Historical Sociolinguistics

Instructors: Carolina P. Amador-Moreno, Josh Brown

This course will offer a general introduction to the relatively new field of Historical Sociolinguistics, defined by the North American Research Network in Historical Sociolinguistics (NARNiHS) as ‘the application/development of sociolinguistic theories, models, and methods for the study of historical language variation and change over time, or more broadly, the study of the interaction of language and society in historical periods and from historical perspectives’ (https://narnihs.org/?page_id=226). Historical Sociolinguistics has grown into a productive area of investigation within the field of general linguistics, but how does one study historical states of language or society, and the historical interaction of language and society? Since Elspaß introduced the notion (e.g., 2005), a strong methodological orientation in historical sociolinguistics has been on “language history from below” and “ego documents”. In this course we will deal with ego-documents such as letters and diaries, and we will learn to identify and exploit some linguistic datasets available to Historical Sociolinguistics. By looking at corpora such as the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC), we will reflect on the advantages of quantitative analyses historically, discuss new types of data visualization, and consider the balance (and synergies) between macro- and micro- approaches. We will also discover how historical language data can be used qualitatively to understand language ideologies and language use patterns, which may be complicated by modern conceptualizations of multilingualism. And lastly, we will explore the ways that historical language data can be used in interdisciplinary contexts, like forensic linguistics and material culture. REFERENCES Elspaß, Stephan. 2005. Sprachgeschichte von unten: Untersuchungen zum geschriebenen Alltagsdeutsch im 19. Jahrhundert. Tübingen: Niemeyer. NARNiHS, https://narnihs.org/?page_id=226. Accessed 01/07/2024.

Keywords: Sociolinguistics, Variation, Corpus Linguistics, Language Change

Instructors

Carolina P. Amador-Moreno

University of Extremadura

I am the main convenor of the North American Research Network in Historical Sociolinguistics (NARNiHS). I became Full Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Bergen, Norway in 2020 and am currently based at the University of Extremadura, Spain. I have held different teaching positions at the Universities of Limerick (Ireland), University College Dublin (Ireland), Extremadura (Spain), and Bergen (Norway). My research interests centre on the English spoken in Ireland with a focus on historical sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics. My work has also dealt with stylistics, discourse analysis and pragmatics. My publications include articles and chapters dealing with these topics.

Josh Brown

University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire

Josh Brown is the Skwierczynski University Fellow of Languages and professor of German and linguistics at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. He has published and presented widely on heritage languages and historical multilingualism. His research interests include language shift, material culture, and forensic linguistics. His professional website is: https://www.joshuarbrown.com/