Authority in Language explores the perennially topical and controversial notion of correct and incorrect language.This seminal text is here reissued with a new preface and a new final chapter looking at the histories created over some centuries for English, considering the scholarly activity itself as ideologically loaded.

1. Prescription and Standardisation. 2.Standard English and the Complaint Tradition. 3. Spoken and Written Norms. 4.Grammar and Speech. 5. Linguistic Prescription and the Speech Community. 6. Linguistic Repertoires and Communicative Competence. 7. "Planned" and "Unplanned" Speech Events. 8. Some Practical Implications of Prescriptivism: Educational Issues and Language Assessment Procedures. 9.Two Nations Divided by the Same Language? The Standard Language Ideology in Britain and the United States.

James Milroy is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics, University of Sheffield, and Fellow of the Faculty of Linguistics and Philology, University of Oxford. He is author of Language Variation and Change.

Lesley Milroy is currently Professor Emerita, University of Michigan and a Fellow of the Faculty of Linguistics and Philology, University of Oxford. She is co-author of Sociolinguistics: Method and Interpretation.