Couched in socio-economic history, the first chapter provides an overview of the origins and development of the English language in Britain from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day. Both internal and external factors for language variation and change are considered when discussing the major orthographic, lexical, phonological and morphosyntactic developments. The English language and its development will therefore also be viewed in relation to other languages that were spoken, written or printed in the British Isles over the last 1,500 years. The creation and increasing availability of new data sources (access to hitherto un- or underexplored social layers, text types, regions) during the last decade (e.g. historical corpora like the Corpus of Early English Correspondence and databases like Eighteenth Century Collections Online) have led to many new studies on a range of different linguistic variables. Many of the new findings form the basis of the chapter, which aims to complement traditional histories of English.

More than half the world is bilingual or multilingual. So when growing up exposed to two (or more) languages at once, children have two systems to learn, and they must also learn when to speak each language. The choices here depend on who the addressee is, and on the setting. Exposure to the two languages may be uneven, and also vary over time, depending on who the child spends time with. Choice of language depends on common ground, on the topic, and on the language common to the child’s conversational partners. The early stages of acquisition are very similar, from perception of sounds and sound sequences to early babbling; from comprehension of words to attempts to produce them. Early vocabularies contain many doublets, freely accumulated as children learn more of each language. (This is consistent with contrast, but not with mutual exclusivity.) Language mixing tends to mirror adult usage and so varies across languages. Children attend not only to differences in the sound systems but also to structural differences of all kinds. Conversational skills develop in similar ways across languages, depending on exposure and practice, with language dominance fluctuating over one’s lifetime. Acquiring two dialects involves similar skills.

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.

Reflecting the cultural and regional diversity in China, signs may contain dialectal elements, especially those of the major dialects such as Cantonese, Min, and Shanghai/Wu. Dialects can differ in vocabulary and grammar, and particularly in sound. The differences in sound can sometimes be seen in phonetic transliterations. Dialectal words are those that do not have counterparts in the standard language. They are often written by borrowing standard characters just for the sound without regard for their original meaning (Rebus Principle); they can also be written in specially created dialectal characters. Dialects can also resemble classical Chinese, as they tend to retain features of older Chinese.

Chapter 8 examines the typologically rare three-way laryngeal contrast found in Korean. As also noted in Chapter 2, the manner contrasts in the Korean obstruent inventory have been the point of departure for many descriptive and theoretical contributions to the typology of laryngeal contrasts and related issues, such as feature theory. More recently, a diachronic change characterized by the redistribution of cue weights from the consonantal to the vocalic portion of the signal, mirroring the common historical process of tonogenesis, has sparked renewed interest in the Korean laryngeal contrasts. The opportunity to observe such a change in vivo, and to compare its progression across different dialects, provides an ideal testing ground for theories of sound change. This chapter provides a review of the literature on the phonetic and phonological characterizations of the stop-laryngeal contrast, as well as a survey of dialectal and diachronic variation in its phonetic realization. The chapter closes with an apparent-time study documenting dialectal variation and change in the use of three acoustic cues to the contrast (VOT, f0, and H1-H2) in three dialects of Korean.

This chapter elaborates on two case studies in structural variation to illustrate how the comparison of closely related grammatical systems fuels research questions on general theoretical issues. Our first case study regards subject clitics in central Romance dialects. Subject clitics have been studied extensively over recent decades, but they still raise several questions concerning the nature of null subject languages. Analogously, there is a huge literature on the selection of perfective auxiliaries – the second case study in our chapter – and, as in the case of subject clitics, lesser-known non-standard dialects display a kaleidoscope of auxiliation options whose rationalization poses fascinating analytical challenges and yields insights into basic issues of linguistic theory. The core question raised by our case studies concerns the modelling of linguistic diversity: do the above phenomena result from a finite set of discrete parameters or emerge from random language-specific options? We argue that the otherwise ‘hyperastronomical’ number of possible grammars is aptly constrained by syntactic factors, although inflexional morphology – which syntax cannot control entirely – may have a role in the realization of specific auxiliary or subject clitic forms in each dialect and for each person.

Pierre Escudé’s text begins with a reminder of the history of dialects across France, and particularly Occitan. He draws our attention back to the nineteenth century and France’s systemic repression of minority languages. Against this tide, he gradually became the ambassador of these so-called dialect languages and developed the field of intercomprehension, actively challenging the adage: “One country, one language”. On the contrary, he describes how linguistic diversity may reinforce national identity surprisingly, through its most recent immigrants: “If my little one speaks Occitan, he will really be French.”

Marisa Cavalli discovered at a very young age that her family's dialect put her in a marginal position, under the symbolic domination of the tourists who invaded her Italian village every year. This situation led her to fight for the rights of minorities from an inclusive pedagogical perspective. She promotes the maintenance of languages, shedding light on the social-political power relations and, in turn, on the pedagogical aspects.

In Belgium, Piet Van Avermaet and Sven Sierens offer a joint biography where "Dutch" and local dialects were their norm. Both of them grew up in a multilingual environment with migrant classmates. As researchers, they turned to a critical sociolinguistic perspective to propose functional multilingual learning to give multilingual students a chance to use their linguistic repertoires.

This chapter provides demographic information on the number of Hausa speakers and their geographical distribution. The geographic core of traditional ‘Hausaland’ is the area encompassing Zaria, Kano, and Katsina. Hausa is classified as a Chadic language belonging to the West-A branch. It constitutes a group by itself along with a Creolized offshoot called Gwandara. Hausa employs two writing systems dating from the beginning of the twentieth century, one using the Latin alphabet (called boko), the other using the Arabic alphabet (called ajami). Hausa linguistic scholarship over the past century and a half is outlined, including that of Hausa-speaking linguists in Nigeria and Niger in recent times. This work has been mostly descriptive. The foundation for the historical study of Hausa is a classic paper published a century ago by August Klingenheben.

An elephant seal rookery is a noisy place. The vocalizations of adults of both sexes and the pups are described as well as their functions. Elephant seals have good hearing in air and in water and are also unusually sensitive to sounds. This is especially the case because their deep diving puts them smack in the middle of the deep sound channel where low-frequency sounds travel most efficiently and can be heard thousands of miles away. This may make them prone to disturbance by sources such as ship traffic, air guns from petroleum exploration, and US Navy operations.

Getting to the field site to study wild animals sets stringent limits on what can be done. Access to the seals at Año Nuevo Island from my university office was fast, inexpensive, and convenient but was adventurous and dangerous in the early years. The initial attempts to study the seals are described as well as monitoring the entire population by study of the largest extant rookeries. Field research at Año Nuevo was made easier when the seals started breeding on the mainland adjacent to the island. This change facilitated the long-term study of these animals, which is critical for a deep understanding of their natural history. Identifying individuals with marks, tags, or brands, as well as other manipulations such as measuring, weighing, and taking blood samples, was vital and the key start in determining the questions we could address and answer. We developed a system to identify individuals throughout their lives.

As a result of New Zealand’s colonial history, the indigenous Maori language was excluded from schooling (formally) and from a number of other language domains (informally) for over 100 years. By the late 1970s, Maori was considered an endangered language, heading towards extinction. In response, various grassroots Maori communities initiated Maori-medium education, which required, amongst other linguistic challenges, the rapid development of a corpus of terms to enable the teaching of all subjects in the Maori language. Eventually, Maori-medium schooling became state funded, which was accompanied by a requirement by the state agency which controlled education to standardize the corpus of terms for schooling. In this paper, we explore the challenges associated with the (re)development of te reo Maori in the 1980s and 1990s as an educationally standardized indigenous language in relation to one key curriculum area: pangarau (mathematics). This includes analysing the key role of top-down agents and agencies in the standardization of the pangarau lexicon and register. The chapter also examines the influence of the agents’ linguistic ideologies on subsequent corpus development that still determines the codification of terms thirty years later.