David West Brown is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Marymount University, Virginia. His research examines writing as a social practice, its structures, and its history, covering topics ranging from Singaporean identity performance in online discussion boards, to representations of gender in sports reportage, to the stylistic differences between higher and lower scoring essays on educational assessments. He is author of In Other Words: Lessons on Grammar, Code-Switching, and Academic Writing (2009).

1. Introduction; 2. Literary dialect, race, and empire; 3. Corpus design; 4. An overview of data and the digital toolkit; 5. Case 1: African diasporic dialogue; 6. Case 2: Indian dialogue; 7. Case 3: Chinese dialogue; 8. The enduring power of mimicry and the politics of measurement.