The Language of Daily Life in England, (1400-1800)

This book stems from the experiences gained during the fifteen years we have been involved in compiling and doing research on the Corpus of Early English Correspondence(CEEC), which by now has grown into a small corpus family, altogether covering the years 1403–1800.1 The corpus contains a stratified sample of male and female informants from different geographical locations and as such provides a rich source of material for the study of language variation and change in the history of English. The letters included in the corpus are personal correspondence between identifiable individuals, who share their concerns and joys over a geographical and temporal distance. The topics discussed cover a wide variety of mundane issues ranging from business matters and estate management to family

news and little everyday incidents. The corpus was intended for sociolinguistic
studies from the outset, and we can still say that historical sociolinguistics provides the broad framework for our work, although the theoretical orientations applied
to the data today are perhaps more varied than originally envisioned. One of the purposes of this book is to illustrate some relevant ways of using the corpus and the kinds of contextualizations we can make on the basis of the data.Historical sociolinguistics, just like sociolinguistics focusing on present-day
language use, comprises many different approaches addressing a variety of research
questions. Historical sociolinguistics has drawn on correlational sociolinguistics,
but increasingly also on a variety of fields such as interactional sociolinguistics,
sociopragmatics, discourse studies, contact linguistics and sociology of language