Friday 31 January Location: U-Residence
9:00 – 9:30	Coffee, registration and welcome
9:30 – 12:30	Hands-on workshops – part one Choose either workshop A or B: A. The study of translocated speaker groups in historical sociolinguistic research Karoline Kühl (Europa-Universität Flensburg) B. Unheard voices. Irish English and historical corpora Carolina Amador Moreno (Universidad de Extremadura)
12:30 – 13:30	Lunch
13:30 – 16:00	Master class – ‘Planned speech’ in historical sociolinguistics Agnete Nesse (Universitetet i Bergen)
16:00 – 16:30	Coffee
16:30 – 17:30	The Bad Data Lecture – Separating norms from universals in historical sociolinguistics John E. Joseph (University of Edinburgh)
Approx. 18:45	Dinner and social program

Saturday 1 February Location: U-Residence
9:30 – 12:30	Hands-on workshops – part two Second part of the workshop chosen on Friday A. The study of translocated speaker groups in historical sociolinguistic research Karoline Kühl (Europa-Universität Flensburg) B. Unheard voices. Irish English and historical corpora Carolina Amador Moreno (Universidad de Extremadura)
12:30 – 14:00	Lunch and goodbye

Abstracts

Keynote Lecture – John E. Joseph (University of Edinburgh)

Separating norms from universals in historical sociolinguistics

In school I was taught that the Latin equivalent of ‘thank you’ is gratias tibi ago. This mattered because we were encouraged to speak the language in class, and thank you is such a frequent utterance. The Lewis & Short dictionary, however, has just one occurrence of it in all of Latin literature. So thanking as a pragmatic act existed in Latin, but its value seems to have been vastly different from what it is today. Similarly, although the good sisters who taught me would regularly offer up prayers of Thanks be to God, the Lord’s Prayer contains praise and entreaties but no thanks, nor does the Hail Mary. Yet every day I thank and get thanked so often that it is hard to imagine its banality as belonging to a particular time or place, rather than being universal.
In this lecture I shall explore a number of cases where there is reason to suspect that context-specific norms have been construed as universals, and where a separation between the two may be enlightening. They include:

• Language standardisation, which combines certain aspects of ‘prescriptivism’ that appear to be universal (but are they?) with others that quite clearly represent a unified cultural tradition;
• Assumptions about the universality of language structures, or about the range of variation possible;
• The pathologising of individual divergence from norms, as evidenced in cases of what I call ‘schizosemiotics’, and what it reveals about the nature of the norms themselves;
• Speech acts such as the one described at the start of this abstract, which when formulated in a universalist way (a la Grice’s maxims), can become ‘colonialising’.

I shall give some attention to the historical dimension of these issues within linguistics, including the role of norms in the approaches of Louis Hjelmslev and Eugenio Coseriu, and their potential helpfulness in addressing the issues which arise in historical sociolinguistics.

Master Class – Agnete Nesse (Universitetet i Bergen)

‘Planned speech’ in historical sociolinguistics

The master class will focus on planned speech; speech which is neither natural nor spontaneous. This kind of spoken language has been an important part of people’s lives, even if natural, spontaneous speech is the most common code. The speech heard in the church, the school, the theatre – and from the 20th century on, on the radio and tv, have influenced the linguistic awareness of the listeners, if not their linguistic practice (?). The data presented and discussed during the Master class will be from Norway, mostly from the 20th century, and the language practice of the theatre and the radio will dominate, although the school and the church will be briefly visited.

The concept of audience design is useful for the investigation of linguistic choices both in the radio and at the theatre. Also, indexicality can be a helpful theory to understand why some linguistic features are chosen for a particular role, and others not. For example, hypercorrect variants can serve useful on stage when there is little time to establish a character.

Central issues to discuss will be the use of dialect and standard in different domains, how certain features can index “olden times” in historical plays, and how those producing planned speech interact with tendencies of linguistic changes in the society at large.

Selected references

Bell, Allan and Andy Gibson. 2011. Staging language: An introduction to the sociolinguistics of performance. In Journal of Sociolinguistics 15/5.

Birchfield, Alexandra and Rolando Coto-Solano. 2021. “I am not that I play” – The use of hypercorrection in the performance of gender by Shakespeare’s ‘breeches’ parts. In Journal of historical sociolinguistics.

Nesse, Agnete. 2016. Kallemann & Amandus: The use of dialect in children’s programmes on early Norwegian radio. In J. Thøgersen, N. Coupland and J. Mortensen (eds.). Style, Media and Language Ideologies. Oslo: Novus.

Nesse, Agnete. 2019. From everyday speech to literary style: The decline of distant address De in Norwegian during the 20^th century. In Journal of historical sociolinguistics 5/1.

Winge, Vibeke 1983. Der komische Deutsche. Deutsche und Deutsch auf der dänischen Bühne zwischen 1720 und 1850. In Text und Kontext, Jahrg. II, h. 1.

Qualitative workshop – Karoline Kühl (Europa-Universität Flensburg)

The study of translocated speaker groups in historical sociolinguistic research

Migration (short-term, long-term or circular) has always been unremarkable human behaviour, and it seems to be part of human nature to stay together in migration (at least for the first generations), thus creating translocated language communities. This workshop will focus on the possibilities and challenges of historical sociolinguistic research on these communities in Europe and overseas, drawing on research from historical (socio)linguistics, Sprachinselforschung, the study of diaspora languages particular in the US and colonial studies, with an emphasis on the study of language use, language maintenance and shift as well as synchronic and diachronic variation and change in the heritage language. We will pay particular attention to the consideration of sources (‘born’ data sources such as early recordings vs. mining sources that were not intended for research such as ego documents, census data, cookbooks and gravestones) and the potential as well as the challenges that they hold for historical sociolinguistic insight. In this vein, we will consider methodological decisions that need to be taken into account when studying (historical) translocated speaker groups.

Quantitative workshop – Carolina Amador Moreno (Universidad de Extremadura)

Unheard voices. Irish English and historical corpora

This workshop will focus on Irish English and Irish emigrants’ letters. By turning to CORIECOR, the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence, we will take a closer look at how Irish English was recorded through letter writing. We will explore how written discourse captured the voices of many Irish English speakers in the past, allowing us to trace language use diachronically.

CORIECOR is a corpus of personal letters covering the timespan from 1700s to the 1900s. The corpus contains some 6000 texts (over 3 million words), most of which are correspondence maintained between Irish emigrants and their relatives, friends and contacts. The letters were sent mainly between Ireland and other countries such as the United States, Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia, and Argentina, and therefore provide an empirical base for studies of historical change in Irish English.

Part of the corpus is now available through CORVIZ, the acronym of the project ‘CORIECOR visualized. Irish English in writing across time (a longitudinal historical perspective)’. The aim of the CORVIZ project is to create a publicly accessible, sustainable electronic correspondence corpus, so that it can then be used for further research by the wider academic community.

The workshop will include both a focus on compiling a historical letter corpus for the first part, and a more focused session on corpus linguistics methods for historical sociolinguistic research in the second part.