This chapter clarifies that the treatment and reliability of orthographic variables as linguistic variables has already been tested with the application of both macroscopic and microscopic approaches to digitalized historical materials. Patterns of variation and change in past periods of a given language have been evidenced through the observation of its users’ sociolinguistic behavior in social interaction. The recent prolific research output in historical sociolinguistics reflects the growth of interest in style and register within the field. The role of new genres and text types (e.g. travel accounts, court records, recipes, diaries, and letters) is thus also being highlighted as materials worth studying for both interspeaker and intraspeaker variation. The chapter explores the indexical potential of orthographic variation in style, register, genre and text types. The extralinguistic factors conditioning the use of different spelling forms in cases of variability are usually based on production, geographical location, sociodemographics (sex, age, rank), social networks, text type (and genre), style, register and medium (handwritten vs. printed). In earlier periods, when correspondence and other ego-documents were probably the most frequent means of written communication and without the existence of a well-established and fixed standard variety, orthographic variation constituted a source of social meaning.

This chapter explains that linguistic uniformity is rarely characteristic of nation-states. In Europe, official national languages brought powerful and ongoing consequences for ‘minority’ languages and their speakers. Nineteenth-century nation- and empire-building affected regional speakers of national languages, such as Flemish or Austrian German, or Afrikaans among other postcolonial varieties of European languages. Imposing European languages in settler nations has irrevocably endangered or eliminated Indigenous languages and cultures. The debates about European orthographic authorities surveyed in this chapter expose conflicting cultural allegiances and pedagogical needs. Vernaculars inherited diverse writing practices from different scholarly discourse communities, whether government chanceries or literary scriptoria or national language academies. Representative conflicts include tensions between scholarly traditions and simplified spellings for mass state education. Existing traditions can be difficult to displace, especially in democracies. Educators’ engagement with the state reminds us that pedagogy is often a matter of politics. Journalists can support or undermine proposed norms, whether using or reporting them. Successful reforms sometimes reflect intersections of low literacy and/or authoritarian states. Many debates that raged in the nineteenth century have continued into modern times. With the rise of social media, individuals can not only internalize but also influence and drive discourses of group identity.

This chapter provides a short introduction to historical orthography, discussing purposes, ambitions and boundaries within the subfield. It also outlines chapter contents.

This chapter introduces readers to the concept of spelling standardization, offering an overview of the ways in which spelling standardization occurred, the agents behind the modern-like developments in historical spelling, and the chronology of the process of development in historical English. The chapter departs from the idea that historical spelling represents one of the most complex facets of linguistic standardization, and one where disagreements exist about its overall process of development. The contribution moves on to discuss the idea that standardization in English spelling was, for some scholars, an intralinguistic, spontaneous process of self-organization, and for others a multiparty affair that involved authors, readers, the printing press and linguistic commentators of the time. The final section summarizes findings from recent work that focuses on large-scale developments over the sixteenth and the seventeenth century, and overviews the role and relevance of theoreticians, schoolmasters, authors and readers in Early Modern English spelling.

This chapter focuses on the terminology and typology relevant to the study of early writing systems from a linguistic perspective. It first introduces writing as a linguistic notation system that arose in the context of numerical and iconographic notation systems, and the study of writing systems as a growing subdiscipline of linguistics. Next, it presents the typology of written signs, including the basic divide between logograms and phonograms. It also describes how writing arose independently in three or four places in the world, resulting in writing systems that were heavily logographic, encoding morphemes, which have both phonological and semantic values. Abstraction along the phonological and semantic dimensions led to phonography and semantic determinatives. The author briefly characterizes each of the pristine systems and considers the typology of phonographic writing more closely, following the traditional division into syllabaries and alphabets. This chapter defends the established definition of syllabary and offers some criticism of the Daniels’ abjad-abugida-alphabet typology of segmental scripts. The chapter presents some early historical examples of phonographic scripts and considers implications of script typology on sign inventory size as well as the evolution of script types, and whether there is directionality in script evolution.

This chapter discusses the ongoing enterprise of developing typologies of writing systems, which strives to propose a coherent framework for classifying the world’s diverse writing systems. Because different theoretical assumptions about the core entities under analysis can yield divergent proposals, it is valuable to continually assess the conceptual and terminology contrasts that both shape and communicate typology proposals. Therefore, this chapter examines the underlying conceptualizations, the diverse, and often inconsistent, terminology, and the main limitations of existing typologies of writing systems, to further elucidate the materialization of written language both diachronically and synchronically. The substantial third section illustrates how the majority of typology proposals classify writing systems primarily in terms of a core set of representational principles, or mapping relationships, assumed to exist between the linguistic units and graphemes of a language. After commenting on the elusive trinity of key terms (writing system, script and orthography), this section outlines some of the most influential, controversial and promising typology proposals and reflects on the various conceptual and terminological distinctions propounded to capture the principles of representational mapping. The last section of the chapter briefly considers the merits of exploring complementary or alternative approaches to writing system typologies.

This chapter gives an overview of different approaches to data collection. Three methods of comparative variable studies are presented in detail and illustrated with examples from the early history of printing: intratextual, intertextual and cross-textual variable analyses. Intratextual variable analysis investigates the frequency and range of spelling variants in a single text copy and is particularly useful for the detection of possible internal factors that trigger the choice of a variant. The intertextual analytical method compares the results of two or more intratextual investigations, for example with respect to different external determinants such as time and place. The third method, cross-textual variable analysis, compares the spelling variants of different versions of the same text, and is concerned with alterations from one version to the other in order to detect a pattern of deliberate changes. The advantages and disadvantages of the three methods are considered in the chapter, and their inherent theoretical premises are discussed. The author shows that data collection and interpretation are closely intertwined, and also that the chosen approach prestructures the data and leads to preferences for specific interpretations.

This chapter introduces the topic of expressivity and outlines the contributions to the book.