Abstract
Abstract This issue of the Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics aims to contribute to our understanding of language change in real time by presenting a group of articles particularly focused on social and sociocultural factors underlying language diversification and change. By analysing data from a varied set of languages, including Greek, English, and the Finnic and Mongolic language families, and mainly focussing their investigation on the Middle Ages, the authors connect various social and cultural factors with the specific topic of the issue, the rate of linguistic change. The sociolinguistic themes addressed include community and population size, conflict and conquest, migration and mobility, bi- and multilingualism, diglossia and standardization. In this introduction, the field of comparative historical sociolinguistics is considered a cross-disciplinary enterprise with a sociolinguistic agenda at the crossroads of contact linguistics, historical comparative linguistics and linguistic typology.
Highlights
This issue of the Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics aims to contribute to our understanding of language change in real time by presenting a group of articles focused on social and sociocultural factors underlying language diversification and change
The approaches adopted in this issue of the Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics are united in drawing attention to the impact of external factors on the rate of linguistic change
The various contingent factors listed by Dixon (1997: 76–85) range from natural causes, material innovations, forms of communication and trade to conquests and religious expansionism, occupations of previously occupied territory and expansion of populations into uninhabited territory. Many of these influences lead to language contact, which was already acknowledged in historical comparative linguistics in that it could impact on the assumed regularity of linguistic change
Summary
One of the major challenges in linguistic research is unravelling the process of language change. The work carried out so far typically analyses more recent periods and topics such as the impact of prescriptivism on language change (Nevalainen 2015a; Nevalainen and Rutten 2012) This is not surprising: historical sociolinguistics is a relatively new field of study informed by historical linguistics and sociolinguistics, and its parent discipline of sociolinguistics itself has a broad scope and variety of specializations. This is not to say that there would be no work analysing the (co-)evolution of languages from sociolinguistically relevant perspectives, only that this work has largely been carried out in related fields such as dialectology, area studies, and linguistic typology (see e.g. Fisiak 1988; Greenhill 2014; Wichmann 2014). The focus of this special issue is on the rate of linguistic change, a topic of direct relevance to historical comparative linguistics from the 19th century on and central to sociolinguistics at large.
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