Volume 6, Issue 2 - Special Issue: Comparative sociolinguistic perspectives on the rate of linguistic change; Guest Editors: Terttu Nevalainen, Tanja Säily and Turo Vartiainen

This issue of the Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics aims to contribute to our understanding of language change in real time by presenting a group of articles particularly focused on social and sociocultural factors underlying language diversification and change. By analysing data from a varied set of languages, including Greek, English, and the Finnic and Mongolic language families, and mainly focussing their investigation on the Middle Ages, the authors connect various social and cultural factors with the specific topic of the issue, the rate of linguistic change. The sociolinguistic themes addressed include community and population size, conflict and conquest, migration and mobility, bi- and multilingualism, diglossia and standardization. In this introduction, the field of comparative historical sociolinguistics is considered a cross-disciplinary enterprise with a sociolinguistic agenda at the crossroads of contact linguistics, historical comparative linguistics and linguistic typology.

Speed of linguistic change is not constant: it differs as between different language and dialects, and between different chronological periods. These differences are, at least to some extent, conditioned by social parameters. Two major social factors are involved in producing these different rates of linguistic change. There is, first, the role of the relative degree of contact versus isolation which speech communities have experienced: a good example is provided by the contrast between Faroese and Icelandic as opposed to the continental Scandinavian languages. There is, secondly, an important role for relative social stability versus social instability in the histories of communities. There is considerable evidence to suggest that conservative language varieties generally tend to be the ones which are relatively more geographically isolated than rapid-change varieties, as well as being relatively more stable as this paper illustrates, through a study of the linguistic consequences of social upheavals involving different historical periods, different continents, and different languages.

This paper will focus on analysing user-related variation in Greek in Egypt as seen through potsherd letters ( ostraka ) of the residents of Roman forts, praesidia , in the Eastern Desert of Egypt. The letters can be dated to the first and second centuries CE. I suggest that the linguistic situation in the forts can be seen as evidence of extensive language contact that was connected with the considerable economic activity of the Roman Empire. All military forts had several L2 Greek speakers of various ethnicity. In what follows I will suggest that Roman soldiers and their civil partners had created a system that can be described as a feature pool of Greek variables. I suggest that the data from Egypt show that L2 speakers of Greek had an effect on Greek at all grammatical levels, strengthening existing and ongoing endogenous changes by creating substantial contact-induced variation in phonology as well as in morphosyntax and even phraseology. The intense language contact suggests, in my opinion, that language dynamics of this period follow the resilience theory, where various different phases of the adaptive cycle can be simultaneous, as almost all possible varieties of Greek, from historical High Attic to Multiethnic Greek are in use.

In this paper, we explore the rate of language change in the history of English. Our main focus is on detecting periods of accelerated change in Middle English (1150–1500), but we also compare the Middle English data with the Early Modern period (1500–1700) in order to establish a longer diachrony for the pace at which English has changed over time. Our study is based on a meta-analysis of existing corpus research, which is made available through a new linguistic resource, the Language Change Database (LCD). By aggregating the rates of 44 individual changes, we provide a critical assessment of how well the theory of punctuated equilibria (Dixon, Robert M. W. 1997. The rise and fall of languages . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) fits with our results. More specifically, by comparing the rate of language change with major language-external events, such as the Norman Conquest and the Black Death, we provide the first corpus-based meta-analysis of whether these events, which had significant societal consequences, also had an impact on the rate of language change. Our results indicate that major changes in the rate of linguistic change in the late medieval period could indeed be connected to the social and cultural after-effects of the Norman Conquest. We also make a methodological contribution to the field of English historical linguistics: by re-using data from existing research, linguists can start to ask new, fundamental questions about the ways in which language change progresses.

This paper examines the Mongolic family of languages from the point of view of their different paths and rates of evolution, and with a view on the general problem concerning the speed of language change. All extant Mongolic languages descend from a relatively recent ancestral form of speech, Proto-Mongolic, spoken by the historical Mongols in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries and documented in a number of written sources conventionally known as Middle Mongol. A comparison of the modern Mongolic languages with Proto-Mongolic and Middle Mongol reveals considerable differences in their rates of evolution, with some languages being highly innovative, while others are conspicuously conservative. These differences are evident at all levels of linguistic structure and substance, including phonology, grammar, and lexicon. The reasons for the different rates of evolution can be sought in a variety of linguistic and extralinguistic factors, including not only the linguistic environment, but also the political and geographical context of the speakers, as well as their demographic structure, economic and cultural profile, and degree of mobility.

This paper brings together typological and sociolinguistic approaches to language variation. Its main aim is to evaluate the relative effect of language internal and external factors on the number of cases in the world’s languages. I model word order as a language internal predictor; it is well-known that, for instance, languages with verb-final word order (that is, languages in which both nominal arguments precede the main lexical verb) tend to develop complex case systems more often than languages with SVO word order do. I model population size and the proportion of second language speakers in the speech community as sociolinguistic predictors; these factors have been suggested recently to influence the distribution of the number of cases in the world’s languages. Modelling the data with generalized linear mixed effects modelling suggests an interaction between the number of cases, word order, and the proportion of second language speakers on the one hand, and between the number of cases, word order, and population size, on the other. This kind of complex interactions have not been previously reported in typological research wherefore they call for more complex explanations than previously suggested for cross-linguistic variation.

In the contemporary northern Baltic Sea area, there are two states, Finland and Estonia, in which a western Uralic language has an official status. Several Finnic minority languages are or used to be spoken in the adjacent areas in the contact zone of Baltic, Germanic and Slavic languages. Historically, the north-eastern surroundings of the Gulf of Finland reflect a gradual spread of the language area during the past millennium and especially the late Middle Ages, while more southern areas in contemporary Estonia, and its eastern neighbourhood in Russia show longer continuity of language borders. The Finnic languages were used predominantly orally until very recently, whereas written language began to affect non-standard varieties more strongly only in the 19th and 20th centuries. The diversification of the Finnic languages in the Northeastern Baltic Sea area involves both integration and disintegration of mutually closely related varieties. This article focuses on i) the variability of changes and their correlation with emerging divergence between Finnic languages, ii) local language contacts during the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern age, and iii) the rate of linguistic change. The external powers affecting the diversity between the Finnic languages include the settling of early Swedish, German and Slavic centres among or in the vicinity of Finnic communities, the policies of medieval Catholic and Orthodox church, the extension of the trading networks of the Hanseatic League, wars and conflicts between dominant political powers in the east and west, as well as the gradual establishment of political borders. I will suggest that all these factors have played a role in the rate of both lexical and grammatical change.