The status of 'Standard English' has featured in linguistic, educational and cultural debates over decades. This second edition of Tony Crowley's wide-ranging historical analysis and lucid account of the complex and sometimes polarised arguments driving the debate brings us up to date, and ranges from the 1830s to Conservative education policies in the 1990s and on to the implications of the National Curriculum for English language teaching in schools. Students and researchers in literacy, the history of English language, cultural theory, and English language education will find this...

In Language in History, Tony Crowley provides the analytical tools for answering such questions. Using a radical re-reading of Saussure and Bahktin, he demonstrates, in four case studies, the ways in which language has been used to construct social and cultural identity in Britain and Ireland. For example, he examines the ways in which language was employed to construct a bourgeois public sphere in 18th Century England, and he reveals how language is still being used in contemporary Ireland to articulate national and political aspirations and why the Irish language died.
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Nowhere in Britain is more closely associated with a form of language than Liverpool. Yet the history of language in Liverpool has been obscured by misrepresentation and myth-making and narratives of Liverpool's linguistic past have scarcely done justice to the rich, complex and fascinating history which produced it. Scouse: A Social and Cultural History presents a ground-breaking and iconoclastic account which challenges many of the forms of received wisdom about language in Liverpool and presents an alternative version of the currently accepted history. Ranging from the mid eighteenth...