Course Overview

The course consists of eight lessons. Information about each lesson including reading lists, lesson plans, study questions, links to assignments and quizzes and so on is provided below. Examination and course evaluations are described in detail below as well.

Additional information about the official course plan, grading criteria etc. is available in the course platform.

Lesson 1: Introduction

Lesson 2: The spread of linguistic innovations

Lesson 3: Literacy

Lesson 4: Standard language and dialects

Lesson 5: Multilingualism and society

Lesson 6: Language and group identity

Lesson 7: Digital Humanities Research Infrastructures and Methods in Historical Sociolinguistics

Lesson 8: Presentations of Student Projects

Teachers: Susanne Tienken and Memet Aktürk Drake

Focus:

• Welcome and introduction
• Introduction to the field of Historical sociolinguistics

Lesson plan:

• Presentation of the course (planning and conduct, aims and objectives, examination)
• Discussion of theoretical approaches in article 2) 3) and 4), discussion the three waves of (historical) sociolinguistics

Assignments to Lesson 1: TBA​

Study questions to Lesson 1: TBA

Literature: 

Conde-Silvestre, Juan Camilo (2016). “A ‘third-wave’ historical sociolinguistic approach to late Middle English correspondence: Evidence from the Stonor Letters”, in Cinzia Russi (ed.), Current trends in historical sociolinguistics, Warsaw & Berlin: de Gruyter, 46–66.

Nevalainen, Terttu (2015). "What are sociolinguistics", Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics, 1(2): 243–269. 

Nevalainen, Terttu & Helena Raumolin‐Brunbergs (2012). "Historical Sociolinguistics: Origins, Motivations, and Paradigms", in Juan Manuel Hernández-Campoy & Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre (eds.), Handbook of Historical Sociolinguistics, Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 22-40.

Further reading:

Eckert, Penelope. 2012. Three waves of variation study: The emergence of meaning in the study of variation. Annual Review of Anthropology 41. 87–100. https://web-stanford-edu.ezp.sub.su.se/~eckert/PDF/ThreeWaves.pdf

Säily, Tanja, Arja Nurmi, Minna Palander-Collin & Anita Auer (2017). ”The future of historical sociolinguistics?”, in Tanja Säily, Arja Nurmi, Minna Palander-Collin & Anita Auer (eds.), Exploring Future Paths for Historical Sociolinguistics, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1–19.

Teachers: Jonatan Pettersson and Michelle Waldispühl

Focus:

• Spread vs. change and variation
• Models which describe to and explain the spread of linguistic innovations

Lesson plan: TBA

Assignments to Lesson 2: TBA

Study questions to Lesson 2: TBA

Literature:

Trudgill, Peter.  Sociolinguistic typology and the speed of linguistic change (13 pages)

Andersen, Henning. 1988. Center and periphery: adoption, diffusion and spread. In: J. Fisiak (red), Historical Dialectology. Regional and Social. Berlin/New York/Amsterdam. S. 39–83 (45 s.) (Tillgänglig elektroniskt via Stockholms universitetsbibliotek.) → delar

Maegaard, Marie m. fl. 2013. Diffusion of language change. Accomodation to a moving target. I: Journal of Sociolinguistics. 17:1. S. 3–36. (34 s.)

Thöny, Luzius. 2019. "Waves in computer-assisted simulations of linguistic diffusion". In: Historical Linguistics 2015: Selected papers from the 22nd International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Naples, 27-31 July 2015, hrsg. von Michela Cennamo und Claudia Fabrizio. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 348. S. 615-30. John Benjamins: Amsterdam.

Hickey, Raymond. 2012. Internally- and Externally-Motivated Language Change. In: Hernández-Campoy, Juan & Conde-Silvestre, Juan Camilo (red.), The handbook of historical sociolinguistics. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. (Tillgänglig elektroniskt via Stockholms universitetsbibliotek.) S. 387–407. (21 s.)

Conde-Silvestre, Juan Camilo. 2012. The Role of Social Networks and Mobility in Diachronic Sociolinguistics In: Hernández-Campoy, Juan & Conde-Silvestre, Juan Camilo (red.), The handbook of historical sociolinguistics. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. (Tillgänglig elektroniskt via Stockholms universitetsbibliotek.) S. 332–352. (21 s.) I: 

Trask, Robert L. 1996. Historical Linguistics. Följande två avsnitt:10.2 Variation and social stratification, 10.3 Variation as the vehicle of change. London: Arnold. S. 267–285. (18 s.)

Teacher: Thomas Rosén

Focus: diachronic and geographical perspectives on language change.

Lesson plan:

• different kinds of literacy
• methods for studying literacy in historical contexts
• literacy and gender
• case study 1: Sweden
• case study 2: Western Europe 1500–1800
• case study 3: Russia

Assignments to Lesson 3: TBA

Study questions to Lesson 3: TBA

Literature: 

Harvey J. Graff (2009). “Introduction to Historical Studies of Literacy, ” in Understanding Literacy in its Historical Contexts: Socio-Cultural History and the Legacy of Egil Johansson, edited by Harvey J. Graff, Alison Mackinnon, Bengt Sandin and Ian Winchester, 14–22. Lund: Nordic Academic Press.

Robert A. Houston (2011). “Literacy,” EGO – European History Online. http://ieg-ego.eu/en/threads/backgrounds/literacy/robert-a-houston-literacy?set_language=http://ieg-ego.eu/en/threads/backgrounds/literacy/robert-a-houston-literacy

Egil Johansson (2009). “The History of Literacy in Sweden, ” in Understanding Literacy in its Historical Contexts: Socio-Cultural History and the Legacy of Egil Johansson, edited by Harvey J. Graff, Alison Mackinnon, Bengt Sandind and Ian Winchester, 28–59. Lund: Nordic Academic Press. (Also available in: Egil Johansson [1977]. “The History of Literacy in Sweden, in comparison with some other Countries,” Educational Reports, Umeå, 12, 2–42. Umeå: Umeå University adn School of Education.)

Gary Marker (1990). “Literacy and Literacy Texts in Muscovy: A Reconsideration,” Slavic Review 1: 74–89.

Jos Schaeken (2017). “Comments on birchbark documents found in the twenty-first century,” Russian Linguistics 2: 123–149.

Teachers: Michelle Waldispühl and Jonatan Pettersson 

Focus: Standardization processes, letter writing

Lesson plan:
Online mini-lecture: Standardization, standard ideology

• Discussion of ‘dialect’, ‘language’, ‘standard’, ‘nation’, theories of standardization (including research history), standard ideology, myth of the homogenous language
• Studying standardisation processes: language history from below
• Cases: Letter writing and standardization
  • Swedish
  • German
  • English

Assignments to Lesson 4: TBA

Study questions to Lesson 4: TBA

Literature:

Haugen, E. (1966), ‘Dialect, language, nation’, in American Anthropologist 68, 922–935.

Elspaß, S. (2015). Private letters as a source for an alternative history of Late Modern German. In Auer, A., Schreier, D. & Watts, R. J., eds., Letter Writing and Language Change. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 35–52.

Langer, N. (2014). Standard German in the eighteenth century. Norms and use. In Rutten, G., Vosters, R. & Vandenbussche, W. Norms and Usage in Language History, 1600-1900: A sociolinguistic and comparative perspective, Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 277-302.

New handbook on standardization: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/the-cambridge-handbook-of-language-standardization/10E8B61D076BB8DCACB43E809F7A42CD

Further reading:

Elspaß, S. (2020). Alternative sources of data for standardisation histories. Language Policy, 19(2), 281–99. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10993-019-09528-x

Teacher: Memet Aktürk Drake

Focus: Macro-sociolinguistic factors that frame multilingualism and language contact

Lesson plan:​ 

• Introduction to the assignment (live seminar)
• How to capture macro-sociolinguistic factors in historical cases

Video lectures to Lesson 5: TBA

• Historical overview of multilingual societies and types of multilingualism
• Sociolinguistic factors in multilingualism and language contact
• Language policy and multilingualism

Study questions to Lesson 5: TBA

Assignment to Lesson 5    

Literature:

Sarah G. Thomason. 2001. Language Contact. An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 59-98.

Herbert Schendl. 2012. Multilingualism, Code-Switching, and Language Contact in Historical Sociolinguistics. In: Juan Manuel Hernández-Campoy, Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre, and Juan Manuel Hernández-Campoy (eds.). The Handbook of Historical Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 520-533.

Anni Sairio, Minna Palander-Collin. 2012. The Reconstruction of Prestige Patterns in Language History. In: Juan Manuel Hernández-Campoy, Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre, and Juan Manuel Hernández-Campoy (eds.). The Handbook of Historical Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 626-638.  

Nils Langer, Agnete Nesse. 2012. Linguistic Purism. In: Juan Manuel Hernández-Campoy, Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre, and Juan Manuel Hernández-Campoy (eds.). The Handbook of Historical Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 607-625.

Literature references for the pre-recorded mini-lectures:

Sarah G. Thomason. 2001. Language Contact. An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1-58.

Daniel Nettle, Suzanne Romaine. 2000. Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World’s Languages. New York: Oxford University Press, 78-149. 

Ostler, N. (2005). Empires of the Word. A Language History of the World. New York: Harper Collins.

Ulrike Vogl. 2012. Multilingualism in a standard language culture. In: Matthias Hüning, Ulrike Vogl and Olivier Moliner (eds.). Standard Languages and Multilingualism in European History. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1-42.

Rosita Rindler Schjerve, Eva Vetter. 2008. Historical sociolinguistics and multilingualism: Theoretical and methodological issues in the development of a multifunctional framework. In: Rindler Schjerve, R. (ed.). Diglossia and Power: Language Policies and Practice in the 19th Century Habsburg Empire. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 35-66.

Teacher: Susanne Tienken

Focus: TBA

Lesson plan: TBA

Literature: TBA

Teacher: Alexandra Petrulevich

Focus: “infrastructure bias” and critical approaches to corpora and available toolbox in historical sociolinguistics

Lesson plan:

• critical discussion of corpus infrastructures and their impact on research in historical sociolinguistics with a special emphasis on name variation and Named Entity Recognition in corpus construction;
• practical work (“lab”) calculating frequencies + using R-packages on suggested corpus + corpus of choice

Study questions to Lesson 7: TBA

Assignments to Lesson 7: TBA

Literature:

Arnold, T., Ballier, N., Lissón, P. et al. Beyond lexical frequencies: using R for text analysis in the digital humanities. Lang Resources & Evaluation 53, 707–733 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-019-09456-6 26 pages.

Kogkitsidou, E. & Philippe Gambette. (2020). Normalisation of 16th and 17th Century Texts in French and Geographical Named Entity Recognition, in GeoHumanities’20: Proceedings of the 4th ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Geospatial Humanities. Pp. 28–34. 6 pages. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3423337.3429437

Kytö, M. & Pahta, P. (2012). Evidence from historical corpora up to the twentieth century, in: Nevalainen, T. & Elizabeth Closs Traugott (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of the History of English. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199922765.013.0013 12 pages.

Petrulevich, A. (forthcoming). Place-name variation in medieval literature in the digital age, in: Petrulevich, A. & Simon Skovgaard Boeck (eds). Digital Spatial Infrastructures in the Humanities: Mapping Worldviews in Pre-Modern Societies. ARC Humanities Press. 12 pages.

Saario, L., Säily, T., Kaislaniemi, S., & Nevalainen, T. (2021). The burden of legacy: Producing the Tagged Corpus of Early English Correspondence Extension (TCEECE). Research in Corpus Linguistics, 9(1), 104-131. https://doi.org/10.32714/ricl.09.01.07 27 pages.

Students give five-minute presentations of their projects followed by questions from the audience.  

Examination

The course exam consists of three main components: course assignments, oral presentation of a student project and a written essay summarizing the student project and its main results.

Course assignments: TBA

Description of a student project: TBA

Presentation of a student project: TBA

Final essay: TBA

Course Evaluations

The course includes two formative evaluations, after Lesson 3 and Lesson 5, as well as a final summative evaluation to be filled in via the course platform.