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Elizabeth had received an excellent education, and her spelling is equal to that of any educated male writer of her time. In her letters, too, Sarah Fielding (1710–68) spells as well as or perhaps even better than her brother Henry (Tieken-Boon van Ostade, 1998), but then she was a learned woman, despite the fact that she had not enjoyed the kind of formal education normally reserved for men at the time.

All through the late Middle English and early Modern periods there were pronounced regional and social differences in the ability to write and to spell, and much higher percentages of full literacy have been noted for the London region as well as among the highest social ranks – though even here there are exceptions, as in the case of the Clift family, a poor, lower-working-class family from Cornwall, whose members quite exceptionally kept in touch with each other by letter. There is no question about the basic literacy of most of the individual family members, though their spelling is very poor. Even before the youngest member of the family, William (1775–1849), went to London to take up an apprenticeship there, his language comes very close to standard English, and whatever dialectal traits still remained in his language were lost soon after his arrival in the capital (Austin, 1994). In his letters, moreover, there are very few traces of the private spelling system in use at the time, which suggests that he was much influenced in his writing by a self-imposed reading programme.

By definition, all dialects of a given language are expected to bear a close structural resemblance to each other. Standard English, too, shares most of its grammar with non-standard varieties of English. It does, however, have a number of basic grammatical features that make it different from most regional and social varieties of English around the world. Trudgill (1999a: 125–6) gives a list of eight such features. Four of them concern the morphology and syntax of the verb phrase, three are pronominal, and one has to do with negation. Trudgill’s list will be presented below. The list is, of course, not exhaustive, but it provides a selection of the fixed, codified features of standard English grammar. Some of the processes of focussing and supralocalisation from which they resulted in the early Modern period will be discussed later on in this section. The section will finish with the present day, and look at some less strictly focalised areas of standard English grammar.

The modern standard English verb phrase is characterised by the unusual marking of the third-person singular in the present tense: he goes vs I go. Many other varieties either use zero (I go, you go, he go) or mark all persons (I goes, you goes, he goes). Standard English also has irregular forms of the verb to be both in the present (am, is, are) and the past (was, were). Many other varieties have only one form for the present (e.g. I be, you be) and one for the past (I were, you were). Similarly with other irregular verbs, standard English has different forms for the past and the perfect, which is accompanied with the auxiliary have (I saw vs I have seen). In many non-standard varieties, the tense distinction is often carried

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input of immigrants from different parts of the country in the late Middle and early Modern English periods. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, London gained a large number of inhabitants from the midlands. But in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the capital also attracted a sizeable number of immigrants from the northern counties. Sixty per cent of London apprentices, for instance, are estimated to have come from the north in the last decade of the fifteenth century, and nearly 50 per cent in the middle of the sixteenth century. Of all the apprentices migrating to London from England and Wales, the corresponding figures for the midlands were 10 and 20 per cent for these two periods, respectively (Wareing, 1980: 243). The effects of regional mobility and dialect contact can be seen in the grammatical features that were supralocalised throughout the country in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Despite such centres of focussing as the chancery and the printing press, it is evident that a number of those grammatical features which had begun to gain ground in London in the fifteenth century or earlier did not originate in the south. Present-day standard English has forms such as the plural are of the verb be and the third-person-singular -(e)s in the present indicative that go back to northern dialects. The forms current in chancery manuscripts and books printed in London in the fifteenth century were the traditional southern plural form be and third-person -(e)th. However, even these two features travelled different paths: the supralocalisation of are looks like a case of regular dialect diffusion that progressed over the centuries from north to south – a process suggested by the Middle English data charted in A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (LALME; McIntosh et al., 1986). The Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC) indicates that are plurals were more frequent in East Anglia, for instance, than in London for the better part of the sixteenth century, but that they were generalised in the capital, too, in the latter half of the century (Nevalainen, 2000: 348). As is commonly the case with language change in progress, both the incoming and recessive forms may be used by one and the same person in the same context, as is shown by John Johnson, a London merchant, writing to his wife Sabine Johnson in 1545 (the variant forms are marked in boldface):

All your menservauntes have bene of counsaill with hym, for they be of no les opynion, declaring that your breid is not good ynoghe for dogges, and drincke so evill that they cannot drinck it, but ar fayn when they go into the towne to drincke to their dynnars. (John Johnson; CEEC, JOHNSON, 250)

By contrast, the third-person suffix -(e)s looks more like a case of ‘dialecthopping’. In the LALME sources, which cover the period up to 1450, it had not quite reached the central midlands. In the latter half of the fifteenth century the suffix, however, shows up in personal letters in London – well before it appears in East Anglia. It is noteworthy that the early users of -(e)s in London are mostly merchants, mobile people with many weak ties within the community and outside it. Moreover, when -(e)s began to diffuse throughout the country, as the CEEC data suggest, in the latter half of the sixteenth century, the process was headed by

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relatively infrequent in the correspondence data, suggesting that it was not a viable alternative for the section of the language community that could write at the time (around 20 per cent of the entire population c.1550 and around 30 per cent c.1650, but with a large amount of regional variation throughout the period; Cressy, 1980). However, some writers could display a three-way contrast in the third-person singular in certain areas of the country. In 1626 Lady Katherine Paston used all three, -(e)s, -(e)th and zero, in the letter to her son cited below. She was a native of East Anglia, where the zero form has been preserved in the local dialect to the present day. Katherine Paston also uses the traditional second- person-singular pronoun thou when addressing her fourteen-year-old son. You had, however, replaced thou in most contexts even within the immediate family as early as the sixteenth century, as is suggested by John Johnson’s letter to his wife cited above. Again we find that neither the regional use of thou nor its prominence in the language of the Authorised Version of the Bible served as models for the evolving supralocal usages.

. . . thy father remembers his loue to the and take thy wrightinge to him very kindly: thy brother remember his louingest loue to the . . . I had thought to haue written to mr Roberts this time. but this sudene Iornye of this mesinger affordethe me not so much time (Lady Katherine Paston; CEEC,

PASTONK, 90).

While both are and -(e)s spread from north to south, research on the letter corpus suggests that most grammatical features that made their way to the supralocal Gemeinsprache during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries diffused from the capital region to the rest of the country. As noted above, London led the process in the last phase of the diffusion of -(e)s in the latter half of the sixteenth century. In a survey of four localities, viz. north, East Anglia, London (the City) and the court, this also appears to have been the case with the personal pronoun form you replacing ye in the subject function and the replacement of multiple negation (not + nobody, nothing, never) with single negation followed by nonassertive indefinites (not + anybody, anything, ever; Nevalainen, 2000: 353–6). The diffusion of you proved to be extremely rapid: it first gained momentum in London in the first decades of the sixteenth century and was completed by the end of the century in all four localities. Multiple negation was also disappearing rapidly in the first half of the sixteenth century but took a much longer time than you, and the process was not fully completed even by the first half of the eighteenth century (Tieken-Boon van Ostade, 1982: 285, note).

These results do not, however, mean that simple generalisations could be made about London English in these two cases either. The use of you as subject diffused in a similar fashion in both London ‘proper’ and the royal court, and found its way to most regional varieties in England (ye is attested only in parts of Northumberland in the Survey of English Dialects; Orton et al., 1998). By contrast, a significant difference emerged in the disappearance of multiple negation between the two London localities, i.e. basically between the City and Westminster. It was

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writing than of speech, while the opposite is the case with that and the zero relativiser. Similarly, forms in -body are preferred in speech to those in -one, and be going to and will to shall. The zero relativiser, -body pronouns and be going to all go back to earlier oral and speech-like registers and have retained these connotations up to the present day. But regional variation also appears in the use of these forms. In American English will is regularly used as a future auxiliary with I and we (Quirk et al., 1985: 227–8). As noted in Section 5.2.7, it has become acceptable in most kinds of British English, too, but shall used to be the prescribed form until the last quarter of the twentieth century. Corpus studies also indicate that be going to is more frequent in American than in British English in both fiction and conversation; American English similarly prefers pronouns in -body to those in -one, and that to which in restrictive relative clauses even in written contexts (Biber et al., 1999: 353, 487–8, 616). In sum, in these cases the more colloquial forms are more common in American than in British English.

We also find that there are forms and structures that are acceptable in speech but not allowed in most kinds of writing. They include the use of the interrogative subject pronoun who as an object form (who did you talk to? vs whom did you talk to?). This use of who as an object form has spread throughout the Englishspeaking world and is no longer confined to casual conversation (Biber et al., 1999: 214–15). Probably due to the fact that it has had a bad press with prescriptivists, it is one of those casual spoken-language features that was never generalised in writing. Although it is commonly attested in early Modern English, for instance, in Shakespeare (O Lord sir, who do you meane? in 1 Henry IV, II.iv), it was probably too slow in spreading high and far enough before codification set in (Schneider, 1992). But there are signs suggesting that the status of who may be slowly changing. It is accepted as ‘legitimate modern practice’ in influential works like The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage (Burchfield, 1996: 848), which is critically concerned only with those cases in which the objective form whom is ungrammatically used for the subjective who (. . . far more hostile to Diana whom she believes betrayed the Prince of Wales; Independent Mag., 1993).

Although the object who may be more acceptable to normative grammarians and educated speakers now than it was in the past, there are a number of grammatical features in conversational language along the standard vs non-standard line that continue to divide speaker reactions. Spoken norms are, however, not only less focussed than written standard norms, but they have also become an object of extensive linguistic research much more recently. One thing that appears from the descriptive grammars of present-day usage based on electronic corpora is that many non-standard spoken-language features, too, have supralocalised worldwide. Some of the ways in which the grammar of written standard English may differ from casual conversation will be discussed below. The illustrations are all drawn from the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (LGSWE; Biber et al., 1999). The differences are both morphological and syntactic.

A set of features specific to casual conversation can be found in pronominal forms and verbal inflections. They coincide in subject–verb concord. In order