Language, memory and remembering: explorations in historical sociolinguistics

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Buhan Pan
Keyword(s):  
Historical Sociolinguistics

Scribes, Repertoires, and Variation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eitan Grossman ◽  
Jennifer Cromwell
Keyword(s):  
Language Variation ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Historical Sociolinguistics ◽  
Written Texts ◽  
Linguistic Practices ◽  
Culturally Embedded

As in spoken language, variation abounds in written texts. In the latter, linguistic and extralinguistic variation coexists: one finds variation in lexical and grammatical features, as well as in other textual parameters such as orthography, phraseology and formulary, palaeography, layout, and formatting. Such variation occurs both within the written output of individuals and across broader corpora that represent ‘communities’ of diverse types. To encapsulate this, we use the inclusive term ‘scribal repertoires’, a concept that is intended to cover the entire set of linguistic and non-linguistic practices that are prone to variation within and between manuscripts, while placing focus on scribes as socially and culturally embedded agents, whose choices are reflected in texts. This conceptualization of scribal variation, inspired by the relatively recent field of historical sociolinguistics, is applied to a range of phenomenon in the scribal cultures of premodern Egypt, across languages and socio-historical settings.

Scribal Repertoires in Egypt from the New Kingdom to the Early Islamic Period

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Historical Sociolinguistics ◽  
Islamic Period ◽  
The People ◽  
Modern Egypt ◽  
Early Islamic Period ◽  
Early Islamic ◽  
Point Of Departure

This volume deals with the possibility of glimpsing pre-modern and early modern Egyptian scribes, the people who actually produced ancient documents, through the ways in which they organized and wrote those documents. Breaking with the traditional conception of variation in scribal texts as ‘free’ or indicative of ‘corruption’, this volume reconceptualizes scribal variation in pre-modern Egypt from the point of view of contemporary historical sociolinguistics, seeing scribes as agents embedded in particular geographical, temporal, and sociocultural environments. This volume comprises a set of studies of scribal variation, beginning from the well-established domain of scribal variation in pre-modern English as a methodological point of departure, and proceeding to studies of scribal variation spanning thousands of years, from Pharaonic to Late Antique and Islamic Egypt. This volume introduces to Egyptology concepts such as scribal communities, networks, and repertoires, and applies them to a variety of phenomena, including features of lexicon, grammar, orthography, palaeography, layout, and format.

The Language of the Xūz and the Fate of Elamite

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
KEVIN T. VAN BLADEL
Keyword(s):  
Historical Sociolinguistics

Abstract This article discusses the language of the Xūz mentioned in Arabic sources, endorsing the view that it is the latest attestation of the Elamite language. Drawing on models from historical sociolinguistics, it also studies the problem of mutual acculturation between speakers of Elamite and Persian in antiquity.

scholarly journals Comparative sociolinguistic perspectives on the rate of linguistic change

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Terttu Nevalainen ◽  
Tanja Säily ◽  
Turo Vartiainen
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Sociocultural Factors ◽  
Specific Topic ◽  
Linguistic Change ◽  
Comparative Linguistics ◽  
Historical Sociolinguistics ◽  
Contact Linguistics ◽  
Historical Comparative ◽  
Social And Cultural Factors

AbstractThis 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.

scholarly journals Reviving the genitive. Prescription and practice in the Netherlands (1770–1840)

2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Krogull ◽  
Gijsbert Rutten
Keyword(s):  
Language Use ◽  
Extreme Case ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Interesting Case ◽  
Research Literature ◽  
National Language ◽  
Prepositional Phrases ◽  
Historical Sociolinguistics ◽  
The One ◽  
Genitive Case

AbstractHistorical metalinguistic discourse is known to often prescribe linguistic variants that are not very frequent in actual language use, and to proscribe frequent variants. Infrequent variants that are promoted through prescription can be innovations, but they can also be conservative forms that have already largely vanished from the spoken language and are now also disappearing in writing. An extreme case in point is the genitive case in Dutch. This has been in decline in usage from at least the thirteenth century onwards, gradually giving way to analytical alternatives such as prepositional phrases. In the grammatical tradition, however, a preference for the genitive case was maintained for centuries. When ‘standard’ Dutch is officially codified in 1805 in the context of a national language policy, the genitive case is again strongly preferred, still aiming to ‘revive’ the synthetic forms. The striking discrepancy between metalinguistic discourse on the one hand, and developments in language use on the other, make the genitive case in Dutch an interesting case for historical sociolinguistics. In this paper, we tackle various issues raised by the research literature, such as the importance of genre differences as well as variation within particular genres, through a detailed corpus-based analysis of the influence of prescription on language practices in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Dutch.

scholarly journals Using the Eighteenth-Century English Phonology Database (ECEP) as a teaching resource

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 591-606
Author(s):  
CHRISTINE WALLIS
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Historical Linguistics ◽  
Language Attitudes ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Historical Sociolinguistics ◽  
Teaching Resource ◽  
The University ◽  
Late Modern

This article reports on the use of the Eighteenth-Century English Phonology Database (ECEP) as a teaching resource in historical sociolinguistics and historical linguistics courses at the University of Sheffield. Pronouncing dictionaries are an invaluable resource for students learning about processes of standardisation and language attitudes during the Late Modern English period (1700–1900), however they are not easy to use in their original format. Each author uses their own notation system to indicate their recommended pronunciation, while the terminology used to describe the quality of the vowels and consonants differs from that used today, and provides an additional obstacle to the student wishing to interrogate such sources. ECEP thus provides a valuable intermediary between the students and the source material, as it includes IPA equivalents for the recommended pronunciations, as well as any metalinguistic commentary offered by the authors about a particular pronunciation. This article demonstrates a teaching approach that not only uses ECEP as a tool in its own right, but also explores how it can be usefully combined with other materials covering language change in the Late Modern English period to enable students to undertake their own investigations in research-led courses.

Book Review: Historical Sociolinguistics

2005 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-203
Author(s):  
Sali A. Tagliamonte
Keyword(s):  
Historical Sociolinguistics

The French Language in Russia

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek Offord ◽  
Vladislav Rjéoutski ◽  
Gesine Argent
Keyword(s):  
French Language ◽  
Speech Community ◽  
Historical Sociolinguistics ◽  
Arts And Humanities ◽  
Imperial Russia ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Social ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
The Uk

-- With support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the UK and the Deutsches Historisches Institut Moskau -- The French Language in Russia provides the fullest examination and discussion to date of the adoption of the French language by the elites of imperial Russia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is interdisciplinary, approaching its subject from the angles of various kinds of history and historical sociolinguistics. Beyond its bearing on some of the grand narratives of Russian thought and literature, this book may afford more general insight into the social, political, cultural, and literary implications and effects of bilingualism in a speech community over a long period. It should also enlarge understanding of francophonie as a pan-European phenomenon. On the broadest plane, it has significance in an age of unprecedented global connectivity, for it invites us to look beyond the experience of a single nation and the social groups and individuals within it in order to discover how languages and the cultures and narratives associated with them have been shared across national boundaries.

A case-study in historical sociolinguistics beyond Europe: Reconstructing patterns of multilingualism in a linguistic community in Siberia

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-251
Author(s):  
Olesya Khanina ◽  
Miriam Meyerhoff
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Language Choice ◽  
Linguistic Community ◽  
Oral Histories ◽  
Northern Siberia ◽  
Historical Sociolinguistics

AbstractA collection of traditional and ‘old life’ stories recorded in the late 1940s is used to reconstruct the sociolinguistic situation of the Enets community in Northern Siberia from the 1850s until the 1930s. The Enets had regular contacts with a number of neighbouring indigenous peoples (Nganasans, Tundra Nenets, Selkups, Evenkis, Dolgans) and later with Russian newcomers. The oral histories often comment on language use, and as a result we can reconstruct not only the languages that the Enets people used in this period, but also the contexts in which they used them. The Enets community’s multilingualism was typically characterized by command of key neighbouring languages, with the occasional command of other more (geographically and socially) remote ones. With close neighbours, language choice seems to have had limited social load, while in cases of trade or agonistic contact, the choice of language in interethnic communication seems to have followed a principle of asymmetric convergence towards the language of the party with the greatest contextual social power. The analysis is founded on a database of dozens of communicative events mentioned in the oral stories (over 50 are analyzed). Ongoing fieldwork on the modern sociolinguistic situation suggests that until quite recently there was considerable stability in the sociolinguistic norms governing multilingual interaction among the Enets.

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