Broadening the base of historical sociolinguistics

Resumo

This issue of Cadernos de Linguística has an unusual but important origin story. When the COVID pandemic hit the world in March 2020, we were all suddenly confronted with a situation where we could not hold in-person conferences or even presentations, and we were left struggling to learn how to meet virtually. As readers will already know, Abralin did huge work for our field worldwide by launching an online presentation series that many of us found to be a lifeline intellectually and even socially. Our gratitude brought with it a sense of debt to Abralin, the Brazilian Linguistics Society, and its journal, Cadernos. In thinking about topics that might be valuable in this forum, we quickly thought of the relatively new field of historical sociolinguistics, with developments led in large part by the Historical Sociolinguistics Network, HiSoN (hison.org), and then, inspired by HiSoN, the North American Research Network in Historical Sociolinguistics, NARNiHS (narnihs.org). While the empirical scope and time depth of studies have steadily diversified, we saw an opportunity to expand the range in both respects. We hoped that a collection of papers focused on broadening the base would showcase how vibrant the research tradition now is beyond Europe in the early modern and modern periods. It also provided us as editors with a chance to stretch beyond the world of Germanic linguistics where we have all done most of our work.  Another motivation for choosing this topic is that historical sociolinguistics is drawing work from a lot of early career scholars, offering a chance to bring some new voices to a broader audience.