| Kommentar |
In recent years, insights and methods from sociolinguistics have been applied to the field of historical linguistics in order to identify the sociolinguistic forces in the history of English. Focusing on the social context in which language change occurs, historical linguists have mainly dealt with morphological and syntactic changes, language standardisation and codification as well as language contact. New primary data that allow for such analyses of language change have become available, especially letters of all types. It is the study of these letters that we will focus on in the seminar to see how they can be used to inform our understanding of the sociolinguistic nature of changes in English. After an introduction to the field of historical sociolinguistics, we will discuss a number of case studies and students will have the opportunity to choose from a number of letter collections as a basis for their mini projects.
Recommended reading: McColl Millar, Robert. 2012. English Historical Sociolinguistics. Edinburgh University Press. |
