Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics

About this journal

Objective
The Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics (JHSL) is a double-blind peer-reviewed forum for research into the social history of language. We welcome original contributions (both linguistic and interdisciplinary) from young and established scholars alike on aspects of language and society in the past including (but not limited to) the social embedding of language variation and change, issues of language contact and conflict, historical multilingualism, the social stratification of writing skills, the development of language norms and the impact of language ideologies. JHSL also publishes book reviews of recent work in these domains. Both the managing editorial team and the editorial board are members of the Historical Sociolinguistics Network.

Topics

Language in sociohistorical context
Variation and change
Language contact and conflict
Language shift
Language standardization
Corpus linguistics
Multilingualism
Language ideologies

Article formats
Research articles

Your Benefits

Your benefits:

In-depth study of language in its social and historical context
Interdisciplinary approach to linguistics
State-of-the-art contributions to the growing field of research
High quality peer-review

Special issues
The Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics welcomes proposals for special issues. Proposals need to provide an explanation of the main theme of the special issue (500-1,000 words) and abstracts of the individual papers (200-300 words each, without references). When compiling a proposal, please keep the following points in mind:

Special issues should have one well-defined overarching theme that is of relevance to the field and of interest to the broad readership of the Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics. The theme of the issue should be explained against the background of recent scholarship in historical sociolinguistics.
The individual papers should be preceded by an introduction by the guest editors in which they explain the theme of the issue as well as introduce the papers.
Every paper in the issue should have a clear connection to the overarching theme and has to address historical and sociolinguistic issues.
A special issue ideally comprises papers on a variety of languages.

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Mixed: Turkish–Armenian language contact and its invisibilization

August 22, 2025

Jennifer Manoukian

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This article strives to offer the historical sociolinguistic context needed to understand the use of Turkish loanwords in the informal Western Armenian spoken today. It does so by proposing a new framing for pre-twentieth-century Armenian dialects that underscores their openness to contact-induced change. This new framing aims to counter purist currents in scholarly and popular discourses that have treated loanwords in Armenian – Turkish and otherwise – as examples of corruption, contamination, and perversion, thereby vilifying them and erasing awareness of their longstanding normalcy and ubiquity in spoken varieties of Armenian. I begin by delving into this study’s contributions to two distinct audiences: historical sociolinguists and scholars of Armenian history and linguistics. After a brief overview of Armenian dialects in the nineteenth century, I draw on insights from contact linguistics and on a corpus of largely untapped Armenian-language materials to draw attention to contact features in one of the most well-documented Armenian dialects of the Ottoman Empire: the Armenian dialect of Istanbul. Here I focus specifically on Turkish contact features found at the lexical level in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and illustrate how studying them can offer historians new lines of inquiry and entry points into the largely unexplored social histories of Armenians in the Ottoman capital and beyond. I end with a brief look at how Ottoman Armenian intellectuals actively worked to stigmatize, pathologize and invisibilize Turkish contact features in the second half of the nineteenth century and how the ideologies they invented continue to shape the way many Western Armenian speakers use and think about language today.
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(De)constructing “verbatimness”: a study of speech reporting strategies in the late modern Flemish courtroom

August 21, 2025

Magda Serwadczak

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Speech reporting and reported speech are omnipresent in courtroom discourse and often regarded as crucial for presenting evidence during trial. Contemporary courtroom procedures emphasize the importance of accurately preserving previous speech, ideally aiming for a verbatim (word-for-word) record. However, the process of reporting speech rarely involves literal, unbiased replication of past utterances, making actual “verbatimness” largely unachievable. While the “verbatimness standard”, feasible or not, is commonplace in today’s courtrooms, its historical development and applicability in the past remain relatively unexplored. Using a combination of corpus-driven, statistical approaches and qualitative discourse analytic methods, the present study examines how speech is reported in late modern Flemish courtroom records, how the use of speech reporting strategies changes across time and how these strategies are set against the background of legal procedures and genre conventions. Additionally, the analysis explores different pragmatic and discursive functions of speech reporting to determine if (and how) they contribute to the construction of “verbatimness”. The study is further complemented by an examination of contemporaneous instruction manuals and training materials for scribes to gain a better understanding of conventions and regulations governing the process of drafting documentation in 19th-century Flemish courtroom.
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Lingala only? A history of the D. R. Congo’s ideologies and counter-ideologies of monolingualism

August 21, 2025

Margot Luyckfasseel, Michael Meeuwis, Joshua Castillo

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This article investigates how ideologies of monolingualism have evolved over the course of Congolese history. Since King Leopold II’s Congo Free State (1885–1908), missionaries, linguists, and policymakers have made arguments to defend the top-down imposition of a singular language for vertical communication between the colonial state and the Congolese population. Similar debates remained at the heart of negotiations over state power throughout the late colonial and Mobutist era. While Belgian and Congolese actors evaluated the needs and possibilities of monolingualism in Congo from their own perspectives, their arguments were always driven by the conviction that language policy and the effective implementation of state power went hand in hand. As such, the myth of the so-called Congolese Tower of Babel remained a recurrent trope to justify monolingual propositions. We argue that ideologies advancing the potential of French and local languages, mainly Lingala, as sole national language have swung like a pendulum throughout the colonial and postcolonial period, shifting to the rhythm of evolving beliefs about the emancipatory potential that European and African languages could offer. Today, defenders of Lingala seem to be on the winning end: the language’s historical development within Congo’s sociolinguistic landscape has resulted in a direct association with national identity.
Open Access
“Ik heef niets gezeg”: the past tense in an Anglo-Boer War concentration camp diary

August 21, 2025

Johanita Kirsten

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This paper presents a case study of the writing of the young woman Rensche van der Walt in her personal diary during the Anglo-Boer War, specifically 1901 to 1902. A corpus of about 24,000 words was compiled from the diary, detailing the personal experiences of Van der Walt in concentration camps during the war. This study focuses on her use of the past tense to determine the extent to which it aligns with modern Afrikaans norms rather than Dutch norms, and it is contextualized against a control corpus of letters written during the same war. The results show that Van der Walt uses the Dutch preterit to a limited extent, while the modern Afrikaans past tense (based on the Dutch perfect) is the preferred choice. This aligns with the usage in the letter corpus. However, the past participles used in the diary are more regularized, with much fewer inflectional markings than in the letters, indicating that Van der Walt is slightly ahead of her time regarding this development – it is not unexpected, as young women are known to lead the adoption of new variants during periods of language change. The findings also shed light on the extent of variation still present in the past tense use of semi-literate writers of early Afrikaans, a topic which has not received much attention in corpus-based studies yet.
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Hillary Taylor: Language and Social Relations in Early Modern England

August 21, 2025

Tino Oudesluijs

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The Victorians and English dialect

August 21, 2025

Paul Cooper

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Variation and change in pronominal address in 19th and early 20th-century German private letters

July 31, 2025

Markus Schiegg, Stephan Elspaß

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This article for the first time provides a corpus-based investigation of the variation and change in the system of German pronominal forms of address in the 19th and early 20th century. Today’s opposition between formal Sie (‘Siezen’) and informal Du (‘Duzen’) originates in the 18th century; Sie mainly replaced formal forms of address with Ihr (‘Ihrzen’) or Er / Sie (‘Erzen’). The data for our analyses are taken from two corpora of private correspondence – patient letters and emigrant letters – with a total of 2,748 letters by 788 writers. Contrary to previous findings that had mainly been based on grammar book accounts and/or anecdotal evidence, our results show that the use of the formal Sie pronoun was still rather common when addressing parents in the second half of the 19th century and even the early 20th century. There was no abrupt collapse of the four-tier system of pronominal address to today’s two-tier system but in some regional non-standard varieties of German a three-tier system continued to be used throughout the 20th century. The addressee, the linguistic context and a writer’s changing emotional state prove to be relevant factors of intra-individual variation. The data also suggest that male writers and experienced writers lead the change from formal Sie to informal Du in addressing parents. Overall, the observed change in pronominal address can be interpreted as a prototypical invisible-hand process.
Open Access
Orality and overtness: effects on Spanish subject use

July 31, 2025

Gemma McCarley

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This study of a corpus of varieties of Spanish finds that the level of orality of a text is a strong predictor of subject pronoun expression. Following previous studies’ application of orality to interrogative constructions in Brazilian Portuguese and French, an orality measurement was adapted for Spanish and applied to the new corpus Corpus Diacrónico del Español Latinoamericano: Edición de Sujetos (CorDELES). CorDELES was created to investigate the historic development of subject pronoun expression that led to the high rates of overt subject pronouns attested in current varieties of Latin American Spanish, specifically whether overt subject pronoun expression increases following contact with the enslaved Africans brought to the Caribbean during the colonial period. This contact hypothesis was used as a backdrop to investigate the effects of orality on a corpus. Indeed, the inclusion of orality as a predictor in a mixed-effects model found significant effects for a distinction between Spain and the Americas as well as an intriguing interaction between year and orality. These results add to the burgeoning body of work revealing the benefits of accounting for orality in corpus work.

Issue 0

Issue 1

Special collection: Language Change from Above and from Below in Greek and Latin; Guest Editors: Ezra la Roi and Dalia Pratali Maffei

Issue 2

Special Issue: The role of merchants in language standardisation; Special Issue Editors: Anita Auer (Université de Lausanne) and Josh Brown (University of Western Australia)

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

Issue 1

Issue 2

Special Issue: Historical heritage language ego-documents: From home, from away, and from below, Edited by Joshua Brown

Special Issue: Constructing the social margins in Early and Late Modern English, Edited by Minna Nevala, Marianna Hintikka and Turo Vartiainen

Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics publishes special and thematic issues focussed on important and emerging topics in the field of study. The journal has established a rigorous process to ensure that any special issue manuscripts follow the same high-quality standards and peer review processes as regular manuscripts. For further information on the journal’s peer review policy please see the "Instructions for Authors".

Recent Special Issues

Volume 10 | Issue 2 Special Issue: The role of merchants in language standardisation; Special Issue Editors: Anita Auer (Université de Lausanne) and Josh Brown (University of Western Australia)

Journal Impact Factor	0.4	2024, Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate, 2025)
5-year Journal Impact Factor	0.6	2024, Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate, 2025)
Journal Citation Indicator	0.24	2024, Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate, 2025)
CiteScore	0.9	2024, Scopus (Elsevier B.V., 2025)
SCImago Journal Rank	0.133	2024, SJR (Scimago Lab, 2025; Data Source: Scopus)
Source Normalized Impact per Paper	0.920	2024, CWTS Journal Indicators (CWTS B.V., 2025; Data Source: Scopus)

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You can easily submit your manuscript online. Simply go to...
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High quality manuscript processing
Optional open access publication
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Please note

Manuscripts must be written in clear and concise English; articles should not exceed the limit of 12,000 words
Please see the De Gruyter Mouton Journal Style Sheet for information regarding the proper copyediting and formatting of your manuscript.
Before submitting your article please have a look at our Information for Authors and our Copyright Agreement.
Once your article is accepted you have the option to publish it open access
Our Repository Policy allows you to distribute 30 PDF copies of your published article to colleagues (the PDF has to include the information that it is an author's copy). Please also feel free to distribute the link to the online abstract
If you have any general questions please visit our FAQ for authors.

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Authors have the option to publish their article under an open access license. The standard article processing charge for a hybrid open access article is 2,000 Euro (plus VAT if applicable). Please note that corresponding authors from institutions with which we have a transformative agreement, can publishing open access without paying the fee. More information on the eligible institutions and articles can be found here.

Editor-In-Chief
Gijsbert Rutten (Leiden University, The Netherlands)

Editors
Anita Auer (Université de Lausanne, Switzerland)
Israel Sanz-Sánchez (West Chester University, USA)
Rik Vosters (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium)

Review Editor
Anna Havinga
21 Woodland Road
Clifton
Bristol
BS8 1TE
UK

Honorary Editors
Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (Leiden University, The Netherlands)
Wim Vandenbussche (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium)

Editorial Board
Jeroen Darquennes (Université de Namur, Belgium)
Ana Deumert (University of Cape Town, South Africa)
Stephan Elspaß (Universität Salzburg, Austria)
Susan Fitzmaurice (University of Sheffield, UK)
Kristine Horner (University of Sheffield, UK)
Brian D. Joseph (Ohio State University, USA)
Nils Langer (University of Bristol, UK)
Mark Richard Lauersdorf (University of Kentucky, USA)
Martyn Lyons (University of New South Wales, Australia)
France Martineau (Université d’Ottawa, Canada)
Miriam Meyerhoff (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand)
Terttu Nevalainen (University of Helsinki, Finland)
Sergio Romero (University of Texas at Austin, USA)
Hiroyuki Takada (Gakushuin University, Tokyo, Japan)
José del Valle (The Graduate Center, CUNY, USA)
Marijke van der Wal (Leiden University, The Netherlands)
Laura Wright (University of Cambridge, UK)

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Journal information

Additional information

eISSN:

2199-2908

Language:

English

Publisher:

De Gruyter Mouton

Additional information

First published:

March 20, 2015

Publication Frequency:

2 issues per year

Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics

Overview

About this journal

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