The paper focuses on three important themes in historical sociolinguistics: (1) the emergence of national language planning in the Netherlands around 1800, (2) the influence of historical prescriptivism on usage, and (3) genre as a crucial factor in explaining variation and change. The case study deals with relativisation, particularly the neuter relative pronoun in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Dutch. Analysing both internal and external factors, we show that the definiteness of the antecedent does not explain the variation, contrary to what is assumed in the research literature. Likewise, a strong effect of language norms on usage patterns cannot be established. The crucial factor turns out to be genre.

Due to their pictographic nature, emojis come with baked-in, grounded semantics. Although this makes emojis promising candidates for new forms of more accessible communication, it is still unknown to what degree humans agree on the inherent meaning of emojis when encountering them outside of concrete textual contexts. To bridge this gap, we collected a crowdsourced dataset (made publicly available) of one-word descriptions for 1,289 emojis presented to participants with no surrounding text. The emojis and their interpretations were then examined for ambiguity. We find that, with 30 annotations per emoji, 16 emojis (1.2%) are completely unambiguous, whereas 55 emojis (4.3%) are so ambiguous that the variation in their descriptions is as high as that in randomly chosen descriptions. Most emojis lie between these two extremes. Furthermore, investigating the ambiguity of different types of emojis, we find that emojis representing symbols from established, yet not cross-culturally familiar code books (e.g., zodiac signs, Chinese characters) are most ambiguous. We conclude by discussing design implications.

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Migration brings people into situations where languages other than their native tongues are dominant. Their mother tongues often therewith become minority varieties, for young people and later generations what are now called 'heritage languages'. This particular kind of multilingual setting appears to correlate with consistent (but variable) processes of change. In the last few years, heritage-language research has been developing rapidly across subdisciplines as varied as heritage language education (Trifonas & Aravossitas 2015; Kagan et al. 2017), language attrition (Köpke et al. 2007; Schmid 2011), and structural linguistics (see notably Benmamoun et al., 2010; 2013). While these research areas provide broadly detailed and comprehensive overviews on grammatical knowledge and grammatical change in the heritage-language context, less attention has to date been dedicated to sociolinguistic approaches and the role that specific external-linguistic factors play. In this special issue of the International Journal of Bilingualism, we foreground the role of external factors in heritage-language variation and change. More precisely, we are concerned with the questions of (a) what effect the prestige of related minority languages/language varieties has in the heritage-language context, and (b) how heritage-language speakers view and evaluate their own linguistic practices, notably also in relation to other languages/language varieties. Relatedly, the following considerations 1 also frame the collection of articles presented herein: 1 These considerations reflect current debates in the field, see e.g. Polinsky & Kagan (2007); Potowski (2013); Polinsky (forthcoming).

This article introduces the new Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics by situating it in the developing field of historical sociolinguistics. The landmark paper of Weinreich et al. (1968), which paid increased attention to extralinguistic factors in the explanation of language variation and change, served as an important basis for the gradual development and expansion of historical sociolinguistics as a separate (sub)field of inquiry, notably since the influential work of Romaine (1982). This article traces the development of the field of historical sociolinguistics and considers some of its basic principles and assumptions, including the uniformitarian principle and the so-called bad data problem. Also, an overview is provided of some of the directions recent research has taken, both in terms of the different types of data used, and in terms of important approaches, themes and topics that are relevant to many studies within the field. The article concludes with considerations of the necessarily multidisciplinary nature of historical sociolinguistics, and invites authors from various research traditions to submit original research articles to the journal, and thus help to further the development of the fascinating field of historical sociolinguistics.