Warren Maguire is a Senior Lecturer in English Language at the University of Edinburgh. Warren is Depute Director of the Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics. He is co-editor of the journal English Language and Linguistics, author of Language and Dialect Contact in Ireland (EUP, 2020) and co-editor of Dialect Writing and the North of England (EUP, 2020). Warren is a leading expert in variation and change in dialects of English and Scots in Britain and Ireland.

• Chapter 1: Introduction 1.1. About this book 1.2. What is Mid-Ulster English? 1.3. The phonological origins of Mid-Ulster English 1.4. Sources and methods 1.5. Structure of this book Chapter 2: Background 2.1. Preliminaries 2.2. English in Ulster before the 17th century 2.3. The Plantation of Ulster and its associated settlements 2.4. Demographic and linguistic transformation in the 17th and early 18th centuries2.5. Ulster in subsequent centuries 2.6. The decline of Irish in Ulster 2.7. The ethno-religious dimension 2.8. The linguistic history of Ulster Chapter 3: Consonants 3.1. The consonants of MUE 3.2. The dorsal and glottal fricatives 3.3. Velar Palatalisation 3.4. The Palato-alveolars and Palatal Velarisation 3.5. Pre-R Dentalisation 3.6. Intervocalic /t/-Voicing 3.7. Dental fricatives 3.8. Rhoticity, /r/ realisation and Post-/r/ Retraction 3.9. The distribution and realisation of /l/ 3.9.1. The lexical distribution of /l/ 3.9.2. The realisation of /l/ 3.10. Epenthesis 3.11. Consonant cluster simplification 3.11.1. Deletion of /t/ 3.11.2. Deletion of /d/ after /l/ 3.11.3. Deletion of /d/ after /n/ 3.11.4. Deletion of /b/ and /g/ 3.11.5. Summary 3.12. Other consonantal features 3.13. Summary Chapter 4: Vowels 4.1. The MUE vowels 4.2. Vowel quality in MUE 4.3. Vowel quantity in MUE 4.4. Lexical distribution 4.5. Summary Chapter 5: Discussion 5.1. Preliminaries 5.2. Contact with Irish 5.3. The English input to MUE 5.4. The Scots input to MUE Chapter 6: Conclusions Bibliography

The basic question Maguire attempts to answer is: why is Mid-Ulster English (MUE) like it is? This is an important question of great theoretical and historical linguistic importance and interest. The book tells a fascinating story, and expounds it very clearly and interestingly. It is a highly erudite piece of work – the historical and linguistic research on which it is based is exemplary – and the discussion is presented in a very agreeably judicious manner.