journal: Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics

Impact Factor: 0.3

Published since March 20, 2015

Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics

ISSN: 2199-2908

Edited by: Anita Auer, Gijsbert Rutten, Israel Sanz-Sanchez, Rik Vosters

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About this journal

Objective
The Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics (JHSL) is a double-blind peer-reviewed forum for research into the social history of language. We welcome original contributions (both linguistic and interdisciplinary) from young and established scholars alike on aspects of language and society in the past including (but not limited to) the social embedding of language variation and change, issues of language contact and conflict, historical multilingualism, the social stratification of writing skills, the development of language norms and the impact of language ideologies. JHSL also publishes book reviews of recent work in these domains. Both the managing editorial team and the editorial board are members of the Historical Sociolinguistics Network.

Topics

Language in sociohistorical context
Variation and change
Language contact and conflict
Language shift
Language standardization
Corpus linguistics
Multilingualism
Language ideologies

Article formats
Research articles

Your Benefits

Your benefits:

In-depth study of language in its social and historical context
Interdisciplinary approach to linguistics
State-of-the-art contributions to the growing field of research
High quality peer-review

Special issues
The Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics welcomes proposals for special issues. Proposals need to provide an explanation of the main theme of the special issue (500-1,000 words) and abstracts of the individual papers (200-300 words each, without references). When compiling a proposal, please keep the following points in mind:

Special issues should have one well-defined overarching theme that is of relevance to the field and of interest to the broad readership of the Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics. The theme of the issue should be explained against the background of recent scholarship in historical sociolinguistics.
The individual papers should be preceded by an introduction by the guest editors in which they explain the theme of the issue as well as introduce the papers.
Every paper in the issue should have a clear connection to the overarching theme and has to address historical and sociolinguistic issues.
A special issue ideally comprises papers on a variety of languages.

Abstracting and Indexing

Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics is covered by the following services:

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Supplementary Materials

Topics

External Links

Volume 10 (2024)

Issue 1

Volume 9 (2023)

Volume 8 (2022)

Volume 7 (2021)

Volume 6 (2020)

Volume 5 (2019)

Volume 4 (2018)

Volume 3 (2017)

Volume 2 (2016)

Volume 1 (2015)

Journal Impact Factor	0.3	2022, Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate, 2023)
Journal Citation Indicator	0.23	2022, Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate, 2023)
CiteScore	0.5	2022, Scopus (Elsevier B.V., 2023)
SCImago Journal Rank	0.168	2022, SJR (Scimago Lab, 2023; Data Source: Scopus)
Source Normalized Impact per Paper	0.845	2022, CWTS Journal Indicators (CWTS B.V., 2023; Data Source: Scopus)

More information about journal rankings

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Submission
You can easily submit your manuscript online. Simply go to...
https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jhsl
...and you will be guided through the whole peer-reviewing and publishing process.

Your benefits of publishing with us

Rapid online ahead-of-print publication with short turnaround times
High quality manuscript processing
Optional open access publication
Accepted papers will be published online first as DOI-citable, forward-linked articles for quickest possible visibility for the scientific community
Every article easily discoverable because of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and comprehensive abstracting and indexing services
Convenient citation tracking via e-mail alert
Secure archiving by De Gruyter and the independent archiving service Portico
Professional sales and marketing activities

Submission process

Submission of your paper via our submission management tool
Peer review process (you will be guided through every step)
Decision on your paper
If accepted: you have the option to publish it open access
Publication online and in print

Please note

Manuscripts must be written in clear and concise English
Please see the De Gruyter Mouton Journal Style Sheet 　for information regarding the proper copyediting and formatting of your manuscript.
Before submitting your article please have a look at our Information for Authors and our Copyright Agreement.
Once your article is accepted you have the option to publish it open access
Our Repository Policy allows you to distribute 30 PDF copies of your published article to colleagues (the PDF has to include the information that it is an author's copy). Please also feel free to distribute the link to the online abstract
If you have any general questions please visit our FAQ for authors.

We look forward to receiving your manuscript!

Hybrid Open Access

Authors have the option to publish their article under an open access license. The standard article processing charge for a hybrid open access article is 2,000 Euro (plus VAT if applicable). Please note that corresponding authors from institutions with which we have a transformative agreement, can publishing open access without paying the fee. More information on the eligible institutions and articles can be found here.

Editorial

Editor-In-Chief
Gijsbert Rutten (Leiden University, The Netherlands)

Editors
Anita Auer (Université de Lausanne, Switzerland)
Israel Sanz-Sánchez (West Chester University, USA)
Rik Vosters (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium)

Review Editor
Anna Havinga
21 Woodland Road
Clifton
Bristol
BS8 1TE
UK

Honorary Editors
Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (Leiden University, The Netherlands)
Wim Vandenbussche (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium)

Editorial Board
Jeroen Darquennes (Université de Namur, Belgium)
Ana Deumert (University of Cape Town, South Africa)
Stephan Elspaß (Universität Salzburg, Austria)
Susan Fitzmaurice (University of Sheffield, UK)
Kristine Horner (University of Sheffield, UK)
Brian D. Joseph (Ohio State University, USA)
Nils Langer (University of Bristol, UK)
Mark Richard Lauersdorf (University of Kentucky, USA)
Martyn Lyons (University of New South Wales, Australia)
France Martineau (Université d’Ottawa, Canada)
Miriam Meyerhoff (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand)
Terttu Nevalainen (University of Helsinki, Finland)
Sergio Romero (University of Texas at Austin, USA)
Hiroyuki Takada (Gakushuin University, Tokyo, Japan)
José del Valle (The Graduate Center, CUNY, USA)
Marijke van der Wal (Leiden University, The Netherlands)
Laura Wright (University of Cambridge, UK)

Volume 10 Issue 1

April 2024

Publicly Available April 11, 2024

Frontmatter

Page range: i-ii

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Articles

Publicly Available August 23, 2023

Flipping the script? Native-speaker linguists and colonial orthographies in nineteenth-century Senegal

Doyle Calhoun

Page range: 1-30

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Abstract

Throughout the nineteenth century, Senegal was the site of some of the most extensive French experiments with alphabetic print literacy in African languages, especially Wolof. Before the advent of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), authors such as Jean Dard, Jacques-François Roger, Aloïs Kobès, David Boilat, Louis Faidherbe, and Louis Descemet experimented with Latin-scripted orthographies for representing the sounds of Wolof. This article focuses on the contributions of Boilat and Descemet, both members of prominent multilingual métis families in Saint-Louis and native speakers of Wolof. Even as they expressed deference to their predecessors, Boilat and Decemet asserted their intuitions as native speakers, challenging dominant colonial “scripts” by authoring their own texts and proposing their own orthographies. I read their nineteenth-century analyses of Wolof as important, if understudied, contributions to the history of phonetics by situating their works within the politics of colonial alphabet schemes.

Publicly Available April 10, 2024

‘My dearest Clara … my dear friend’ – Personal Names and direct address in Mary Hamilton’s private correspondence

Nuria Yáñez-Bouza

Page range: 31-62

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Abstract

In the eighteenth century, a period dominated by linguistic correctness, propriety and etiquette, appropriate forms of address are a customary feature in correspondence and a key means by which individuals are able to construct their social identity in light of their relationships with others. In this context, and framed within the fields of historical sociolinguistics and historical sociopragmatics, this paper explores the role of direct address as a socially-governed linguistic practice and as an index of politeness, and the focus lies in intra-speaker variation in the use of personal names and honorifics in the opening, body and subscription parts of the letter. The study is based on a set of 170 private letters written by Mary Hamilton (1756–1816), courtier, diarist and a member of the Bluestocking circle, and the analysis considers notions traditionally connected with pragmatic language use such as distance, power and politeness, bearing in mind other content-dependent factors as well. Overall, the research presented here aims to contribute to a growing body of literature which understands ego-documents as providing a window onto language and society.

April 10, 2024

Finnish reported speech and Swedish intratextual translations in 17th-century court records

Oliver Blomqvist

Page range: 63-91

Abstract

This paper studies on multilingual administrative writing in Sweden during the early modern era of emerging national language ideology within the domain of court writing. The source material for this study consists of lower-court records from Finnish-speaking areas of the Swedish realm c. 1620–1700. The court system in Sweden was reformed in 1614 with the establishment of appellate courts that scrutinized the sentences passed by lower courts. Court records were written in Swedish, the official language of administrative writing of the period, but certain segments, notably represented speech, could be rendered in Finnish. This required textual mediation between the prescribed Swedish language of the court protocol, and the non-standard spoken Finnish in the courtrooms. The aim is to examine the embedding strategies, retention patterns, and textual mediation in the multilingual writing of 17th-century Finnish court scribes. The results show that Finnish is retained for especially pertinent or untranslatable witness statements. At the end of the 17th century, the use of parallel Swedish translations and clarifications to Finnish items increased. It is argued that this increase is due to the imposition of autocracy in 1680 and a concomitant push towards monolingual Swedish uniformity within the entire realm.

April 10, 2024

Academic writing and identity: evaluative discourse in academic papers across cohorts of 20th century linguists

Jesús David Guerra Lyons, Valentina Concu

Page range: 93-125

Abstract

Using a cohort sequential quantitative design and evaluative features drawn from Systemic Functional Grammar, this study investigates diachronic variation in linguists’ use of evaluation to perform scholarly identities in English academic writing. More specifically, it focuses on the use of statements, commands, modality, comment assessment, and positive and negative lexis, in early and late career papers from 30 linguists born between 1905 and 1960. These linguists were grouped into three cohorts based on year of birth and studied in terms of variation along developmental and cross-generational timescales. Within the developmental timescale, scholars were found to use more evaluation in early career writing than in late career writing. Cohort-specific developmental changes are identified in the frequency of modality and comment assessment. Developmental and cohort-specific trends are found to occur within the backdrop of an overall decrease in the use of evaluative language within the discipline. Results point to a complex diachronic model of academic identity enactment in writing, whereby evaluative features pattern in similar or different ways depending on the timescale considered.

Open Access April 10, 2024

Developing a standard in lower-class Scottish writing: pauper petitions as a source for nineteenth-century lower-class Scottish language

Hester Groot

Page range: 127-155

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Abstract

The anglicisation of Scottish writing, a development in which the features of the previously high-status Scots language variety became marginalised and proscribed in favour of prestige Standard English variants, is typically dated by scholars to the sixteenth through eighteenth century. The effect of anglicisation on upper- and middle-class Scottish authors’ written language has been attested in numerous studies; however, how the metalinguistic ideologies of the time affected the language of the Scottish lower classes has long remained underinvestigated. This study makes use of the recent publication of a corpus of lower-class Scottish writing from the nineteenth century – the Corpus of Scottish Pauper Petitions – to investigate the effect of prescriptivism on lower-class Scottish writing as documented in nineteenth-century pauper petitions. The materials are placed side-by-side with the writings of upper- and middle-class Scottish people during this period, taken from the Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing. This study, which investigates both overt and covert Scotticisms by drawing respectively on usage guides by contemporaneous prescriptivists and works by modern linguists, takes a ‘from below’ approach to Scotland’s linguistic history and represents a new step in our understanding of the development of historical Scottish writing.