Mair Christian. Twentieth-Century English: History, Variation and Standardization

Cambridge University Press, 2006. — 244 p. — (Studies in English Language). — ISBN: 0521832195Standard English has evolved and developed in many ways over the past hundred years. From pronunciation to vocabulary to grammar, this concise survey clearly documents the recent history of Standard English. Drawing on large amounts of authentic corpus data, it shows how we can track ongoing changes to the language, and demonstrates each of the major developments that have taken place. As well as taking insights from a vast body of literature, Christian Mair presents the results of his own cutting-edge research, revealing some important changes which have not been previously documented. He concludes by exploring how social and cultural factors, such as the American influence on British English, have affected Standard English in recent times. Authoritative, informative and engaging, this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in language change in progress, particularly those working on English, and will be welcomed by students, researchers and language teachers alike.Setting the scene
Ongoing language change: problems of detection and verification
Lexical change in twentieth-century English
Grammatical changes in twentieth-century English
Pronunciation
Language change in context: changing communicative and discourse norms in twentieth-century EnglishBrief survey of the corpora used for the present study
The OED Baseline Corpora
Estimating text size in the newspaper archives and the World Wide Web
A quarterly update of the OED Online (New Edition)