Linguistic fingerprints of authors and scribes

Abstract

One of the methodologically most challenging tasks in historical linguistics is to find out who actually produced the linguistic material which is available to us today. In other words: who is - linguistically speaking - responsible for the manuscripts and texts that have survived? Whose language do they represent? How much influence did scribes actually have on the final product? These questions seem particularly interesting and important from the viewpoint of historical sociolinguistics (see Bergs 2005; Nevalainen 2012), which aims at describing and understanding language variation in context, i.e. in relation to speakers. On the one hand, we need to think about who actually produced the material we see before us now. As any sociolinguistic textbook today shows, it certainly makes a big linguistic difference if speakers are male or female, old or young, rich or poor. Both stable and dynamic social factors (e.g. gender and membership in a community of practice, or network) play an important role in the use of linguistic variables. There is no reason to believe that this was any different in the past, though we need to establish, of course, which factors were actually relevant at a given point in time (see Bergs 2012 on the risk of anachronism in historical sociolinguistics). In order to gauge the importance of any factor, we need to know who was actually responsible for the linguistic output we are analysing. Furthermore, we should not forget that manuscript production itself is an important social practice, and subject to a number of constraints that need to be investigated (see Fairman, Chapter 4 this volume). Both micro-level variation and macro-level modes of production are important questions in historical sociolinguistics, but both can only be studied productively if the exact source and context of linguistic performance are documented, or at least critically discussed. © Cambridge University Press 2015.