The background of modern sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics is commonly regarded as a new field of inquiry which investigates the language usage of particular human groups and relies on data sources and analytical paradigms quite distinct from those employed by linguists. Yet the two subfields have common intellectual roots. Throughout the nineteenth and for much of the present century, language study was an integral part of the wider search into the cultural origins of human populations. This inquiry was in part motivated by abstract scientific concerns, but in part also by the desire to legitimize the national ideologies of the newly emerging nation states of Central and Eastern Europe. Because of the lack of direct documentary sources reflecting earlier forms of culture and the great gap in the published literature on local speech varieties, scholars began to seek new ways of recovering what the German Romantics had called Versunkenes Volksgut, the ‘sunken folk cultures’ of past eras. Along with the quest for new unpublished manuscripts, the search for historical materials on which to base studies of cultural evolution also stimulated direct investigation of unwritten folk speech throughout the world.

Although the development of linguistic tools for comparative reconstruction was the overt goal of nineteenth-century language scholarship, its most important achievement from the social scientist's point of view is the discovery of grammatical structure as the underlying dynamic of all verbal communication. Pioneers of linguistic sciences like Erasmus Rask and Jakob Grimm had already demonstrated that, to capture the regularities of language evolution, one cannot rely on comparison of words as meaningful wholes. One must analyze patterning both at the level of form and at the level of content.