We go back in history and discuss the historical dimension of sociolinguistics. We focus on life in the British Isles in the Early Modern period and discover that most of the British population spoke regional and social varieties. As a result of profound changes in society, the history of English is manifold and more diverse than is suggested by a Standard-oriented lens only. We look into language standardization in Late Modern England (1600–1900) and discuss the validity of data, as special care needs to be taken when assessing written data from times when education and schooling were a rare privilege. We present English language ideologies in general, particularly relating to standardization and the persistence of dialect variation. We end with a presentation of groundbreaking studies in English historical sociolinguistics to show how one can gain insights into variation and change despite methodological challenges.

Observing that a linguistically principled characterisation of standard English remains elusive, this chapter explores the indeterminacy surrounding standard English, as well as reasons why a broad consensus on what it comprises is challenging to achieve. This indeterminacy is particularly acute with regard to the concept of standard spoken English, where uncertainty has been exacerbated by the failure of the prescriptive grammatical enterprise to acknowledge systematic structural differences between written and spoken English as well as formal and informal speech. Although linguistic accounts stress that standard English is best conceptualised as an abstraction to which actual usage conforms to a greater or less extent, there remains a gulf between academic and public understanding of the standard language. This disconnect facilitates the perpetuation of obfuscatory ideologies which inform public discourse about standard English. These include tenacious beliefs in the infallibility of its norms and its putative superiority to non-standard varieties, which are routinely dismissed as ‘incorrect,’ ‘vulgar’ and ‘uneducated’, when not altogether discounted as English. Empirically accountable analyses of naturally occurring discourse furnish an indispensable corrective to highly idealised prescriptive accounts of usage, which often fail to capture many of the implicit regularities of actual speech.