An excursion into the lost history of historical sociolinguistics

An origin story has emerged and solidified around the relatively new research area called historical sociolinguistics – a story based primarily on the field’s relatively brief history as a “named” field (reaching back only a few decades) and repeated regularly and largely uniformly in summary, overview, encyclopedic, and introductory presentations of historical sociolinguistics. We argue that the defining characteristics of the modern field are deeply connected to and clearly rooted in the key traditions of historical and sociolinguistics and allied areas going back to the nineteenth century. We highlight select instances of sociolinguistic thinking in early historical linguistic work and historical considerations in early sociolinguistic research, as well as key notions, including uniformitarianism from historical-comparative linguistics and ego-documents from social history. Better understanding of the history of historical sociolinguistics, we argue, helps us anchor our future work better in the full relevant context.