"Offering researchers in historical sociolinguistics unique insights, and utilizing corpus methodologies, this book delves into Benjamin Franklin's English, illustrating the variable nature of 18th-century American English and his stylistic manipulation of the potentiality of English. Benjamin Franklin is one of the Founding Fathers of the United States and while his achievements have been well established in the history of America, his linguistic activities have been explored only to a lesser extent. Iyieri examines a corpus of letters and autobiographical writings left by Benjamin Franklin which provide linguists with opportunities to study his language. The book has been structured using the "form-to-function" framework, the first part focuses on different lexical items one by one, and can be read in the order readers want, whilst in the second part, Iyieri stitches the arguments together, discussing various grammatical features across different lexical items. This book is a fantastic reference for students and scholars of historical linguistics, world Englishes, and varieties of Englishes"--