This Afterword discusses the chapters presented in the volume. It argues that by aligning corpus linguistics research with societal needs and ethical considerations, experts in the field can make significant contributions to addressing global challenges, shaping future research priorities. The Afterword underscores the practical applications of corpus research methods, demonstrating how corpus linguists’ work can effectively tackle social issues of interest outside the academic sphere. The afterword looks at how shaping policy decisions and fostering a culture of knowledge exchange and collaboration both within academia and beyond can enhance the visibility and applicability of the field.

In this chapter, we take the perspective of the sociology of language, focusing first on language maintenance and shift in historical settings. We then expand the discussion to include issues of language vitality and of reversing language shift, based on examples for seventeenth-century Dunkirk and twentieth-century Constantinople. A more general perspective of language policy and planning is subsequently developed, including crucial notions such as status planning, corpus planning and language-in-education planning. Examples and case studies are taken from a variety of languages, including Hebrew and Dutch. The Dutch case also serves to illustrate language planning at the level of the nation, and as a function of historical nationalism. The final part of the chapter addresses isssues such as language conflict, the invisibilisation of languages, both in discourse and in practice, and linguistic genocide. We discuss examples from the Habsburg Empire, Belgium, the German–Danish–Frisian area and the Menominee people in Wisconsin.

In this chapter, we focus on the meso- and micro-levels of social organisation, below the macro-levels discussed in Chapters 1 and 2. We first discuss social network theory, including crucial concepts such as ties, density and multiplexity, and explain the relationship with innovation diffusion and norm enforcement. We then explore to what extent social network theory can be applied to historical situations, distinguishing between functional and emotional ties. Examples and case studies of historical network studies are taken from English and Afrikaans. The chapter also discusses related models such as coalitions and communities, in particular, communities of practice, text communities and discourse communities. The final part of the chapter addresses individual variation and style shifting on the basis of examples from English and German data.

In this chapter, we elaborate on the sociolinguistic theory introduced in Chapter 1, focusing on variationist approaches that correlate language and society. We introduce the theory of language change developed by Weinreich et al. (1968), which encompasses the contraints problem, the transition problem, the embedding problem, the evaluation problem and the actuation problem. We then discuss social macro-categories such as social rank, gender, age and generations, arguing that detailed sociohistorical evidence is needed for establishing these categories in order to prevent an anachronistic approach to sociolinguistic history. Literacy, education and writing experience are discussed as highly relevant social factors for the sociolinguistic analysis of linguistic history. Case studies are taken from French and Dutch. The chapter ends by describing the variationist approach as the first of three waves of sociolinguistics.

This chapter introduces the theory of sociolinguistics using concepts such as variation, inherent variability, social meaning, real and apparent time, and the S-curve. We argue for the importance of a sociolinguistic approach to language history, and introduce key concepts used in historical sociolinguistics such as literacy and the bad data problem. We also dicuss the need for sociohistorical baseline evidence to reconstruct social orders and hierarchies in the past. Two case studies are discussed, which illustrate the applicability of sociolinguistic theories and methods to historical data by demonstrating the social embedding of ongoing changes in historical English, and the role of social mobility and social aspirers in these changes.

This chapter first discusses to what extent we can find attitudes in historical contexts. Whereas explicit attitudes can be culled from metalinguistic texts, implicit attitudes may be reconstructed on the basis of variation in language use, for example, in the use of pronouns versus full noun phrases. Such discursive patterns are signs of indexicality, which can be seen as the linguistic form of more intangible language ideologies. The chapter then introduces main concepts from language ideological theory, such as erasure and iconisation. Distinguishing between language myths and language ideologies, we discuss a range of examples, such as the myth of polite language and the standard language ideology. A number of case studies, including purism in the German metalinguistic tradition, linguistic debates about antiquity and ethnicity in Early Modern Spain, and the establishment of Luxembourgish as a national language, are used to further illustrate key concepts and approaches.

Traditional language histories have often focused narrowly on formal printed texts, produced by educated elite men from urban social elites, largely neglecting the everyday language practices of ordinary people. This chapter introduces the perspective of language history from below, where we shift our focus to these often-overlooked voices, in order to arrive at a fuller and more complete understanding of historical language variation and change. We discuss the challenges faced by investigations of the everyday language of ordinary people, including difficulties in determining actual authorship and interpreting texts produced through delegated writing. Based on case studies and examples from a range of different historical and linguistic contexts, we show how examining ego-documents such as private letters and diaries from lower social ranks can reveal valuable insights and complement and at times even correct our existing view of language histories.

Changes in social structure often lead to mobility and migration. Urbanisation is one important outcome of mobility and migration. Mobility, migration and urbanisation lead to dialect contact, that is, between speakers of mutually intelligible varieties. This chapter first introduces general concepts such as diffusion and supralocalisation, and then moves on to discuss sociolinguistic models developed for the analysis of dialect contact, including the theories of koineisation and new-dialect formation, based on principles such as accommodation and salience. Case studies are taken from medieval Spain, Early Modern New Mexico and twentieth-century Norway. The chapter also addresses the role of new speakers in contact situations, based on an example from sixteenth-century Tuscany, and ends with a short discussion of sociolinguistic typology.

Different texts have different characteristics. In this chapter, we first explore the concepts of register, genre and style, which are, in the tradition of Biber, linked to communicative functions and situational characteristics. The co-occurrence of register features and dimensions are introduced as the linguistic indicators of communicative functions. A particularly useful approach to register centres around keyness, which we demonstrate with historical Portuguese data. We then introduce discourse traditions as a historical-linguistic concept closely related to genre and register. We use French literary examples to explain stylistic differences and the link with the Labovian distinction between indicators, markers and stereotypes. This leads to a discussion of indexicality and indexical fields more generally, for which we draw on ancient Greek plays. The chapter continues the discussion of the literary representation of language variation on the basis of English texts comprising dialect, and explains the important concept of enregisterment.

This chapter discusses standardisation as a major factor in sociolinguistic history. After a brief dicussion of basic concepts such as diglossia, Ausbau, Abstand and diaglossia, we introduce the Haugen model, including the key concepts of selection, codification, elaboration and acceptance. We go on to argue that the later introduced concept of implementation is crucial in analyses of the interaction of norms and language use in the language community. Focusing on this interaction, and based on case studies from English and Dutch, three scenarios are distinguished: prescriptive influence, prescriptive delay and concurrent prescriptivism. The chapter ends by situating the interaction of norms and usage into the wider framework of the total linguistic fact as developed by Silverstein.

In this chapter, we focus on multilingualism and language contact, moving away from the strong focus on monolingualism characteristic of many traditional approaches to language history, and discussing various onsets, scenarios and outcomes of language contact. We introduce the concepts of borrowing and imposition as central constructs to understand contact-induced change in language, illustrating and critically examining these ideas in three case studies: the development of loanwords in Canadian French, Germanic substrate effects in the formation of American Englishes and mixed-language business writing in medieval Britain after the Norman Conquest. Building on these cases, we discuss which elements of the language can be transferred and explore possible pathways of social diffusion of borrowings, as well touching upon various traits and examples of code switching and similar multilingual practices in historical texts. Finally, we evaluate the constructs of pidgin and creole languages, discussing to what extent they can be seen as different in structural terms, or whether their distinctiveness arises primarily from the sociohistorical circumstances from which they arose.