For almost a thousand years language has been an important and contentious issue in Ireland but above all it reflects the great themes of Irish history: colonial, invasion, native resistance, religious and cultural difference.
Collected here for the first time are texts on language from the date of the first legislation against the Irish: the Statute of Kilkenny, 1366, to the constitution of the Free State in 1922. Crowley's introduction connects these texts to current debates, giving The Belfast Agreement as a textual example and illustrating that the language debates continue...

Covering a three hundred-year period from Locke to the present, this book demonstrates the processes by which particular forms of language (and those that use them) are validated as correct and proper and which forms are evaluated as wrong or impure.

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...