Weaving data strands together

Abstract

The important role of historical cities as centers of higher literacy and text production in the standardization processes of written languages has been recognized some time ago by scholars working on different languages. The current article, which is couched in the study of urban vernaculars in the field of historical sociolinguistics, focuses on written language use in Norwich during the period 1422–1760. Within the context of the city’s socio-economic history, the article investigates two linguistic variables, notably the third person present tense forms and periphrastic DO, in the manuscript-based Corpus of Middle English Local Documents (MELD) and An Electronic Text Edition of Depositions 1560–1760 (ETED) and compares them to findings from other urban centers. Despite the restricted data set, the study shows that the supralocalization processes and the speed of change differ from one linguistic feature to another in the different urban datasets. The Norwich data confirms previous findings of other urban datasets that the supralocalization of the morphological feature precedes that of the syntactic feature.