8 - Introduction to Part III

Summary

The problems of studying sociolinguistic diversity in the past have been well documented, not least by Hogg (2006). In addition to addressing all the challenges of contemporary dialect research (such as accurately delineating speech communities, adequately representing social groups within those speech communities, and equally representing all levels of the grammar in subsequent analyses), historical research must also deal with the inescapable problem of the paucity of data. Faced with such difficulties, it is unsurprising that the study of historical dialectology has lagged behind sociolinguistic research on contemporary data. However, the need to more fully contextualise language internal evidence has driven some historical scholars to develop innovative approaches which permit them to more fully reconstruct a sociolinguistic picture of the past. Following the lifelong philosophy of Richard Hogg, these researchers – who include the authors of the papers in Part III – fully acknowledge the limitations of their methods and data, but refuse to ‘submit to them’ (Hogg 2006: 353). The result is a body of research which not only draws upon contemporary sociolinguistic practice but adds to it.

Whilst Richard Hogg argued for the need to situate historical data in both space and time throughout his career, this stance has not always been fully appreciated or accepted. A dismissal of the study of non-standard varieties of English can be traced in the writings of a number of eminent historical scholars. Whilst the commentary of Jespersen (1922), Wyld (1927), Dobson (1968) and Henderson (1971) overtly dismisses non-standard dialects as ‘vulgar’ and ‘corrupt’, J. Milroy (2002) suggests that more recent work (such as Thomason and Kaufman 1988: 325–7; Honey 1997) exhibits a more covert disregard of non-standard English scholarship via an espousal of the ‘purity’ or pedigree of Present-day (Standard) English. J. Milroy (2002) argues that the continuity of this view has served to ‘historicise’ Standard English at the expense of other varieties. Thus researchers have found themselves trapped in a rather vicious circle: non-standard Englishes were not studied because they lack historicity but their continual dismissal impeded attempts to document the histories that prove their status as legitimate objects of study.