Historical sociolinguistics

J. Camilo Conde-Silvestre
Table of contents

Historical sociolinguistics developed as a new approach to diachronic linguistic research in the last third of the twentieth century, at the intersection of historical linguistics and sociolinguistics with other interrelated fields like social history and corpus linguistics, among others. It derived from the basic “underlying premise that linguistic and social factors are clearly interrelated in language change” and the need to study them “in their mutual interaction” (Roberge 2006: 2308). The genesis of the new discipline did not take place in a vacuum. In fact, from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries some linguists had already called attention to the role that social factors play in various aspects of language development, history and change. Early dialectologists (Georg Wenker, Louis Gauchat, Raven I. McDavid or Ramón Menéndez-Pidal) as well as researchers on linguistic anthropology or on the study of languages in contact (William D. Whitney, Uriel Weinreich, Einar Haugen), even proponents of the functionalist approah (Eugeniu Coseriu), had developed methods that transcended the principles and models of their time, which, implicitly, tended to downplay the social nature of human language in their application: the comparatist organic view of languages or the structuralist quest for systemic balance (Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2012: 28). In this context, the well-known distinction between the internal and the external history of the language was also established as an attempt to counteract the disdain for the social dimension in historical linguistics. Scholars who studied the social and cultural aspects of change (external history), instead of change in linguistic structure (internal history), can be considered, in a sense, proper predecessors of the historical sociolinguistic approach. This could be the case, in the English-speaking world, of Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable (1951), Dick Leith (1983) or Joey Lee Dillard (1985).

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