Acknowledgements -- Part I: Introduction -- 1 Scribes and Language Change -- Part II: From spoken vernacular to written form -- 2 Biblical Register and a Counsel of Despair: two Late Cornish versions of Genesis 1 -- 3 Medieval Glossators as Agents of Language Change -- 4 How scribes wrote Ibero-Romance before written Romance was invented -- 5 Hittite scribal habits: Sumerograms and phonetic complements in Hittite cuneiform -- Part III: Standardisation versus regionalisation and de-standardisation -- 6 Words of kings and counsellors: register variation and language change in early English courtly correspondence -- 7 Quantifying gender change in Medieval English -- 8 Identity and intelligibility in Late Middle English scribal transmission: local dialect as an active choice in fifteenth-century texts -- 9 Lines of communication: Medieval Hebrew letters of the eleventh century -- 10 The historical development of early Arabic documentary formulae -- 11 Individualism in "Osco-Greek" orthography -- 12 How a Jewish scribe in early modern Poland attempted to alter a Hebrew linguistic register -- Part IV: Idiosyncracy, scribal standards and registers -- 13 Writing, reading, language change - a sociohistorical perspective on scribes, readers, and networks in medieval Britain -- 14 Challenges of multiglossia: scribes and the emergence of substandard Judaeo-Arabic registers -- 15 Variation in a Norwegian sixteenth-century scribal community -- 16 Language change induced by written codes: a case of Old Kanembu and Kanuri dialects -- Index.