Historical sociolinguistics

Historical sociolinguistics is a research area that aims to combine expertise from historical linguistics and sociolinguistics to study past or long-term language changes in considering the language use in social context. Due to the sparsity of records, the practical research requires a creative combination of different types of data sources.

My PhD dissertation studies the mechanisms of spelling standardization for end of the 19th century Estonian. To study this, I combine a variety of datasets (i.e. text corpora, demographic data, bibliographic data, biographic data) to characterise the language community of an emerging literate culture. In that era, spelling variation is influenced by social and geographical background, and prescription plays an important role in determining individual language use.

Historical Sociolinguistics community are connected via the HiSoN network.