Historical sociolinguistics: Language change in Tudor and Stuart England

Terttu Nevalainen & Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, Historical sociolinguistics: Language change in Tudor and Stuart England (Longman Linguistics Library). London: Pearson Education, 2003. Pp. xvi, 266. Historical sociolinguistics is another outcome of the long-term endeavor by Terttu Nevalainen and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, from the English Department at the University of Helsinki, to “put sociolinguistics to the test of time” (p. 202) by reconstructing the English language in some of its social and historical contexts, here in the Tudor and Stuart periods (Early Modern English). This enterprise has also allowed the authors to refine the methodology of historical sociolinguistics: first by confronting both the fragmentary nature of historical materials and the difficulties of socially reconstructing the past – the “bad data problem,” in the words of Labov – and second by looking for the solutions afforded by ancillary disciplines like corpus linguistics and social history. In fact, the authors' research is built, on the one hand, upon the Corpus of Early English correspondence, a collection of personal letters (nearly 2.7 million words from 1410 to 1681) compiled specifically for historical sociolinguistic research, which ensures the reliable reconstruction of both linguistic and extralinguistic variables, as well as the commonsense use of the findings of social history, which facilitates access to period-specific information in the process of reconstructing the sociohistorical circumstances that may have affected linguistic variation and change in the past. Corpus linguistics and social history, in the view of Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg, scientifically legitimate historical sociolinguistics by conferring upon it “empirical” and “historical” validity.