Conference theme: Diversity and uniformity across time and space
Over the past decades, historical sociolinguistics has grown and diversified considerably, contributing to our increasingly multifaceted understanding of language histories. Two key themes that have emerged as overarching research directions in the field are linguistic diversity and linguistic uniformity. On the one hand, historical sociolinguists have studied and uncovered many different facets of linguistic diversity in past societies. These include aspects of both individual and societal multilingualism, historical settings of language contact and conflict, the social embedding of language variation and change, and so on. Diversity in historical sociolinguistics has also been foregrounded by drawing on sources from different genres and domains, and by including language users, networks and communities from a wide range of social backgrounds, regions and periods. On the other hand, historical sociolinguistics has a strong research tradition that focuses on linguistic uniformity. Scholars in the field have addressed topics related to language standardization processes, prescriptivism and purism, and of course language norms more generally, as well as underlying ideologies and beliefs. By investigating sociohistorical and linguistic developments in different regions, periods and comparatively across languages, both ‘from above’ and ‘from below’, traditional models and theories of standardization have been rethought and refined. While diversity and uniformity may be considered as two opposite poles, they could equally be interpreted as two complementary perspectives on language histories, tackling the complex interplay between linguistic diversity and uniformity in times past.
Plenary speakers:
- Wendy Ayres-Bennett (University of Cambridge) - Tracing change through different text types and genres: successes and challenges
- Aneta Pavlenko (Drexel University / University of York) - Multilingualism and history: Inconvenient thoughts
- Joshua Brown (The University of Western Australia) - Dialect contact, norms, and non-standard language ideology in and around the Mediterranean basin, 1300-1500