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In this paper, we apply the methods of historical sociolinguistics to seventeenth-century religious literature in Basque. We explore issues related to macrosociolinguistics, and, in particular, the problem of contextualisation of authors and their works. As an example of this approach, we analyse Doctrina Christiana by Esteve Materra (published in 1617 and 1623), the first Basque Catholic catechism in the province of Labourd, in the northern part of the Basque Country. It marked the beginning of an intense period of publishing in Basque which lasted until the late seventeenth century. We place the book in the context of major religious movements in France at that time. Materra’s catechism was a response of the Catholic Church to the Reformation in the Basque Country, and was produced with the support of the Church authorities, which needed Basque to reach monolingual speakers. Notwithstanding, Materra’s catechism also attests to the development of a model of written language to be used in the Labourdin literature.

This study uses variationist sociolinguistic methodology to explore the construction of gender in four of Shakespeare’s comedies. Gender performance is at issue in these plays specifically, not only because, in Shakespeare’s time at least, young male actors play the female roles, but also because each play contains a female character in male disguise. By analysing and comparing the patterns of variation used by Shakespeare’s female, male and “female as male” characters, this study provides further insight into Shakespeare’s construction and conceptualisation of gender. Further, by comparing the patterns of gender variation found in these plays with non-fiction data on the gendered variation of the period (Nevalainen, Terttu & Helena Raumolin-Brunberg. 2003. Historical sociolinguistics . Harlow: Pearson Education Ltd.), it is possible to investigate how accurately Shakespeare captures the sociolinguistic variation present in his society. This study hopes to provide support both for the validity of using sociolinguistic methods to study literature but also for using data from literature in studies of historical sociolinguistic variation and change.

Historical metalinguistic discourse is known to often prescribe linguistic variants that are not very frequent in actual language use, and to proscribe frequent variants. Infrequent variants that are promoted through prescription can be innovations, but they can also be conservative forms that have already largely vanished from the spoken language and are now also disappearing in writing. An extreme case in point is the genitive case in Dutch. This has been in decline in usage from at least the thirteenth century onwards, gradually giving way to analytical alternatives such as prepositional phrases. In the grammatical tradition, however, a preference for the genitive case was maintained for centuries. When ‘standard’ Dutch is officially codified in 1805 in the context of a national language policy, the genitive case is again strongly preferred, still aiming to ‘revive’ the synthetic forms. The striking discrepancy between metalinguistic discourse on the one hand, and developments in language use on the other, make the genitive case in Dutch an interesting case for historical sociolinguistics. In this paper, we tackle various issues raised by the research literature, such as the importance of genre differences as well as variation within particular genres, through a detailed corpus-based analysis of the influence of prescription on language practices in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Dutch.

In this article, I explore code-switching in Llibre dels Fets (a 13th century chronicle that narrates the life and deeds of king James I of Aragon) from a glottopolitical perspective in order to uncover the linguistic ideologies reflected in the text through this phenomenon. Code-switching in contemporary Romance languages, as well as in Latin and Arabic, is found throughout the text, mostly within reported speech. Through the analysis of these fragments and the analysis of the labels used to refer to each of these varieties, it is shown that: (i) different varieties are used to express either allegiance (Catalan and Occitan) or opposition (Western Ibero-Romance) to the figure of the King, and that that Aragonese was erased as a language of the Crown of Aragon; (ii) code-switching in Latin is used to confer authority to the discourse; (iii) code-switching in the Romance languages is a mechanism to express group membership; and finally (iv) that mutual intelligibility between Catalan and the attested contemporary Romance varieties is assumed at the time of composition of the text.

This article presents research on the system of T/V distinction in Hebrew from the 16th to the 20th century. As the article is the first attempt to describe the phenomenon, it aims to give a general overview of the T/V distinction in European Hebrew, introducing new language data, and posing new questions. One book served as terminus a quo for the whole article: Course of the Russian Language by Zalkind (Epstein, Zalkind. 1869. Учебная книга Русскаго Языка. מסלת הלמוד או ספר ללמד לשון רוסיא עם העתקה אל לשון עברי [Course of the Russian language. Path of learning or book to study the language of Russia with translation into Hebrew] . Warsaw: Schriftgisser), written in Hebrew, contains approximately 100 pages of everyday dialogues in both Hebrew and Russian. The question of whether the Hebrew language of the 19th century was a dead or living language is still a matter of debate. In that regard, the course book provides valuable material that does not fit into the framework of the general idea of the history of the Hebrew language. Basic elements of conversational politeness are the focus of the analysis. The system, in which V-forms of address are expressed by a third-person singular, is reconstructed from the conversations in the Epstein’s book and traced back to the 16th century in a wide range of various Hebrew sources. The T/V distinction in Hebrew is also compared to the similar phenomena in Polish and German. Originating before the 16th century, the T/V distinction disappeared in modern Israeli Hebrew. However, it is still in use in some specific communication situations, which can be regarded as residues of earlier forms of traditional speech practices.