English Grammar Day 2025

A day of talks and discussion on aspects of English grammar

Are you sat down or sitting down while reading this? Have you got or do you have a preference for one form over the other? English has a number of ways of expressing the same concept, and with approximately 400 million mother-tongue speakers and an estimated 1.4 billion non-native speakers it has become a diverse, flexible language that continues to adapt, evolve – and provoke strong reactions. You only need to search for #grammar on Twitter to see what we mean!

Developments in the National Curriculum for England have placed grammar in schools at centre stage once more, and divided opinion among politicians, teachers, linguists and journalists, as well as the wider public, on how and whether it should be taught. How have teachers implemented changes to their teaching and learning programmes to adapt to the new syllabuses, assessment criteria and tests? What resources are available for students, teachers and the general public to learn more about English grammar, and how reliable are they? What is or should be the role of English grammar teaching in schools today and why is this so controversial? What do teachers, professionals, academics and the general public feel is the cultural and educational significance of knowledge about the language?

Join us for a day of talks and discussion, and feel free to ask our panel of experts to explore any aspect of English grammar from ain’t to innit.

Programme

*Coffee/tea is included but lunch is not provided: there are numerous food outlets at the British Library and within a short walking distance nearby.

Programme (PDF)

Programme (PDF)

How to find the venue

• The British Library is adjacent to St Pancras Railway Station on Euston Road in Camden, Central London.
• The nearest tube station is Kings Cross/St Pancras, and the Library is a short walk from Euston. Multiple buses alight or terminate nearby, by the Kings Cross forecourt.
• After entering the British Library forecourt, the Knowledge Centre is in the building to your right closest to St Pancras. Enter the building and go up the stairs.

Abstracts

Solving puzzles is a large part of doing linguistics. These can be very specific (for example, about details of particular languages), or much broader, (for example, about the processes involved in language acquisition). In this talk, I consider how puzzles can help to develop an interest in linguistics, encouraging curiosity about the complexities of grammar in particular languages, how languages vary, and aspects of verbal and nonverbal communication, often leading on to larger projects. I consider how puzzles can engage people from a variety of backgrounds, and their role in the UK Linguistics Olympiad. This national puzzle-solving competition attracts a large number of entrants from UK schools (over 5,000 for this year’s competition) and recruits a team for the international competition where young linguists from the UK have achieved spectacular results in recent years.

How did spoken English change across the 20th century? What different patterns of variation could be found around England? A major challenge when exploring these questions is the lack of audio archives with sufficient time depth. To help address this, Queen Mary University of London partnered with the British Library Sound Archive, on the REDD corpus project. My aim was to design and construct a new diachronic spoken English language resource, freely available for a wide range of researchers with an interest in language. To do this, I’ve worked with over a hundred recordings from the British Library’s oral history collections. These represent four locations in England — London, Nottinghamshire, Merseyside and Tyne & Wear — chosen for their relative socio-economic changes throughout the century. This talk will describe the project to date, and share some initial findings on grammatical variation, to illustrate the kind of research the REDD corpus will support.

Popularly viewed as eccentric and illogical, dismissed by linguists as fixed and therefore uninteresting, English spelling is the Cinderella of modern linguistics. However, recent scholarship has shown the English writing system to be a complex and fascinating subject. With a rich history of variation, English spelling has much to offer diachronic sociolinguists, while study of its history helps to explain many of today’s apparent irregularities and anomalies. The story of its standardisation, beginning with the introduction of the printing press, and the destandardisation currently being witnessed on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, offers new perspectives on how technology drives linguistic change, and reveals fascinating insights into the ways in which variable spelling is being repurposed today. This paper will touch on a number of these topics and show how electronic resources can be used to conduct studies into spelling variation in the past and present.

The way news media reports outbreaks of infectious disease, like COVID-19 or mpox, can have a profound influence on public perceptions of the disease. Media reporting on the global outbreak of the disease then known as ‘monkeypox’ in mid-2022 was, for example, suspected of sustaining, or even creating, a homophobic association between mpox infection and communities of men who have sex with men (MSM). This association with MSM and the perceived racism of the label ‘monkeypox’ were pivotal in driving the World Health Organisation’s renaming of ‘monkeypox’ to ‘mpox’ in English, in November 2022. This talk will explore the grammatical patterns around ‘monkeypox’ and ‘mpox’ during the 2022 and 2024 global outbreaks, revealing how the grammar of news media contributed to the development of homophobic stigma in 2022, and how renaming the disease to ‘mpox’ led to corresponding shift in patterns of grammar.

In this session, Zara and Holly explore the teaching of grammar as a moral imperative in the English classroom, and what it can look like in practice to teach grammar as a tool for equity, identity, and empowerment. This talk will examine how explicit grammatical instruction can help learners navigate power dynamics, express themselves with confidence, and understand the societal forces that shape language use. By demystifying grammar, educators can equip students with the skills to challenge linguistic hierarchies and take ownership of their voices.

People’s approaches to language are often described as either prescriptive (how language should be used) or descriptive (how language actually is used). The tension between these two apparently opposing camps, while seemingly light-hearted, often boils over into arguments around language decline, linguistic pedantry, and accusations of being too tolerant or not being tolerant enough. In this talk I’ll explore why we have these often very strong feelings towards the use of language (and grammar in particular), how seriously we should view the subject, and what we can do to find a more balanced outlook.

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Concessions