Part of
Touching the Past: Studies in the historical sociolinguistics of ego-documentsEdited by Marijke J. van der Wal and Gijsbert Rutten
[Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 1] 2013
► pp. 129–148
Edited by Marijke J. van der Wal and Gijsbert Rutten
[Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 1] 2013
► pp. 129–148
Written documents
What they tell us about linguistic usage
This paper explains why large historical sociolinguistic corpora are needed to interpret traces of spoken features through the written medium. To support this, the eighteenth-century personal diary of a small merchant is compared with other documents to show that the diary displays a number of vernacular and formal features and is therefore considered hybrid in nature. It is also shown that even a homogeneous collection of family letters can constitute a microcosm of linguistic communities and can reveal sociolinguistic changes. Through a study of the relations between close and extended family members living in Detroit in the nineteenth century, the author examines how to interpret the linguistic variation found in documents written by less-skilled authors.
Cited by
Cited by 7 other publications
Dourdy, Laura-Maï
2021. Entend-on vraiment les paysans ? Ce que la variation syntaxique nous dit des représentations sociales dans la littérature des XV e et XVI e siècles. Cahiers internationaux de sociolinguistique N° 18:1 ► pp. 53 ff. 
Joseph, John E., Gijsbert Rutten & Rik Vosters
2020. Dialect, language, nation: 50 years on. Language Policy 19:2 ► pp. 161 ff.
Martineau, France & Sandrine Tailleur
2014. From local to supra-local. In Norms and Usage in Language History, 1600–1900 [Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics, 3], ► pp. 223 ff.
Rutten, Gijsbert
2022. Historical Diaglossia and the Selection of Multiple Norms:MijandMijnas 1st Person Singular Object Pronouns in 17th- and 18th-Century Dutch. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 34:1 ► pp. 35 ff.
Włodarczyk, Matylda
2015. Nineteenth-century institutional (im)politeness. In Transatlantic Perspectives on Late Modern English [Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics, 4], ► pp. 153 ff.
Włodarczyk, Matylda
2017. Auer, Anita, Daniel Schreier and Richard Watts (eds). 2015.Letter Writing and Language Change. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 18:1 ► pp. 142 ff.
[no author supplied]
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