The present volume brings together leading scholars studying language change from a variety of sociolinguistic perspectives, complementing and enriching the existing literature by providing readers with a kaleidoscopic perspective of aspects of change in English from around 1700 until the present day. The volume presents a collection of in-depth studies on a broad spectrum of phonetic, lexical, grammatical and discourse variation, drawing on historical corpora, dictionaries, metalinguistic commentary, ego-documents, spoken language and survey data.
Apart from advancing our knowledge of processes of language change in varieties of English, including British English, Irish English, Australian English, South African English, American English and Canadian English, the individual chapters contribute to the theoretical debates on variation and change in Late Modern as well as Present-day English.

Jie Hu,Zhejiang University, in Language in Society 49:2 (2020):
[T]his volume enlightens readers that neither descriptivism nor prescriptivism should be underestimated. The former is an intriguing language garden that abounds with plentiful flowers of dialects, and the latter represents humans’ endeavor to keep the linguistic world of chaos in order. These two notions are intertwined, and somewhere in the middle, the modern linguistic map has formed during the long course of history.