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Although dialectology in England received two major boosts at the end of the 19th century and the middle of the 20th century (Ellis 1889 and Orton & Barry 1956-8), discussion of dialect change since that time has avoided discussion of many areas, concentrated as it was in those Universities with a tradition of dialectology (Essex, Leeds, Sheffield, Newcastle). Though many areas have since been re-examined in England; notably Bristol dialect (Blaxter & Coates 2019), Newcastle dialect (Milroy 1994, Milroy et al. 1999) Sunderland dialect (Burbano-Elizondo 2007), and Manchester dialect (Baranowski & Turton 2015, Bermúdez-Otero et al. 2015) there remain many areas which were never fully explored at the time of the Survey of English Dialects (Birmingham as an urban area for example was completely bypassed by that survey), as well as many areas which remain little known and studied. This paper brings together what is known about the dialects of the Upper Southwest and suggests pointers for directions in future research there based on the data from Worcestershire and Herefordshire that we discuss.

This qualitative paper examines the identities of Saudi students who come to study for higher education qualification in the UK. It aims to shed light on how Saudi learners encounter a new culture and engage within the community and how this interaction affects their complex identities for the purpose of learning. The aim of this research is to obtain an understanding of Saudi learner's' sense of self and how culture affects them; thereby enabling the development of strategies to encourage the investment in the target culture through the process of learning the language. This study was conducted by using semi-structured interviews and questionnaires with female and male Saudi students. The results highlighted the importance of the target culture for language learning, as well as how the conflict between two cultures has resulted in a rejection of investment in language learning. Nonetheless, it is clear that many other variables affect an individual’s adaptability to the new culture; this aspect is not unique to Saudi learners.

This chapter examines literary and vernacular sources to consider how sensory experiences become encoded in dialect; looking at how words change meaning over time, how the dialect remains vital, and at the kinds of sensory experiences residents reported having. I explore the Aristotelian model of the senses, relating it to words which were present in my doctoral fieldwork and broaden the discussion of these words and their history. Using speech and writing by Black Country people, drawing on poetry, fiction and spoken data I critique the idea that the dialect is in any greater danger of becoming less vital than any other regional dialect of the UK. Using current linguistic research, I consider the future of the dialect, questioning what experiences speakers may wish to encode through language in a changing Black Country.

This chapter examines Black Country dialect literature. It looks at the small amount of dialect poetry published in the 19th century, most of which appeared in local newspapers, and compares it with earlier protest songs from the 18th century, most of which were collected and written down in the 1960s by the folksingers Michael and Jon Raven. It looks also at dialect songs circulated in broadsheet form at the annual wakes in the Black Country, some of which were written especially for the event, to examine what we can say about grammatical and phonological change both across time in the Black Country and within the Black Country itself. The chapter cautions against inferring too much from historical data which can only tell us that variants were known, rather than being evidence of their use in the speech community.

This article examines a corpus of private text messages collected in Birmingham and surrounding towns in 2015. We look specifically at pragmatic roles played by the vocatives we find in the corpus. Since text messages are sent to targeted recipients, vocatives are structurally redundant, and we review literature concerning vocatives in spoken and written data to first see what categories others have proposed for these functions. We then challenge some of these categorisations, identifying a new category of ‘focuser’ which we argue is akin to a summons in spoken language. We also examine the pragmatic value of vocatives in performing identity work for both sender and receiver. We finish by looking at gendered performance of identity as a case study in our corpus of how text producers construct themselves and others.