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This chapter uses a new resource, the Middle English Grammar Corpus (MEG-C), a corpus of 14th and 15th Century English texts, to answer an old question: it is possible to find traces of a systematic distinction between the reflexes of Old English e/ē and eo/ēo in Middle English? An investigation into the spelling variation found in 27 lexical items that contain a vowel representing Old English eo/ēo as well as the equivalent Old Norse element jó throws up a wide range of spellings, the vast majority of which show /. Spellings that might suggest a rounded pronunciation are also fairly robustly present, however, particularly , with the Southwest Midlands as its core area. The second part of the investigation retrieves all words that were spelled with the digraph . The vast majority of these turn out to be reflexes of Old English eo/ēo, and almost all of them are localized to the Southwest Midlands. They occur either as reflexes of OE y/ȳ, or in unstressed syllables, or in words where follows – three groups for which a rounded pronunciation would be plausible.

This chapter discusses the problem of relating individual scribal usages to community-level linguistic variation in languages for which the surviving records consist of handwritten texts (‘manuscript languages’). In the absence of detailed contextual information, both individual texts and corpora pose problems of representativeness. A solution is to study the surviving texts strictly on their own terms, rather than attempting to reconstruct the overall variation within the language area. The study of smaller text communities, defined on the basis of groups of texts sharing specific parameters, may provide a useful approach. The discussion is based on work on late Middle English materials, but deals with problems common to many manuscript languages.

The article presents a study of the process of gender change in the thirteenth-century Southwest Midlands, based on twenty texts localized in this area. The assumption is that a study limited to a single text community would give a better view of the patterns of change than studies spanning a wide chronological and/or geographical range. It is suggested that the system of pronominal gender assignment went through a process of semantically based reorganization during this period, and that the resulting patterns are most usefully described using the model of a hierarchy or continuum of individuation (Dahl 1999a: 99; Siemund 2008: 140). The gender assignment of individual nouns is found to be remarkably regular, and the material seems to give no reason to assume a period of confusion between the Old and postmedieval English systems of gender assignment.

This article assesses the evidence provided by linguistic surveys and atlases in the history of the English language. It deals with two kinds of surveys: those which involved living informants when they were carried out but now provide historical evidence, and those historical surveys for which the informants are written texts. It focuses on two projects that represent the two kinds of survey: the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (LAMSAS, Georgia) which covers the mid-twentieth century, and the Middle English Grammar Project (Stavanger and Glasgow), which covers the period 1150–1500. In modern survey research, “representativeness” comes from the application of randomized survey methods in sampling, so that the sample is not biased towards any identifiable segment of the population.