English World-Wide - Online First

This paper presents an apparent-time analysis of current changes underway in Canadian English, based on the New Survey of Canadian English, a questionnaire comprising 85 linguistic variables answered by nearly 14,000 native speakers of English in every region of Canada in 2023–2024. Responses are divided into three age groups: 55 and older, 30–54 and under 30 years old. Questions and individual variants are ranked by how much inter-group difference they display. In general, we find that British and Canadian forms are declining relative to American forms, though this trend is not uniform across all variables. At the aggregate level, the 20 most active changes proceed evenly across regions and sexes, but individual changes show diverse regional and sex patterns. Change affects pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary more than spelling, and has decelerated somewhat in the youngest group of respondents, compared to the middle group.

This paper examines a little-known composite second-person plural pronoun that has received no systematic attention in the historical-linguistic literature to date: among(st)-you. Drawing on a broad range of textual sources, we first map the geographical distribution of this pronoun across the anglophone world. The feature is shown to cluster in the Caribbean and in the Chesapeake-Delmarva region in the U.S., with peripheral, semi-grammaticalized attestations also in East Anglia. We then offer a discourse-pragmatic account of its emergence, arguing that the among(st)-you pronoun likely developed in formal, formulaic (and possibly religious) registers of communal address. This contrasts sharply with other, more popular American English compounds such as you all and you uns which emerged within informal, colloquial discourse. To account for the feature’s geographic spread, we outline a salient transfer scenario involving Nonconformist expansion. Finally, to situate the phenomenon in a wider perspective, we provide pronominal comparanda from two little-known non-standard varieties of English and Dutch.

With empirical research on Standard Scottish English showing a bias towards phonology, the aim of the current study is to contribute to the morpho-syntactic documentation of this variety. Relying on Standard Southern British English for comparison, we concentrate on four eWAVE features on which the varieties have been noted to diverge: (i) youse as a second person plural pronoun, (ii) extended uses of the progressive, (iii) epistemic mustn’t, and (iv) quotative like. We use questionnaire data, where respondents indicate how many speakers in their home country use a particular feature. Ratings are elicited from 43 English and 61 Scottish participants (mostly university students) for two usage contexts, (informal) speech and (semi-formal) writing. Our findings corroborate expert ratings in eWAVE and show that the reported currency of all features is higher in Standard Scottish English, albeit to varying degrees. Our study draws attention to the complementary potential of questionnaire data in World Englishes research.

This study examines non-canonical uses of the Present Perfect (PrPf) with definite past time adverbials such as yesterday, last + NP, and ago in British English (BrE) and American English (AmE), drawing on data from the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). While quantitatively marginal, these uses reveal a distinctive pattern: in pragmatically marked contexts, especially in spontaneous speech and media, the PrPf encodes both past anchoring and current relevance, violating canonical constraints. I argue that these instances reflect a strategy of relevance compression, where the PrPf functions as a discourse shortcut, simultaneously maintaining topic continuity and signaling temporal relevance. Ambiguous contexts, where current relevance and past perfective readings co-exist, are prevalent in AmE, where a past perfective interpretation may be salient. Ultimately, the study confirms that genre and register shape the distribution and interpretation of tense forms, with innovation concentrated in spoken, spontaneous contexts.