This chapter offers a new outlook on the history of Scots, a minority language related to English, up to 1700. Scots and its history have been a subject of pioneering work in historical linguistics, especially in historical dialectology and digital approaches to language change. The chapter takes stock of previous scholarship and the extra-linguistic events which shaped the linguistic situation in Scotland from the medieval period till the early eighteenth century. It then highlights problematic areas and questions related to constructing a narrative for a history of an unstandardised minority language, with special focus on defining Scots as a language of written communication, its family tree, periodisation and status, as well as metalinguistic perspectives. The discussion finishes with an overview of the most recent research on various aspects of structure and language use, and a summary of available resources for the study of historical Scots.

Drawing on their classroom experiences, five secondary school language educators present how training in linguistics has positively impacted their pedagogical practices and increased student engagement, enjoyment, and motivation. These teachers of French, German, Latin, and Spanish describe how they bring linguistics into the L2 classroom, giving concrete examples of how the metalinguistic and social awareness that comes with “doing linguistics” can help students learn new languages by drawing on their L1 strengths, as well as gain an appreciation of the beauty and complexity of language, contributing to a welcoming classroom for students of all language backgrounds. These examples, alongside the student feedback described in the chapter, demonstrate that training teachers in linguistics has the potential to keep students curious and motivated, improving both student retention and learning outcomes in secondary L2 classes.

Latin poetry has always been defined by its relationships with poetry in other languages – first with poetry in ancient Greek, more recently with poetry in the European vernaculars. The Introduction defines the book less as a literary history of Latin poetry across languages, as such, than as a set of essays that offer test cases, sometimes limit cases, for such a literary history. What is promised is a book of intertextual juxtapositions, moving between extreme close-ups and broader treatments of intercultural relationality. A special interest is expressed in the possibilities of two-way poetic conversation across languages. The Introduction concludes with trailers for the book’s seven chapters.

The use of Latin alongside Greek in Roman soldiers’ private documents on papyrus or tablet has already been approached by modern scholarship. However, new evidence allows a further exploration of this topic and a reassessment of some of the results reached so far. Therefore, this chapter investigates three case studies based on this new evidence: the use of the tribal designation, the use of Latin in marriage agreements, and the use of Latin in Roman testaments. The following questions are addressed: What kind of Latin did Roman soldiers and veterans use? Under what circumstances? And why? What can we learn from new evidence? Does it strengthen or challenge traditional hypotheses? The investigation contributes to our understanding of the significance of written documentation in the daily lives of Roman soldiers and veterans and of the usages of the Latin language, script, or culture in their private documents. The new evidence considered sometimes strengthens and at other times challenges traditional hypotheses, showing how complex the relationship was between the Latin and Greek languages, scripts, and cultures in the Graeco-Roman eras.

The twelfth century witnessed an unprecedented scholarly effort to access and assimilate new corpora of knowledge by translating Greek as well as Arabic sources into Latin. This chapter surveys the various translations, discusses the role of those who mediated them to the Latin tradition, and finally focuses on the reception of the texts at the University of Paris during the first decades of the thirteenth century.

The Latin mistakes in a tenth-century papal document converge with other evidence for the abysmal education of the papal staff.

The numerous multilingual texts from medieval to modern times have only recently received the recognition as serious linguistic data that they deserve. They provide important testimony of medieval and early modern multilingualism and have increasingly been seen as written records of early code-switching and language mixing, which can be analysed on the basis of modern code-switching theories. This chapter discusses this assumption with historical data from England, addressing questions like syntactic, functional and visual approaches to the data, the distinctiveness of languages in multiligual texts. A related, but special type of multilingualism is attested in medieval mixed-language administrative texts which show a principled but variable use of Latin, French and English. Other issues are the increasing use of manuscripts and electronic corpora as data for linguistic analysis. The chapter finishes with a small selection of multilingual historical texts from England with brief comments to illustrate some of the issues discussed.

The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English vocabulary witnessed a sort of revolution due to the massive influx of new words and coinages primarily from classical languages. They were largely introduced by scholars to supply English with an appropriate terminology for fields traditionally dominated by Latin, but also to provide the richness of vocabulary (copia verborum) considered the hallmark of a literary language and Renaissance rhetoric as well as a sign of education or social superiority. Their ‘artificiality’ and ‘abstruseness’ provoked a fierce debate among purists and innovators, and made necessary the production of dictionaries that explain such ‘hard words’, and often attest them for the first time. A sign of the creativity of these centuries, most of them remained in the language and contributed to shaping the structure vocabulary, thanks also to the role played by monolingual dictionaries. A text-corpus analysis of new coinages derived from ‘hard words‘ dictionaries in a so-far neglected genre – namely early modern street literature texts (pamphlets, broadsheets and ballads) devoted to monstrous births – will shed light on the mechanisms of their diffusion.

This chapter explores the link between education and linguistic innovation in the early history of English, by looking at the evolution of the school system and the languages of school instruction. Varieties of spoken and written Latin and Latin as a second (and third) language are among the other sociolinguistic anchors of this chapter. The turning points are located at about 650 CE, the spread of Christianity and formal schooling in Latin among the Anglo-Saxons, at 1066, the introduction of French as a second vernacular and language of school instruction, and at 1349, the reversal of the latter situation in the wake of the socio-demographic changes caused by the Black Death. The survey starts on the eve of the Germanic migration to Britain and ends around 1500; it is illustrated with a selection of lexical and structural features introduced into English through contact with Latin.

This chapter presents one of the most recent additions to the historical sociolinguistic toolkit, a community of practice (CoP). The discussion of definitions and delimitations of this concept places it in the ‘three waves’ of sociolinguistic research and builds comparisons and contrasts with two neighbouring frameworks: social networks and discourse communities. The focus moves on to the applications of CoPs in historical sociolinguistics. The dimensions of practice – joint enterprise (or domain), mutual engagement, and shared repertoire – are redefined for the purpose of historical sociolinguistics and illustrated with examples from studies which engage with the sociohistorical and cultural context of communication. We show how language change – or, indeed, resistance to change – may be observed through a CoP lens. Prolific contexts where the concept of a CoP has been fruitfully employed include letter writing, the production of manuscripts and early prints, professional discourse, trial proceedings, multilingual practices and online blogging.

This chapter provides an overview of the language of religious texts in Old, Middle and Early Modern English. We divide religious language into three spheres: Bible language, the language of prayers and the language of texts of religious instruction and discussion. We then discuss the language of religious texts against the background of the impact of the language of the vernacular Bible, particularly before 1500. We argue that, prior to the publication of the King James Bible, there was no specific ‘religious register’ in Old and Middle English, and even in Early Modern English a typically ‘religious style’ is found only as an additional layer in religious texts, which, by and large, follow the general standardising tendencies of the language at the time.