects of ontologies of English in the education context, with important implications for education policy. Despite extensive scholarly work in Applied Linguistics offering positive reconceptualisations of language use in a variety of approaches, such as World Englishes, English as a Lingua Franca, and translanguaging (e.g. Creese and Blackledge, 2010; Hornberger and Link, 2012; García and Wei, 2014; García and Kleyn, 2016), the notion of a ‘target’ for the learning and teaching of ‘good English’ for most monolingual mainstream teachers in the United Kingdom remains based on the norms of Standard English, or N-English (to adopt the categorisation terminology proposed by Hall, this volume). For more discussion on the nature of linguistic norms, see Harder (this volume). In this chapter, I show how the presentation of Standard English as the ideal, on the assumption that it is “the language we have in common” (DES, 1988, p. 14), alienates not just multilingual learners of English but also many school children who would regard themselves as first-language English speakers.

This chapter aims to engage with wider discussions in this volume regarding ontologies of English and how language can be productively conceptualized by English teachers, learners/users, and other stakeholders. As indicated by the title, the work is intended to make a specific contribution towards uncovering complexity in ontologies of language that do not map cleanly onto dichotomies such as ‘monolithic versus plurilithic’ (Hall, 2013), ‘difference versus deficit’, or ‘standards-based versus intelligibility-based’. As also indicated, these ontological discussions are framed by a study carried out in a lingua franca context of pedagogy and usage, where (1) Japanese voluntary workers use English as a Lingua Franca to communicate with local interlocutors in diverse global locations and (2) an English language course is taken by these volunteers prior to their departure from Japan that is specifically designed to facilitate that communication. Further details on this context are provided in the following section before the focus returns to conceptions of English.

What is there in the world that we refer to as ‘the English language’? Is it more than one thing? If so, how many? And what is their ontological status? For those of us engaged in researching and teaching what we call English, these are fundamental questions, yet they are seldom posed. In addressing them explicitly here, I aim to provide academics, teachers, and policy makers with some conceptual tools and arguments for a deeper reflection on the nature of English, with a view to ultimately benefiting learners and users.

This book is about the ways in which English is conceptualised in and for the domains of language learning, teaching, and assessment. Examining and being explicit about what we, as applied linguists, think English is – our ontologies of English – and how these ontologies underpin our educational ideologies and professional practices, should be an essential component of research in the discipline. Yet the nature of the ‘EL’ in ELT does not feature anywhere nearly as much as the ‘T’, and how English is conceptualised in schools tends to be debated more by educationalists than applied linguists. Teachers, learners, policy makers, and other stakeholders do have strong beliefs about what counts as English, who it belongs to, and how it should be taught, learned, and tested. In research we conducted with colleagues at a university in China (Hall et al., 2017), English teachers told us about the ways they conceptualised English as a global language and, more narrowly, as the subject they taught to undergraduate students.