What Is Language History?

Abstract

This paper examines the notion of ‘language history,’ which has taken on a different meaning in the Russian linguistic tradition compared to its usage by Western European scholars. The article starts with an analysis of contemporary Western European theories according to which one should consider language history as a historical discipline, and draw a clear distinction between language history and historical grammar. According to the currently accepted socio-pragmatic approach, the subject of language history is, first of all, the history of communication. It is this approach that is presented in the first section of the paper. The history of this notion is then further analyzed. The dichotomy between ‘language history’ vs. ‘historical linguistics’ is not entirely new but goes back to the dichotomy between ‘external’ and ‘internal’ language history, which was widespread at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries and still remains important. In the second section, the author compares linguistic studies in the sphere of historical Slavic studies from the last third of the 19th to the first decades of the 20th centuries to the contemporary theories in Western European historical linguistics in the context of the model of external and internal language history. It is the interpretation of the notion ‘literary language’ that is of special interest. In the works of historians of language from the late 19th–early 20th centuries, it was used interchangeably with the term ‘written language,’ i.e., the language of writing in general. The phenomenon of ‘written language’ constituted an aspect of the ‘external history of a language.’ In the theory of functional linguistics developed by the Prague linguistic circle, the notion of the ‘literary language’ acquired a new meaning, i.e., ‘standard language.’ However, in Soviet linguistics the new concept was denoted by the old term with a different tradition behind it. This led to a confusion regarding the concepts and the subjects of research: the separate aspect split off to form a new discipline—the history of literary language—which inevitably resulted in a reduced field of research. This matter is examined in the third segment of the paper. The concluding section returns to the socio-pragmatic approach to the history of language described at the beginning of the paper, suggesting an alternative model for the study of Russian language history, which should be regarded as the history of language and its usage.