The observee’s paradox

Ego-documents are at the heart of historical sociolinguistics. Contrary to what a label such as ego-document may suggest, Early and Late Modern ego-documents constitute a heterogenous group of genres comprising, among others, private letters, diaries and travel journals. Empirical studies have shown that there are important linguistic differences between private letters on the one hand, and diaries/journals on the other. The latter often seem surprisingly standard-like or formal. Theoretical models of register variation and conceptual orality can partially explain the differences, without however offering a full explanation of the surprising formality of diaries/journals. We argue that it is crucial to take into account recent work by social historians concerning diaries/journals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Diary-writing was an inherently reflexive practice allowing authors to reflect on their lives, and to create a textually fixed point of reference. Authors of diaries had a variable and multilayered audience in mind of known and unknown readers. We introduce the observee’s paradox: while creating private texts for themselves in which they were their own observers and observees, authors of diaries also reckoned with unknown readers in a possibly distant future, which prompted them to shift into a more formal or standard-like register.

Women’s letters from the Chilean Nitrate Era: address choice, emotions and patriarchal reciprocity

This article explores how women from the lower ranks of Chilean society mobilized a dynamic address system through affective letter-writing to negotiate their familial position and identity at the end of Chile’s Nitrate Era. Inspired by the third wave in historical sociolinguistics and in dialogue with the glottopolitical perspective, the study foregrounds the interactive nature of ego-documents by analyzing indexical connections between address choice, emotions and unequal gendered relationships between partners. The pragmatic analysis of a set of letters written by women between 1913 and 1928 shows insightful connections between address choice, speech acts, emotions and politeness strategies. By linking textual evidence to the material conditions in which letter-writing is embedded, the article illustrates how women writers negotiated their position and personae within the family structure by inscribing letter-writing in a system of patriarchal reciprocity. This suggests that address choices and the expression of emotions are an index of gendered reciprocal practices that allowed women to preserve their familial structure in the context of industrialization and labor migration.

SOCIOLINGUISTIC «READING» OF THE WORLD OF EVERYDAYNESS: LANGUAGE PRACTICES OF THE UKRAINIANS OF KHOLMSHCHINA AND SOUTHERN PІDLASHSHIA IN THE FIRST WORLD WAR (1914–1918)

he article is devoted to one of the little-known periods of the language situation in which autochthonous Ukrainians from the far western ethnic Ukrainian lands lived. The relevance of the topic is stipulated by the need to develop a theory of historical sociolinguistics on language, power and identity. The revealed relations of language practices (microhistorical standard of living of an individual) to the geopolitics (as macrohistory) allow us to state that the linguistic dimension of the communicative everyday life of the Ukrainian speech community appears through a set of features realized before and during the war of 1914. Before the war, the colloquial form of the Ukrainian language as a means of interpersonal communication had a dialectal nature, which was layered with Polonization and Russification influences, and oral and written forms of the Russian language were a means of official communication. During the war of 1914–1918, there were changes in the language use of Ukrainians: the Russian language in the territories of Kholmshchyna and Pidlaschia curtailed its functions after the withdrawal of the tsarist troops together with the forcibly deported Ukrainians; Ukrainian-language practices in the Kholm region did not have a chance to develop due to the support of the Austrian occupation authorities for the functions of the German and Polish languages; in Polonized Pidlaschia, occupied by the German authorities, owing to the activities of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine and later representatives of the Ukrainian authorities, Ukrainian forces managed to partially develop the functions of the Ukrainian language in administration, primary education and periodicals. Ukrainian literary language began to slowly realize its communicative, informational and unifying social functions.

Towards a typology of language situations in historical sociolinguistics. The language situation in Kholmshchyna and Pidliashshia in 1815-1915

The article seeks to study a new period in the typological characteristics of language situations related to the functions of the Ukrainian language. The purpose of the article is to analyze the changes in the language situation and the causal interaction of social functions of languages used by the indigenous Ukrainian population on the outskirts of ethnically Ukrainian territory of Kholmshchyna and Pidliashshia in 1815–1915. In order to reach this goal, the author reveals the political factors that led to a variety of language situations, communicative practices, and assimilation processes. The analysis is based on the results of interdisciplinary research on the history, politics, and culture of Kholmshchyna and Pidliashshia, as well as the works on historical sociolinguistics. The sources of analysis include travel records, memoirs, and documents, to which the method of sociolinguistic interpretation and reinterpretation is applied, as well as comparative and biographical methods, elements of discourse analysis. The results testify to three geopolitical influences that changed the directions of development of the language situation: the transition of territories within the Kingdom of Poland to the Russian Empire in 1815; military actions on the territory of Kholmshchyna and Pidliashshia during the First World War in 1914– 1915; the arrival of the new occupation authorities in 1915. In early 20th century, there was a decrease in the number of native speakers of the Ukrainian language: after the permitted conversion from Orthodoxy to the Roman Catholic faith under the tsarist law of 1905 and in connection with the deportation in 1915. Communicative practices of Ukrainians in different spheres of life included a combination of languages: colloquial Ukrainian and Polish, literary Polish, Russian and occasionally Ukrainian, Church Slavonic with Ukrainian and Russian pronunciations, and the German language. Based on the assimilative interaction of the languages, it might be suggested that the life of Ukrainians took place in the face of Polonization. This was particularly a manifestation of the resistance of the Polish and non-Polish population to the tsarist government as an occupation after the uprisings of 1831 and 1863–64, and after 1875, and Russification as a result of the planned conversion of Greek Catholics to Orthodoxy, the creation of new educational institutions and separation on the basis of Lublin and Siedlce Voivodeships of Kholm Governorate as an independent administrative unit within Russia.

Historical sociolinguistics and authorship elucidation in medieval private written correspondence:

Corpora of historical correspondence and their social metadata offers a very useful archival source to carry out studies in Historical Sociolinguistics. However, illiteracy among female population and the subsequent use of scribes make authorship and gender constitute some of the most controversial socio-demographic issues when doing sociohistorical research. Letters might not have been autographs but rather dictated to a scribe, which can lead to the distortion of findings concerning authorship and gender-based patterns, from the perspective of sociolinguistic variation. On the other hand, Forensic Linguistics appeared as a branch of Applied Linguistics to assist the law in legal processes, where authorship elucidation is often one of the most disputed questions. In this paper we will present an overview of the main approaches to authorship attribution within Forensic Linguistics and relate them to sociohistorical data in the case of the letters by Margery Paston, putting their theorical tenets and techniques to the test of time. The data suggests that formal (spelling) features are less indicative of authorship than other morphosyntactic markers. Forensic Linguistics and Historical Sociolinguistics can mutually benefit each other, by sharing their expertise in authorship research and its application to current and historical texts in their social context

The Language of the Xūz and the Fate of Elamite

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.

“I am not that I play” – The use of hypercorrection in the performance of gender by Shakespeare’s ‘breeches’ parts

This study uses variationist sociolinguistic methodology to explore the construction of gender in four of Shakespeare’s comedies. Gender performance is at issue in these plays specifically, not only because, in Shakespeare’s time at least, young male actors play the female roles, but also because each play contains a female character in male disguise. By analysing and comparing the patterns of variation used by Shakespeare’s female, male and “female as male” characters, this study provides further insight into Shakespeare’s construction and conceptualisation of gender. Further, by comparing the patterns of gender variation found in these plays with non-fiction data on the gendered variation of the period (Nevalainen, Terttu & Helena Raumolin-Brunberg. 2003. Historical sociolinguistics. Harlow: Pearson Education Ltd.), it is possible to investigate how accurately Shakespeare captures the sociolinguistic variation present in his society. This study hopes to provide support both for the validity of using sociolinguistic methods to study literature but also for using data from literature in studies of historical sociolinguistic variation and change.

Speech Representation in the History of English

This volume explores the speech representation of the past, comprising in-depth analyses of how speakers and writers mark, structure, and discuss a previous speech event or fictional speech in the history of English. Focusing on the Early Modern English and the Late Modern English periods, the chapters are concerned with topics such as parentheses as markers of represented speech, the development of BE like as a reporting expression, the gradual formation of free indirect speech reporting, and the interpersonal functions of represented speech. Various social contexts and genres are covered, including witness depositions, literary texts, letters, histories, and the spoken language of the recent past. The chapters draw on historical sociolinguistics, historical pragmatics, and corpus linguistics in showing a wide array of approaches to the study of speech representation in the history of English.