Historical sociolinguistics is an inviting and vibrant field in which the application of its tenets and tools often reveals new aspects to be analyzed. This groundbreaking volume comprises a wide range of historical sociolinguistic studies that address the issue of language change in English from around 1700 until the present day. The volume is divided into two main sections. The scope of the material in this collection is a testimony to the passion that the authors bring to their materials, as is the intrinsic clarity of their writings.
The first part presents processes of change in Late Modern English. Chapter 2 introduces some historical sociolinguistic concepts such as indexicality and enregisterment, while chapter 3 investigates the prescriptive-descriptive divide. These two chapters shed light on some objective attitudes towards language to avoid anachronism; thus, they serve as the foundation of the volume. Chapters 4, 5, and 8 draw on evidence in some well-compiled historical corpora, providing readers with a much-needed overview of the development of transplanted English variants. Chapter 6 uses an English dictionary to investigate Scotland's contribution to English, whereas the investigation of American English in chapter 7 is based on some important ego-documents.
The second part discusses present-day English. Chapters 9 and 10 use corpora to study changes in the English language, which adds to the credibility of the research. The other three chapters concern acoustic studies. Chapter 11 investigates how dialect levelling and social changes are embedded in a peripheral community, while chapter 12 examines South African English, highlighting ethnicity as one factor for variation. Chapter 13 covers not only pronunciation variables but also lexical variables along the Canadian-US border, providing a brief summary of the relationship between border and language.
Indeed, changes in language are frequently ‘ideologically loaded’, which has often attracted much criticism from modern linguistics. However, this volume enlightens readers that neither descriptivism nor prescriptivism should be underestimated. The former is an intriguing language garden that abounds with plentiful flowers of dialects, and the latter represents humans’ endeavor to keep the linguistic world of chaos in order. These two notions are intertwined, and somewhere in the middle, the modern linguistic map has formed during the long course of history.
This volume is more than a record of the recent breakthroughs in historical sociolinguistics; it combines the methodology of studies of the past and present, highlighting the significance of diachronic studies. Moreover, contributors to this volume present readers with direction on how further research on changes in English may be carried out by focusing on the processes in which language is constructed and reconstructed. That is, the shift in research will be from British English to its transplanted variants, from single studies to comparative studies, and from geographical factors to ideological factors.
