Historical Sociolinguistics: Language Change in Tudor and Stuart England is the seminal text in the field of historical sociolinguistics. Demonstrating the real-world application of sociolinguistic research methodologies, this book examines the social factors which promoted linguistic changes in English, laying the foundation for Modern Standard English. This revised edition of Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg’s ground-breaking work: discusses the grammatical developments that shaped English in the early modern period; presents the sociolinguistic factors affecting linguistic change in Tudor and Stuart English, including gender, social status, and regional variation; showcases the authors’ research into personal letters from the people who were the driving force behind these changes; and demonstrates how historical linguists can make use of social and demographic history to analyse linguistic variation over an extended period of time. With brand new chapters on language change and the individual, and on newly developed sociolinguistic research methods, Historical Sociolinguistics is essential reading for all students and researchers in this area.

Written by an international team of leading scholars, this groundbreaking reference work explores the nature of language change and diffusion, and paves the way for future research in this rapidly expanding interdisciplinary field. Features 35 newly-written essays from internationally acclaimed experts that reflect the growth and vitality of the burgeoning area of historical sociolinguistics Examines how sociolinguistic theoretical models, methods, findings, and expertise can be used to reconstruct a language's past in order to explain linguistic changes and developments Bridges the gap between the past and the present in linguistic studies Structured thematically into sections exploring: origins and theoretical assumptions; methods for the sociolinguistic study of the history of languages; linguistic and extra-linguistic variables; historical dialectology, language contact and diffusion; and attitudes to language

This volume presents a sociolinguistic perspective on the history of the English language. Based on original empirical research, it discusses the social factors that promoted linguistic changes in earlier English, and the people who were the leading force behind them. The authors focus on the major grammatical developments that shaped the language in Tudor and Stuart times, the period that laid the foundations for modern Standard English. Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg adopt an interdisciplinary approach, exploring the extent to which sociolinguistic models and methods can be applied to the history of English.

The book presents an analysis of selected domains of morphosyntactic variation in a 250,000 word collection of the Middle English Paston Letters (1421-1503) from a historical sociolinguistic point of view. In the three case studies, two nominal and one verbal variable are described and discussed in detail: the replacement of Old English “i>h-th-wh-take, make, give, have, do plus deverbal noun). While the study aims at a balanced integration of theories and methods from a number of different approaches in sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics, typology, and language change, its main focus is social network theory and the role of the linguistic individual in the formation and change of language structures. Questions of individual language use and of deliberate versus unmonitored changes in the (individual) system take center stage and are discussed in the light of social network analysis. Traditional empirical social network analysis is carefully revised. Despite its many merits in present-day sociolinguistics, it often needs to be supplemented by hermeneutic-biographical analyses of the individual speakers' lives when applied to historical data. With this background, common theories and models of language change, such as grammaticalization, paradigmatic pressure, typological alignment, and generational shifts, are illustrated and evaluated from the point of view of single speakers and social groups, and their particular embedding in the speech community through various network structures. The book is of interest to advanced students and researchers in English and general linguistics, Middle English, historical linguistics and language change, corpus linguistics, as well as sociolinguistics.

The volume collects original studies highlighting contemporary trends in historical sociolinguistics, as well as current research on the relationship between sociolinguistics and historical linguistics, social motivations of language variation and change, and corpus-based studies. Distinctive features of the book, which make it appealing to a wider audience, are the interdisciplinary nature of the chapters and the range of languages addressed.

What role has social status played in shaping the English language across the centuries? Have women also been the agents of language standardization in the past? Can apparent-time patterns be used to predict the course of long-term language change? These questions and many others will be addressed in this volume, which combines sociolinguistic methodology and social history to account for diachronic language change in Renaissance English. The approach has been made possible by the new machine-readable Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC) specifically compiled for this purpose. The 2.4-million-word corpus covers the period from 1420 to 1680 and contains over 700 writers. The volume introduces the premises of the study, discussing both modern sociolinguistics and English society in the late medieval and early modern periods. A detailed description is given of the Corpus of Early English Correspondence, its encoding, and the separate database which records the letter writers' social backgrounds. The pilot studies based on the CEEC suggest that social rank and gender should both be considered in diachronic language change, but that apparent-time patterns may not always be a reliable cue to what will happen in the long run. The volume also argues that historical sociolinguistics offers fascinating perspectives on the study of such new areas as pragmatization and changing politeness cultures across time. This extension of sociolinguistic methodology to the past is a breakthrough in the field of corpus linguistics. It will be of major interest not only to historical linguists but to modern sociolinguists and social historians.

This collection brings together Peter Trudgill's essays on the sociolinguistic aspects of historical linguistics for the first time.

How can historical sociolinguistic analyses of Medieval Greek aid the interpretation of Medieval Greek texts? This is the main question that the papers collected in this volume aim to address. The term historical sociolinguistics (HSL), a discipline that combines linguistic, social, historical, and philological sciences, suggests that a language cannot be studied without its social dimension. Similarly, the study of a language in its social dimension is nothing else than the study of the communication which takes place between members of a given speech community by the means of written texts. These are seen as sets of shared signs used by authors to communicate to their audiences. This volume is divided into two distinct parts. In the first, Cuomo's and Bentein's papers aim to offer an overview on the discipline and examples of applied HSL. Valente's, Bianconi's, and Perez-Martin's papers will then show how to study the context of production and reception of Byzantine texts. These are followed by Horrocks' study on some features of Atticized Medieval Greek. In the second part, the contributions by Telelis, Odorico, and Manolova focus on the context of reception of the texts by Georgios Pachymeres, Theodoros Pediasimos, and Nikephoros Gregoras respectively.

This interdisciplinary volume explores the unique role of the sociohistorical factors of isolation and contact in motivating change in the varieties of Spanish worldwide. Recognizing the inherent intersectionality of social and historical factors, the book’s eight chapters investigate phenomena ranging from forms of address and personal(ized) infinitives to clitics and sibilant systems, extending from Majorca to Mexico, from Panamanian Congo speech to Afro-Andean vernaculars. The volume is particularly recommended for scholars interested in historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, history, sociology, and anthropology in the Spanish-speaking world. Additionally, it will serve as an indispensable guide to students, both at the undergraduate and graduate level, investigating sociohistorical advances in Spanish.