Was/were variation with subject pronouns we, you, and they in recent British English

This chapter explores trends in the was/were variation in recent British English, focusing on the uses of was/were with the pronoun subjects we, you, and they in the spoken demographic part of the BNC and the Spoken BNC2014 corpus. Extracting all instances of was and were with the examined pronoun subjects in both corpora, we annotated the data for intra-linguistic (e.g., negation, pronoun) and sociolinguistic (age, gender, region, and social class) variables. While a striking decline in the normalized frequencies of was with the pronouns is undisputable, we dig deeper into intra- and extra-linguistic parameters to reveal the changing patterns with generalized linear mixed model tree analysis (GLMM tree; Fokkema et al. 2018). The results indicate that the sociolinguistic parameters override intra-linguistic ones; the major divide is found between speakers of different age groups, working-class speakers as opposed to other social classes, and the north and the south, while pronouns and inversion are the only intra-linguistic parameters selected in the final model.