This volume provides a diachronic and synchronic overview of linguistic variability and change in involved, speech-related and spoken texts in English. While previous works on the topic have focused on more limited time periods, this book covers data from the 16th century up to the present day. The studies offer new insights into historical and present-day corpus pragmatics by identifying and exploring features of orality in a variety of registers. For readers who are new to the field, the range of approaches will provide a helpful overview; for readers who are already familiar with the field, the volume will shed light on the complexity of factors such as register, sociolinguistic variability and language attitude, thus making it a useful resource and stepping stone for further exploration. The volume celebrates the groundbreaking contributions of Professor Merja Kytö in making accessible speech-related corpus material and leading the way in its exploration.

The preservation of South Africa’s indigenous languages – the extinct Bushman and Khoikhoi languages in particular – is a pressing concern. Voices Past and Present serves as a comprehensive, scholarly and practical source for documenting and preserving some of them. The subcontinent of Africa has been inhabited by Bushman, Khoikhoi and Bantu-speaking peoples for thousands of years, and, for the past few centuries, also by European-speaking peoples. Contact between these peoples brought about changes in the different languages. As a result, modern languages are no longer identical to the original ones, many of which, especially in the case of the Bushman and Khoikhoi languages, have become extinct. Words used in ancient times and recorded long ago often bear no resemblance to their modern counterparts. In this book, Peter E. Raper provides a detailed investigation of the earliest recordings of words available. Words from Old Cape dialects are compared for correspondences in sound and meaning to words from 29 Bushman languages and dialects, as well as to words from Nama, Koranna, Griqua, !Xuhn, !Xoon, Khwe and N/uu. Voices Past and Present provides an extensive corpus of words that can be further utilised for the purpose of shedding light on the specific languages from which the recorded words (and names) were derived, on historical distribution of the various groups, on the classification of the different languages and peoples, for determining relationships or otherwise between the different languages, potentially identifying components of place-names and ethnonyms from ancient and extinct languages, and elucidating other matters that have long vexed scholars who have complained about a lack of recorded data.

This collection of primary sources includes both classic and lesser-known documents describing the rich mosaic of American life from the pre-contact era to the present day. The sources, both public and private documents ranging from letters, diary excerpts, stories, novels, to speeches, court cases, and government reports tell the story of American history in the words of those who lived it."

This book focuses on retelling many of the important episodes in the global past (c.1500–present) from African points of view. It discusses the events and trends of global significance: the Atlantic slave system, the industrial revolution, World Wars I and II, and decolonization.

Voices and Books in the English Renaissance offers a new history of reading that focuses on the oral reader and the voice- or performance-aware silent reader, rather than the historical reader, who is invariably male, silent, and alone. It recovers the vocality of education for boys and girls in Renaissance England, and the importance of training in pronuntiatio (delivery) for oral-aural literary culture. It offers the first attempt to recover the voice—and tones of voice especially—from textual sources. It explores what happens when we bring voice to text, how vocal tone realizes or changes textual meaning, and how the literary writers of the past tried to represent their own and others' voices, as well as manage and exploit their readers' voices. The volume offers fresh readings of key Tudor authors who anticipated oral readers including Anne Askew, William Baldwin, and Thomas Nashe. It rethinks what a printed book can be by searching the printed page for vocal cues and exploring the neglected role of the voice in the printing process. Renaissance printed books have often been misheard and a preoccupation with their materiality has led to a focus on them as objects. However, Renaissance printed books are alive with possible voices, but we will not understand this while we focus on the silent reader.