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Language Variation - European Perspectives VII: Selected papers from the Ninth International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 9), Malaga, June 2017
Edited by Juan-Andrés Villena-Ponsoda, Francisco Díaz Montesinos, Antonio Manuel Ávila-Muñoz and Matilde Vida-Castro
[Studies in Language Variation 22] 2019
► pp. 103–118

Chapter 6
Virtual sociolinguistics

From real-time surveying to virtual-time archival sources for tracing change longitudinally

| University of Murcia

The limitations of apparent-time approaches and the difficulties of conducting studies in real-time for observing language change have traditionally been one of the main methodological concerns in sociolinguistics since the 1960s. However, archived radio recordings and historical corpora of written correspondence have recently been demonstrated to be excellent sources for both cross-sectional and longitudinal approaches. The aim of this paper is to show the results from two studies where radio and historical archival sources afford comparative evidence for tracing language change developments. The conclusions suggest that these resources offer a privileged perspective for the historical reconstruction of linguistic change in present-day or remote languages, functioning as virtual approaches where the problem of real-time in the longitudinal research procedure is conveniently neutralised.

Keywords: sociolinguistic methodology, language change, longitudinal/cross-sectional studies, radio recordings, historical corpora
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Trend study with radio archive sources
  • 3.Panel study with historical corpora of written correspondence
  • 4.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 12 December 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.22.06her
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