Historical Context
Historical context refers to the social, cultural, and political conditions that existed during a particular time period and directly influenced the development and use of languages. Understanding historical context is crucial for interpreting linguistic changes, language evolution, and the impact of historical events on language. It provides valuable insights into the factors that have shaped languages over time.
3 Key excerpts on "Historical Context"
eBook - ePubLanguage Learning
A Lifelong Process
- Joseph Foley, Linda Thompson(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...This led to the emergence of a new variety of English, now established as Estuary English. These studies all support the view that a number of factors influence and precipitate change in a person’s linguistic repertoire. Changing geographic location is perhaps the more obvious but coming into contact with people who speak different language, or the same language differently, can also influence. 11.2 Contexts and the creation of a linguistic biography The dimension of context as central to learning and using language(s) gets support from systemic linguists. Their description of language as a socio-semiotic system of signs makes context a central concern. It is important to emphasize that this should not be understood as regarding language and context as separate. Halliday (1978a) describes language as the dynamic process that actually creates social situations. Hence it is inevitable that the different life experiences, the people we meet, the places we visit and live in, will all contribute to our personal linguistic biography making it distinct from others. In addition, the different social contexts that we participate in and which we help to create will also contribute to our personal, social and linguistic biography. A person’s life comprises a range of very different experiences. However, the social psychologist Jerome Bruner suggests that these varied and different spheres of personal experience are not separate or compartmentalized for people. He suggests that they combine in a variety of ways. For example, let us consider the family as a social unit to illustrate this point. Families invent practices for themselves and their members. These practices exist on a number of levels and can include daily routines like how meal times are observed and conducted, as well as less frequent events like annual cultural events as well as religious and other celebrations...
eBook - ePub- Urszula Clark(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...He writes: At any given moment in its evolution, language is stratified not only into linguistic dialects in the strictest sense of the word, according to formal linguistic markers, especially phonetic, but also – and this is the essential point – into languages that are socio-ideological: languages of social groups, ‘professional’ and ‘generic’ languages, languages of generations and so forth. (1981: 259) What Bakhtin is arguing here has been a central theme of this book, namely that how we use language is determined as much by social, cultural, historical and ideological concepts within which it functions as by its physical manifestations of phonetics, lexis and morphosyntax. Historical and Sociopolitical Contexts of Englishes Chapters 2 and 3 have given an overview of a sociolinguistic history of English, to explain the reasons why we have so many different varieties of Englishes in the world today. They have also shown how ‘English’ has come to have so many varieties both within English-speaking countries and around the world, to account for how variational uses of different Englishes are viewed or perceived within and across the wider national and increasingly global contexts, as well as within local communities within which they are situated. As such, they provide an overview of the wider historical and sociopolitical contexts within which language happens, which includes consideration of the sets of beliefs, values and assumptions that underpin them. By and large, these chapters show that the factors affecting linguistic change are politically and economically driven. Historical and contemporary factors such as invasion, colonisation and the demands of social order based upon law, education, economics and politics intertwine, at any moment in time, with the linguistic and communicative practices of the social groups most affected. Depending upon the prevalent social order, different groups will be affected in different ways...
eBook - ePubHistorical Sociolinguistics
Language Change in Tudor and Stuart England
- Terttu Nevalainen, Helena Raumolin-Brunberg(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Chapter 1 Introduction: Issues in Historical Sociolinguistics It is an everyday observation that young people do not speak like their parents, let alone their grandparents. Where we come from, what we do for a living and the company we keep may also be related to the way we speak. Northerners usually differ from southerners, TV announcers and lawyers rarely sound like dockers or farmers, nor do people use quite the same language when speaking in public and chatting to their friends. All these aspects of linguistic variability are of interest to sociolinguists as they set out to study how language can vary in patterned ways when it is used by individuals and groups of people in various social situations for different communicative purposes. In due course, this variation may lead to language change. It is the processes of language change that constitute the subject matter of this book. Language variation and change have intrigued sociolinguists from the very beginning. Back in 1968, when sociolinguistics was a relative newcomer as an academic discipline, Uriel Weinreich, William Labov and Marvin Herzog drew up an agenda for the study of language change in its social context. The process consists, they suggested, of the actuation of a change in a language at a given time, its transition from one state or form to another, its embedding in the linguistic and social structures where it emerges, and its social evaluation by speakers. We now know a great deal about the transition, embedding and evaluation of language changes, but the first issue, actuation, appears to defy empirical investigation...
