Historical Sociolinguistics

Historical sociolinguistics asks how language change happens, who drives it, and how linguistic innovations are shaped by the societies through which they spread. In this video, Tanja Säily introduces the field through examples such as the shift from taketh to takes in the history of English, showing how corpus evidence, close reading, historical context, and computational methods can be combined to study language use in the past. For those interested in the digital humanities and computational social sciences, historical sociolinguistics offers a powerful model of multidisciplinary research. It uses both carefully compiled historical corpora and large-scale digitized text collections to trace linguistic change across time, social groups, and social networks, while also confronting the challenges of incomplete, biased, and messy historical data.

Tanja Säily is a tenure-track associate professor in English Language at the University of Helsinki. The overarching aim of her research is to develop new ways of understanding language variation and change, often in collaboration with experts from other fields such as history and computer science.

This introductory video is part of a video library used as teaching resource for BA Course Introduction to Helsinki Digital Humanities and Social Science at the University of Helsinki.

Learning Outcomes

After watching this short video, viewers will be able to:

• Define historical sociolinguistics

• Describe the kinds of data used in historical sociolinguistics

• Explain how historical sociolinguistics is connected to other fields