Historical Sociolinguistics: Old and Middle English
Alexander Bergs (Osnabrück University)
The course offers an introduction to the ideas, principles, aims and methods of historical sociolinguistics, with a focus on Old and Middle English. It is designed for students unfamiliar with sociolinguistics and the individual language periods. The goal is to achieve some basic competence in the analysis of language variation from a sociolinguistic point of view (broadly construed), an awareness of the major phenomena of Old and Middle English that warrant closer sociolinguistic study, and some recognition of the chances and limits of sociolinguistic investigations of distant language periods.
Course day by day
Reading, preparation of discussion questions/assignments
1 What is sociolinguistics? What is historical sociolinguistics?
2 First wave sociolinguistics: Of social classes, men and women…
3 Second wave sociolinguistics, reprise: Of Social Networks
4 Third wave sociolinguistics: Of communities of practice.
5 Sociology of language: Why don’t we speak Anglo-Saxon anymore?
Study material
Bergs, Alexander. 2005. Social Networks and Historical Sociolinguistics: Studies in Morphosyntactic Variation in the Paston Letters (1421-1503). Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. (Topics in English Linguistics, TiEL 51)
Bergs, Alexander. 2012. “Middle English Sociolinguistics”. In: Alexander Bergs & Laurel Brinton (eds.) Handbook of the Historical Linguistics of English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 534-551.
Bergs, Alexander. 2013. “Writing, reading, language change - a sociohistorical perspective on scribes, readers, and networks in medieval Britain”. In: Esther-Miriam Wagner, Ben Outhwait, Bettina Beinhoff (eds.). Scribes as Agents of Language Change. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 241-260.
Hernández-Campoy, Juan Manuel & Juan Camilo Conde-Sivestre (eds.) 2012. Handbook of Historical Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid, Terttu Nevalainen, and Luisella Caon (eds.) (2000). Social Network Analysis and the History of English, special issue of European Journal of English Studies, 4.3, Lisse: Swets & Zeitlinger.
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