Historical Folk Sociolinguistics

Dennis R. Preston

doi:10.18290/rh237106.9s

Published : 2023-07-24

Vol. 71 No. 6sp (2023)

Historical Folk Sociolinguistics

Dennis R. Preston

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9949-0211

DOI: https://doi.org/10.18290/rh237106.9s

Abstract

This paper shows how the canonical definition of historical sociolinguistics as the study of language use fails to consider independent evidence for language attitudes, beliefs, and ideologies (i.e., language regard).[1] One approach to avoiding this limited understanding of use might lie in a historical folk sociolinguistics, in which particular attention is paid to the nonasserted (i.e., indirect, presuppositional, implicational, perlocutionary) meanings, described in Preston (2004) as “metalanguage 3.” Interactions in drama are first justified as “good data,” and analyses of such nonasserted elements of utterances show that they approach both the social psychological goal of uncovering implicit language regard behaviors and the variationist goal of determining the subjective correlates of variation and change.

[1] Language regard groups together social psychological (chiefly experimental, e.g., matched guise), anthropological (e.g., studies in language ideology), and sociolinguistic (e.g., folk linguistic and “third wave”) approaches to beliefs about and reactions to language use and language varieties. Preston (2018) reviews established and emerging relationships between these areas. The label is used throughout this paper to refer to all three areas as well as research methods derived from and combining them.

Keywords:

folk linguistics, historical sociolinguistics, pragmatics, Shakespeare

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Dennis R. Preston

dennis.preston@uky.edu
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9949-0211

Affiliation:

University of Kentucky United States

Bio Statement (e.g., department and rank)

Dennis Preston (PhD University of Wisconsin) is Adjunct Professor of Linguistics at the University of Kentucky and an Erskine Fellow of the University of Canterbury (Christchurch NZ), and a Fellow of the Japan Society for the Advancement of Science, the Linguistic Society of America, and the American Dialect Society, the last of which he was President in 2001–2002. In 2004 he was awarded the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Polish Republic. He is best known for his work in variationist approaches to second language acquisition, the revitalization of perceptual dialectology, and, with Nancy Niedzielski, the establishment of modern research efforts in folk linguistics.