E-learning: Diachronic sociolinguistics

The REMODUS Consortium / University of Vienna offered an online course on diachronic sociolinguistics. Details on the course and the schedule can be found below. The core target group of the course were students with some background in historical linguistics.


The course introduced the students to methodology of prehistoric language contact and the prospects of reconstructing prehistoric social relations on the basis of language contact. Topics of proto-language reconstruction, such as problems with reality of proto-languages and reconstruction of “proto-culture” were also covered. The examples and concrete language contact situations were mostly from the history of the Uralic (Finno-Ugric) languages but topics included contacts with Indo-European and Turkic; the course was aimed at students of historical linguistics more generally. Previous knowledge of Uralic languages was not essential.


Some concrete topics discussed during the course included:

  • Proto-language reconstruction and social reality
  • Problems with language contact/external influence as a cause of language change
  • Contacts between closely related languages and problems with the spread of innovations; examples from Finnic, Saami and Ob-Ugric
  • Problems with reconstructing prehistoric multilingualism (esp. Turkic-Hungarian contacts)
  • Finnic-Germanic contacts through the lens of diachronic sociolinguistics

The course was mainly taught by Sampsa Holopainen, PhD, a scholar of prehistoric language contact and historical linguistics more generally, currently employed as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki with funding from the Research Council of Finland. It also featured two guest lectures:

  • Johanna Nichols (University of California, Berkeley): Contact and decomplexification in northern Eurasia
  • Niko Partanen (University of Helsinki: Ethnohistory and current dialectal variation in Komi

For questions, please contact Sampsa Holopainen (sampsa.holopainen@helsinki.fi).

An output based on this course will be published over the course of our project.

 

Schedule

All classes will take place at 17:00 to 18:30 Central European Time (UTC +1). Deviations from this schedule, should they happen, will be discussed in class and communicated to participants via e-mail.

  • Monday, 20 November: Introduction, methodological issues
  • Tuesday 21 November: External cause of language change: problems and issues
  • Wednesday 22 November: Proto-language, variation and sociolinguistic reality
  • Thursday 23 November: Guest lecture by Niko Partanen (University of Helsinki), Ethnohistory and current dialectal variation in Komi
  • Friday 24 November: Problems with prehistoric multilingualism: Turkic-Hungarian contacts
  • Monday 27 November: Contact between closely related languages: Saami and Finnic, Khanty and Mansi
  • Tuesday 28 November: Finnic-Germanic contacts through the lens of sociolinguistics
  • Wednesday 29 November: Substrate: problems with definition and reconstructing contact situations
  • Thursday 30 November: Guest lecture by Johanna Nichols (University of California, Berkeley), Contact and decomplexification in northern Eurasia
  • Friday 1 December: Discussion of specific topics