Preface: Language Change and the New Millennium

All linguists, at some time in their studies, run headlong into fundamental issues associated with language change, and I could not celebrate the ESJ 12th anniversary without investigating the English Language of the New Millennium. Change in languages over time seems to be an inevitable constant. All languages have undergone and, if not dead, are undergoing change. As Ferdinand de Saussure put it more than a century ago, “the linguistic river never stops flowing” (Course in General Linguistics, 1916:110). The English language has been no exception and continues to be widely discussed from different areas or branches of linguistics, such as generative, historical, variationist or corpus linguistics. There is, however, much that still needs to be investigated.