Historical sociolinguistics: the field and its future

Auer, Anita; Peersman, Catharina; Pickl, Simon; Rutten, Gijsbert; Vosters, Rik

doi:10.1515/jhsl-2015-0001

Cited by 71 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…Of course, even such precautions are no guarantee that the materials we analyzed are representative of actual speech, especially of earliest times. Therein lies the intractable "bad data" problem (Auer, Peersman, Pickl, Rutten, & Vosters, 2015;Labov, 1994) inherent to (socio)historical linguistics. Nonetheless, these are the text types that are recommended for reconstructing orality in historical sources: they "are usually close to speech and relatively unaffected by conventions of writing" (Auer et al, 2015:7).…”

Section: T H E M E T H O Dmentioning

confidence: 99%

Be that as it may: The Unremarkable Trajectory of the English Subjunctive in North American Speech

Kastronic

Poplack

2021

Lang Var Change

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The English subjunctive has had a checkered history, ranging from extensive use in Old English to near extinction by Late Modern English. Since then, the mandative variant was reported to have revived, while the adverbial subjunctive continued to diminish. American English is heavily implicated in these developments; it is thought to be leading the revival of the former but lagging in the decline of the latter. Observing that most references to these changes are based on the written language, we examine the diachronic trajectory of the subjunctive in North American English speech. Adopting a variationist perspective, we carried out systematic quantitative analyses of subjunctive use under hundreds of triggers. Results show that, despite the differences in their diachronic trajectories, today both types are not only extremely rare but heavily lexically constrained. We implicate violations of the Principle of Accountability in the disparities between the findings reported here and the consensus in the literature with respect to subjunctive use in North American English.

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Section: T H E M E T H O Dmentioning

confidence: 99%

Be that as it may: The Unremarkable Trajectory of the English Subjunctive in North American Speech

Kastronic

Poplack

2021

Lang Var Change

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“…Demographic reconstructions play a central role in historical sociolinguistic approaches to language change. 'Demography' in historical sociolinguistics does not only imply a quantification of the individuals inhabiting an area and their linguistic profile, but also an understanding of their patterns of communication (Milroy & Milroy 1985;Britain 2011;Auer et al 2015). Ιnsofar as the quantitative strength of each of the settling groups and their degree of mutual communication are important factors in the linguistic dynamics of language maintenance or shift in a community, demographic reconstructions are a frequent ingredient in narratives of colonial language contact (see Bekker 2012 on South African English; Morin 2016 on Qu ebec French; Sanz-S anchez 2013 on New Mexican Spanish, or Trudgill 2004 on New Zealand English, among many others).…”

Section: Documenting Metropolitan Feature Pools In Colonial Contact Ementioning

confidence: 99%

Documenting Feature Pools in Language Expansion Situations: Sibilants in Early Colonial Latin American Spanish

Sanz‐Sánchez

2019

Trans of the Philol Soc

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This paper proposes a reconstruction of the demographic and linguistic composition of the Spanish settling contingent in the American colonies as one of several key factors determining the evolution of Spanish in the early colonial period (sixteenth century). It focuses on the evidence for contact among several sibilant systems, including seseo, i.e. the reduction of four medieval sibilants to /s/. In the standard narrative of the history of Latin American Spanish, this reduction is seen as the consequence of the demographic primacy of seseo in the early metropolitan colonial mix and the inherent phonological simplicity of the merger (Catalán 1958; Granda 1994; Parodi 1995; Hidalgo 2016). This study calls for a reassessment of several of these previous assumptions. The bulk of the data in this study come from a corpus of private letters by early colonial settlers from Spain, analysed quantitatively and contextualized on the basis of additional demographic and linguistic evidence. The sociolinguistic reconstruction that emerges from this data contradicts the canonical presentation of the internal and external ecology of early colonial Latin American Spanish, and calls for the incorporation of a variety of cognitive and sociodemographic triggers beyond the action of the metropolitan input.

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“…What Haugen may not have envisaged in the 1960s is that out of the then relatively young discipline of sociolinguistics another new discipline would emerge from the 1980s onwards, viz. historical sociolinguistics (Auer et al 2015). It is particularly within this field that standardization is analyzed as a historical phenomenon, characteristic of postmedieval Europe, and Haugen's approach has been followed closely, most notably in the edited volume by Deumert and Vandenbussche (2003a) that lays bare the sociolinguistic history of the Germanic languages in terms of the Haugen matrix.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dialect, language, nation: 50 years on

2020

Self Cite

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Over 50 years ago, the Norwegian-American linguist Einar Haugen published a seminal paper entitled 'Dialect, language and nation' (Am Anthropol 68:922-935, 1966b), in which he expounds his four-step model of standardization, explaining the development from dialect to standard following a process of norm selection, codification, acceptance and elaboration. In this article, we start by discussing the life and work of Einar Haugen, situating him within the history of linguistic thought throughout his career. Next, we zoom in on his standardization framework more specifically, discussing the relevant aspects of his four-box matrix, but also comparing his initial proposals to later influential publications on the subject expanding on his ideas, most notably by Milroy and Milroy (Authority in language. Investigating language prescription and standardisation, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1985) and Joseph (The rise of language standards and standard languages, Frances Pinter, London, 1987b). Finally, we will proceed to give an overview of what we perceive to be major lacunae or shortcomings in Haugen's standardization framework, focusing on specific elements missing, unclear or in need of refinement in one of the four originally defined steps, but also discussing Haugen's fairly restrictive understanding of the directionality of language change, the narrow empirical scope of traditional standardization research, the crucial role played by ideology in the development of a standard variety, and the strong monolingual bias and relative absence of language contact in traditional accounts of standardization.

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Historical sociolinguistics: the field and its future

Cited by 71 publications

References 32 publications

Be that as it may: The Unremarkable Trajectory of the English Subjunctive in North American Speech

Be that as it may: The Unremarkable Trajectory of the English Subjunctive in North American Speech

Documenting Feature Pools in Language Expansion Situations: Sibilants in Early Colonial Latin American Spanish

Dialect, language, nation: 50 years on

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