This book examines linguistic variation and change. Section 1, "Sociohistorical Linguistics," includes: (1) "British Vernacular Dialects in the Formation of American English: The Case of East Anglian 'Do'"; (2) "'Short o' in East Anglia and New England"; and (3) "Sociohistorical Linguistics and Dialect Survival: A Note on Another Nova Scotian Enclave." Section 2, "Dialect Change," includes: (4) "Two Hundred Years of Dedialectalisation: The East Anglian Short Vowel System"; (5) "New-Dialect Formation and Dedialectalisation: Embryonic and Vestigial Variants"; and (6) "Norwich Revisited: Recent Linguistic Changes in an English Urban Dialect." Section 3, "Language Contact," includes: (7) "Dual-Source Pidgins and Reverse Creoloids: Northern Perspectives on Language Contact"; (8)"Language Contact and the Function of Linguistic Gender"; (9) "Third-Person Singular Zero: African American Vernacular English, East Anglian Dialects, and Spanish Persecution in the Low Countries"; and (10) "Language Contact and Inherent Variability: The Absence of Hypercorrection in East Anglian Present-Tense Verb Forms." Section 4, "Language Creation and Language Death," includes: (11) "Ausbau Sociolinguistics and the Perception of Language Status in Contemporary Europe;" (12) "Ausbau Sociolinguistics and Identity in Modern Greece"; and (13) "Language Maintenance and Language Shift: Preservation versus Extinction." Section 5, "Englishes," discusses: (14) "English as an Endangered Language"; (15) "Standard English: What It Isn't"; and (16) "The Sociolinguistics of Modern RP." (Contains approximately 230 references.) (SM)