Indexicality and enregisterment are terms introduced by Silverstein (1976, 2003) and Agha (2003, 2007) as part of an ideological approach to linguistic variation and change. This chapter explains these terms, discusses how they have been used in research into the historical sociolinguistics of English, and evaluates the potential of this approach for further research in the history of English. The chapter begins with an explanation of the terminology and the research contexts in which it has been used. It then goes on to note the difficulties of applying an approach which was first used in ethnographic research to historical contexts. Three types of historical evidence are identified as providing evidence for historical indexicality and enregisterment: metalinguistic and metapragmatic comments; dialect literature and literary dialect; and ego-documents. For each of these, a review of research in English historical linguistics using such data is provided.

This chapter explores the language of dialect writing in the history of English. It surveys the complexities underlying the social and linguistic interactions between (non-)standard varieties with examples of literary dialect and dialect literature written between 1500 and 1900 that are now available in the Salamanca Corpus. It is shown that such evidence provides useful insight into the history of forms that remain underexplored, while it vividly reflects changing ideologies about dialect variation. In this regard, this chapter draws on third-wave sociolinguistic models to illustrate that the combination of frameworks such as enregisterment and indexicality with quantitative analysis of dialect writing can prove beneficial in reconstructing linguistic ideas about dialects and ascertaining shifting indexicalities, while it informs our understanding of the social meaning of dialect variation in the past.

To study the history of spoken English is to study its extant vestiges in written texts. This chapter draws upon work that connects speech and writing in historical English to present a framework for contextualising written documents and the particularities of their relationships to spoken language. It examines how written English represents spoken English through different styles and genres of text and across different chronological periods. A late medieval deposition might provide certain clues to the English spoken at the time owing to the non-standard orthography and the regional morphosyntax. By contrast, a contemporary poem might provide different clues to the twentieth-century English spoken in the Caribbean owing to the representation of local English through lexical, syntactic and orthographic means. Neither of these is a perfectly faithful record of speech, however, and each reflects different constraints of genre, style, writing practices and pragmatic pressures in the Englishes that they depict.