Historical Folk Sociolinguistics
Historical Folk Sociolinguistics

Summary/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). 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.

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