LANGUAGE HISTORY “FROM BELOW”: DATA SOURCES AND (DIGITAL) APPROACHES
Place: University of Lausanne, Switzerland, Amphimax (Route de la Sorge 9, 1015 Lausanne), Room 412 [ONLINE PARTICIPATION POSSIBLE, see end of the page]
Dates: 6-7 February 2025
Organisers: Prof. Anita Auer (Lausanne) and Prof. Markus Schiegg (Fribourg)
DESCRIPTION
In 2005, thus 20 years ago, Stephan Elspaß’s monograph Sprachgeschichte von unten. Untersuchungen zum geschriebenen Alltagsdeutsch im 19. Jahrhundert was published. This work and particularly the concept of ‘language history “from below”’ has significantly raised historical linguists’ awareness of the importance of the choice of sources and their writers for their investigations and, as a consequence, for the construction of different language history narratives (see for instance Vandenbussche & Elspaß 2007; Elspaß, Langer, Scharloth & Vandenbussche eds. 2007). The concept has also become one of the central perspectives embraced by the relatively young field of historical sociolinguistics. Within that field, and concerning different language histories, researchers have collected new data sources that represent the voices of the non-elite, e.g. everyday language captured in ego-documents, depositions, etc., which allow for a complementary perspective to the hitherto dominant ‘language history “from above”’.
The last two decades have also seen a fast advance in the field of corpus linguistics and the creation of digital tools to analyse (historical) data. These developments also led to advances in the field of historical sociolinguistics as a number of data collections and corpora have been created, serving for linguistic investigations; see for example the section on methodological innovations in Säily, Nurmi, Palander-Collin & Auer (eds.) 2017, and the Corpus of Historical Patient Documents including more than 4’000 letters and other texts written by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century patients from German psychiatric hospitals (http://copadocs.de; Schiegg 2022).
This international workshop aims to bring together scholars working on West Germanic languages in the field of historical sociolinguistics who take a ‘language history “from below”’ approach in their research combined with corpus linguistics and digital approaches. In that, the workshop wants to mark the 20th anniversary of the introduction of the concept and shed light on how digital approaches have changed the analysis of relevant data sources.
The international workshop is organized as the final event of the SNSF-funded project “The Language of the Labouring Poor in Late Modern England” (2020–2025; PI Anita Auer) in collaboration with the recently finished research project „Flexible Schreiber in der Sprachgeschichte“ (2017–2023; PI Markus Schiegg).
References:
Elspaß, Stephan (2005). Sprachgeschichte von unten. Untersuchungen zum geschriebenen Alltagsdeutsch im 19. Jahrhundert. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.
Elspaß, Stephan, Nils Langer, Joachim Scharloth & Wim Vandenbussche (eds) (2007). Germanic language histories ‘from below’ (1700–2000). Berlin & New York: de Gruyter.
Säily, Tanja, Arja Nurmi, Minna Palander-Collin & Anita Auer (eds) (2017). Exploring Future Paths for Historical Sociolinguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Schiegg, Markus (2022). Flexible Schreiber in der Sprachgeschichte. Intraindividuelle Variation in Patientenbriefen (1850–1936). Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter.
Vandenbussche, Wim & Stephan Elspaß (2007). Introduction: Lower class language use in the 19th century (Special issue). Multilingua 26: 147–150.
WORKSHOP SCHEDULE
6 February 2025
| Time | Speaker | Title |
| 10.00-10.15 | Anita Auer (Lausanne) & Markus Schiegg (Fribourg) | General Introduction |
| 10.15-11.00 | Stephan Elspaß (Salzburg) | Language History ‘from Below’ – a Critical Account |
| 11.00-11.30 | Moragh S. Gordon (Leiden) | Exploring Annotation Methods: Enriching a Corpus of 18th and 19th-Century Scottish Pauper Letters |
| 11.30-12.00 | Anita Auer & LALP Team (Lausanne) | LALP Corpus: Diving into Data ‘from Below’ |
| 12.00-13.30 | Lunch break | |
| 13.30-14.00 | Mark Iten (Lausanne) | Preposition Use in Late Modern English Pauper Letters |
| 14.00-14.30 | Marina Berts (Lausanne) | Literacies of Late Modern English Lower-class Women |
| 14.30-15.00 | Julian Mader (Munich) | CoPaDocs-UK: A New Data Source for the Study of Late Modern English ‘from Below’ |
| 15.00-15.30 | Coffee break | |
| 16.00-16.30 | Markus Schiegg (Fribourg) | The Corpus of Patient Documents (CoPaDocs): More Digging into Data ‘from Below’ |
| 16.30-17.00 | Katharina Gunkler-Frank (Erlangen) | Polysemous Connectors in Historical Patient Letters from the 19th and Early 20th Centuries |
| 17.00-17.30 | Tony Fairman (Independent Researcher) | TBA |
| 18.45 | Dinner |
7 February 2025
If you want to attend the workshop in person (or online), please send an email to Anita Auer (anita.auer[@]unil.ch) and Markus Schiegg (markus.schiegg[@]unifr.ch) by 31 January 2025.