Social stratification and patterns of code-switching in Early English letters

Abstract

The study deals with multilingualism in a historical perspective, focusing on code-switching between English and other languages in letters written in fifteenth-and early sixteenth-century England. The data is drawn from the Corpus of Early English Correspondence, a large electronic tool designed for historical sociolinguistic research. A related database containing background information on the writers makes it possible to apply the framework of correlational sociolinguistics. While testing the relationship of code-switching with many social variables, the study concentrates on social stratification. The analysis shows clear correlation between the writers' social rank and their code-switching behaviour both in terms of quantity and quality. Other interlinked variables such as gender and education are also significant. The study also confirms that for a full understanding of the phenomenon, microlevel analyses of idiolects and interpersonal relations are needed.

Dating the Shift to English in the Financial Accounts of Some London Livery Companies: A Reappraisal

“…Like most studies mentioned previously (Heikkonen 1996;Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2000;Nurmi & Pahta 2004), the interplay between Latin, French and BrMA (1421-1422: 11b) within a Latin Intitulatio nominū ("list of names") of the 111 diūſaχ artiū in civitate London' ("different crafts in the City of London") that "may in any wise profit the hall and Company of Brewers" (Unwin 1908: 370).…”

“…In short, linguistic approaches to the London livery companies have been so far characterised by marked shortcomings; Heikkonen (1996) and Nurmi & Pahta (2004) use inconsistent data for their research and focus on texts whose exact date of composition is in serious doubt. What is more, other studies touching on this topic seem to have relied exclusively (and blindly) on the same second-hand sources.…”

Semi-automatic Discovery of Multilingual Elements in English Historical Corpora: Methods and Challenges

“…One of the latest methodological developments in historical multilingualism studies is the application of corpus linguistic methods to corpora that were originally compiled for the study of historical varieties of English in an effort to discover the extent to which foreign words and phrases were used by native speakers of English writing to an audience of other native speakers. Pioneered by Nurmi and Pahta (2004;Pahta and Nurmi 2006;, this approach holds the dual promise of allowing us to establish baseline frequencies for foreign-language elements in English texts and to discover correlations between multilingual practices and sociolinguistic and text typological variables.…”

“…Both require some extra analytical work on the part of the compiler, the latter particularly so. In historical corpora, tagging of foreign content has been typically carried out manually (see, e.g., Nurmi and Pahta 2004); examples of corpora with annotation of foreign words include the Helsinki Corpus, the Lampeter Corpus and the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence. However, when it comes to large-scale quantitative analysis of multilingual practices with multi-million-word datasets that yield sufficient evidence for inferential sociolinguistic and text typological analysis, the amount of work required will quickly become unmanageable.…”

Female multilingualism in William Shakespeare and George Peele

“…In a series of articles, Arja Nurmi and Päivi Pahta have examined code-switching in written texts in a variety of genres using computer corpora (Nurmi & Pahta 2004, 2010, 2012Pahta & Nurmi 2006, 2011. Their latest article (2012) examines female code-switching during the period 1400-1800 in a corpus of personal letters.…”