English historical sociolinguistics studies the political, cultural, and economic forces that affect a society's use of and views on language. Language contact, language standardization, and linguistic attrition are also investigated. This book is thematic rather than chronological and keeps sociolinguistic insights in the forefront, both microsociolinguistic and macrosociolinguistic. Microsociolinguistics and macrosociolinguistics inform each other, and the interaction between them can be played back into the history of the English language. This book is made up of seven chapters, with each chapter ending with further reading and potential research topics.
Ch. 1 contains a brief discussion of sociolinguistic theory, methodology, and findings. Both microsociolinguistic and macrosociolinguistic concepts are considered, in particular as they relate to language change. Sociolinguistics in all its forms has gone a long way towards explaining linguistic variation. An explanation for linguistic variation has inherent in it the basis for an explanation for contemporary linguistic change. It should be possible to extrapolate these features into the past. Ch. 2 considers sociolinguistic approaches to language change, involving case studies both from the relatively recent past and at a rather greater remove. In this book, while change in the last 500 years is discussed more than what came before, attempts at an historical sociolinguistic analysis of linguistic change before this date are also made. It is hoped that the macrosociolinguistic patterns associated with societal views on, and treatment of, language aid these investigations and deepen their findings.
Chs. 3 and 4 are variations on the same theoretical issues, since both are concerned with standardization of English. Ch. 3 is concerned with the process itself and how this relates to changes in wealth, status, and technology in late medieval England. The history of the standardization of English appears to support both Joseph's (Eloquence and power, London: Frances Pinter, 1987) and Kloss's (“Abstand languages” and “Ausbau languages,” Anthropological Linguistics 9:29–41, 1967) views on how standardization develops. In the fifteenth century, English developed a synecdochic dialect that eventually emerged as a standard. Ch. 4 is concerned with the ideology of standardization and how this relates to social changes in the English-speaking world in the modern era. While the English-speaking world does not have the overt linguistic ideologies which the French-speaking world has, ideology has played and still plays a significant part in the ways the English language is perceived by native speakers. These perceptions have changed over the years, due to social changes, but a centralized, nondialectal, variety lies at its heart.
Chs. 5 and 6 are concerned with the effects linguistic contact has had on the development of English. The closely related phenomenon of language shift is also considered. In Ch. 5 the major typological change English passed through in the late Old English and early Middle English periods is considered in relation to the major contacts speakers of English have had with speakers of other languages. The discussion in this chapter demonstrates how sociolinguistic views on language contact and language shift can be employed in a discussion of linguistic developments in the relatively distant past. Ch. 6 is concerned with how new varieties of language and also other languages must be understood if people are to explain why territorial varieties are often similar to but different from each other. This chapter considers how new varieties have come into being, how they are similar to each other and also different from each other, and what forces may be at work in guiding their drifts in the postcolonial period.
This book provides students with a means by which a previous linear narrative history of English can be deepened by an extended understanding of the sociolinguistic forces that initiate or encourage language change. Uniquely, it discusses not only the central variationist tendencies present in language change and their analysis but also the macrosociolinguistic forces that act upon all speakers and their language. This book holds that all microsociolinguistic studies, whether contemporary or historical, have to include macrosociolinguic elements in their analysis. In addition, discussion of language contact, language standardization, and linguistic attrition is illustrated by apposite examples from the history of English. Thus students will develop a deeper understanding of both sociolinguistics and historical linguistics from the book. This book acts as encouragement towards postgraduate study in the subjects covered. All in all, the book will be helpful to seasoned sociolinguistic researchers, to budding student sociolinguistic analysts, and also to historians. It does much to demonstrate a macrosociolinguistic grounding and emphasize the ways in which people's understanding of the structure of, and change in, society can be mapped onto language use and vice versa.
