“I will be expecting a letter from you before this reaches you”

The Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR) is being developed as a diachronic corpus for tracing the emergence and development of features of IrE, including stylistic, regional, and social variation. CORIECOR currently has good coverage of the period 1740–1940. For historical comparison with relevant British input varieties and other colonial Englishes, data from CORIECOR may be used in conjunction with similar corpora of other Englishes. Such comparisons may address questions of the origins and spread of features of both the standard language and regional vernacular Englishes from Britain into Ireland, and from there to the Americas and the southern hemisphere (and even back to Britain), so that CORIECOR may contribute to the study of global English. In this study special attention is given to the replacement of first-person shall by will.