Investigating West Germanic Languages

An origin story has emerged and solidified around the relatively new research area called historical sociolinguistics – a story based primarily on the field’s relatively brief history as a “named” field (reaching back only a few decades) and repeated regularly and largely uniformly in summary, overview, encyclopedic, and introductory presentations of historical sociolinguistics. We argue that the defining characteristics of the modern field are deeply connected to and clearly rooted in the