Published in Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics
Speed of linguistic change is not constant: it differs as between different language and dialects, and between different chronological periods. These differences are, at least to some extent, conditioned by social parameters. Two major social factors are involved in producing these different rates of linguistic change. There is, first, the role of ...
Published in Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics
Published in Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics
This issue of the Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics aims to contribute to our understanding of language change in real time by presenting a group of articles particularly focused on social and sociocultural factors underlying language diversification and change. By analysing data from a varied set of languages, including Greek, English, and th...
Published in Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics
In this paper, we explore the rate of language change in the history of English. Our main focus is on detecting periods of accelerated change in Middle English (1150–1500), but we also compare the Middle English data with the Early Modern period (1500–1700) in order to establish a longer diachrony for the pace at which English has changed over time...
Published in Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics
This paper will focus on analysing user-related variation in Greek in Egypt as seen through potsherd letters (ostraka) of the residents of Roman forts, praesidia, in the Eastern Desert of Egypt. The letters can be dated to the first and second centuries CE. I suggest that the linguistic situation in the forts can be seen as evidence of extensive la...
Published in Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics
This paper examines the Mongolic family of languages from the point of view of their different paths and rates of evolution, and with a view on the general problem concerning the speed of language change. All extant Mongolic languages descend from a relatively recent ancestral form of speech, Proto-Mongolic, spoken by the historical Mongols in the ...
Published in Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics
Published in Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics
This paper brings together typological and sociolinguistic approaches to language variation. Its main aim is to evaluate the relative effect of language internal and external factors on the number of cases in the world’s languages. I model word order as a language internal predictor; it is well-known that, for instance, languages with verb-final wo...
Published in Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics
Published in Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics
In the contemporary northern Baltic Sea area, there are two states, Finland and Estonia, in which a western Uralic language has an official status. Several Finnic minority languages are or used to be spoken in the adjacent areas in the contact zone of Baltic, Germanic and Slavic languages. Historically, the north-eastern surroundings of the Gulf of...
