Terttu Nevalainen & Helena Raumolin-Brunberg,
Historical sociolinguistics: Language change in Tudor and Stuart
England (Longman Linguistics Library). London: Pearson Education,
2003. Pp. xvi, 266.
Historical sociolinguistics is another outcome of the
long-term endeavor by Terttu Nevalainen and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, from
the English Department at the University of Helsinki, to “put
sociolinguistics to the test of time” (p. 202) by reconstructing the
English language in some of its social and historical contexts, here in
the Tudor and Stuart periods (Early Modern English). This enterprise has
also allowed the authors to refine the methodology of historical
sociolinguistics: first by confronting both the fragmentary nature of
historical materials and the difficulties of socially reconstructing the
past – the “bad data problem,” in the words of Labov
– and second by looking for the solutions afforded by ancillary
disciplines like corpus linguistics and social history. In fact, the
authors' research is built, on the one hand, upon the Corpus of
Early English correspondence, a collection of personal letters
(nearly 2.7 million words from 1410 to 1681) compiled specifically for
historical sociolinguistic research, which ensures the reliable
reconstruction of both linguistic and extralinguistic variables, as well
as the commonsense use of the findings of social history, which
facilitates access to period-specific information in the process of
reconstructing the sociohistorical circumstances that may have affected
linguistic variation and change in the past. Corpus linguistics and social
history, in the view of Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg, scientifically
legitimate historical sociolinguistics by conferring upon it
“empirical” and “historical” validity.