This introduction to the special issue situates cemeteries as culturally and linguistically rich "heterotopias" that negotiate societal values, identities, and power structures. It positions gravestones, grave and cemetery layouts, and funerary practices as dynamic expressions of social norms, revealing how communities construct meaning through these elements. Particular attention is given to multilingual contexts, where gravestones serve as discursive practices that encode tensions, affiliations, and identities. It contextualizes the articles contained in this special issue and underscores cemeteries' significance as linguistic landscapes for historical sociolinguistic inquiry.
A central goal in historical sociolinguistics is studying linguistic change. Yet only a modest body of research has addressed obsolescence of dialect features specifically, neither in historical linguistics nor in sociolinguistics. However, studies that focus on waning features demonstrate that they do not abruptly vanish but may undergo diverse trajectories of change. This situation is ideally suited to the methods of language variation and change with appropriate attention to the adjacent fields of dialect grammar and historical approaches to sociolinguistics and dialectology. This paper presents an in-depth framework for studying grammatical dialect features in decline from these combined perspectives. Our aims are to: (1) discover and analyze rare features before they are lost, (2) determine which obsolescent features endure and which fall away, (3) offer theoretical insights into dialect recession and its window on language change, and (4) advance the understanding of why some features persist while others do not. First, we outline a methodology for studying declining dialect features, from identification to analysis, with case studies of relative markers, preterite come, double modals, preverbal did, and verbal - s. Second, we synthesize findings on obsolescent features and the linguistic insights they generate. We will demonstrate that obsolescence follows variegated trajectories, which help resolve linguistic puzzles, historical anomalies, regional/social distinctions, and origin debates. Overall, the study supports greater understanding of processes of change, factors contributing to the decline of forms and functions, and emergence of linguistic innovations. The reasoned, replicable methodology we detail will support future research and offer rewarding outcomes.
This paper applies a historical sociolinguistic framework to the study of Epigraphic Mayan (EMY), a logosyllabic writing system (ca. 400 bce-ce 1700) innovated by speakers of the Ch'olan and Yucatecan (Mayan) languages. Two variables are studied: 1) the Common Ch'olan *h, *j > /j/ merger (/j/ = IPA /x/); and 2) Common Ch'olan ?aj= similar to ?a= 'male/large/active proclitic classifier'. For each variable, a comprehensive dataset was compiled using the Maya Hieroglyphic Database (Looper and Macri 1991-2024) to study, through a quantitative approach: the nature (linguistic vs. orthographic) of the variables; their temporal and geographic distribution; and the influence of scriptal, linguistic, and social factors. The results show that: 1) the two variables are not interrelated; 2) the innovative variant for each variable shows a significant association with (less "conservative/formal") portable inscriptions, and began spreading earlier than previously thought, but generally in previously identified geographic patterns; 3) the *h, *j > /j/ merger spread in association with Top Rank Size sites, likely reflecting a linguistic change-in-progress, followed by a (newly discovered) conservative orthographic reversal; and 4) that the ?aj= similar to ?a= variable spread in association with Bottom Rank Size sites, but its nature as a linguistic or orthographic variable remains unclear.
This article is a methodological contribution to the question of what can be inferred from the linguistic landscape of a cemetery about the multilingual past of a community. The data of the study come from cemeteries in Varkaus, an industrial town in a Finnish-speaking area in Finland, where a small Swedish- and German-speaking minority formed in the nineteenth and early twentieth century as a result of industrial labor migration. The method selected for the analysis combines the perspectives of linguistic landscape research with onomastics and offers new insights into the possibilities and limitations of cemeteries to function as a source of evidence for the investigation of historical multilingualism. The focus is on both the names of the deceased engraved on grave markers and inscriptions other than names. The article demonstrates that the reasons vary for the multilingualism within and between these two layers of the analysis and that these two layers partly open different windows to the multilingual past of a community. In addition, the cemetery landscape is transformed by commemorative practices: Because they change over time, the cemetery's linguistic landscape is not a direct historical replica of the linguistic resources of past members of the community.
This paper is based on an analysis of heritage gravestones from three Canadian cemeteries that are not assigned to or used by any specific ethnic community in Waterloo Region, Ontario. Drawing on tools from semiotic landscape and historical sociolinguistics, the gravestones are analyzed for evidence of multilingual positioning through elements from German and/or (English-speaking) Canadian language and culture. This qualitative analysis reveals several ways of positioning, both linguistically and visually, that creatively make use of linguistic forms and images, often in ways that merge, rather than delineate, cultural elements. This gravestone analysis is complemented with a discourse analysis of current informational materials (e.g., walking tours, website) about these cemeteries, in which specific German Canadian aspects are instrumentalized as a form of commodification. Highlighting particular (socio-)historical aspects provides a current-day perspective that mediates how historical artifacts (including gravestones) are constructed in terms of their multilingualism and multiculturalism. Overall, this paper argues that a contextualized analysis of heritage gravestones which includes language(s), imagery and current-day constructions of sociohistorical community structures can shed light on the values and positionings at play in a historical heritage community. It contributes to historical sociolinguistics by correlating present-day interpretations with historical language data from gravestones and demonstrates in which ways current materials can add to and shape our understanding of the structure of historical societies.
This article exemplifies how the first in-migrants to places where a new dialect is being formed speak after a lifetime in the new town. In the present study, the speech of three migrants to the new town Narvik, who gave interviews when they were aged 90-100 years old, is analyzed, in particular their choice of linguistic features from the available feature pool. The study is placed within the theoretical framework of new dialect formation and also draws on perspectives from third-wave sociolinguistics, giving new insight into the role of individual variation in new dialect formation processes. The ideologically linked meanings of linguistic features that were relevant in (Northern) Norway at that time provided the inhabitants of the new town of Narvik with potential variants to choose from, but they also set limits. The analysis shows that the informants' personal histories and the sociohistorical context influenced which linguistic choices they made.
The present study examines how national identity and regional belonging are historically represented and expressed in Alsatian cemeteries, evoking past events and sacrifices for the nation. The cemetery is approached as a semiotic linguistic landscape, where both national and regional belonging are asserted and contribute to the construction of collective memory. Particular attention is paid to transgressive monolingual epitaphs in French, where French emerges as a marked language choice since it diverges from the language expected by the ruling German power. This contrasts with monolingual German gravestones and bilingual gravestones in French and German. Language choice thus signals an ideological stance, further reinforced by symbols and verbal signs. Identity is articulated on both the national and regional levels: on the national level through references to specific French markers (decorations, public service titles, French wars, etc.), and on the regional level through distinctly Alsatian markers (e.g., the Malgr & eacute;-nous). Ultimately, the cemetery visitor is reminded of national allegiance and of the authority of the nation, which has demanded the ultimate sacrifice from its citizens.
As sacred spaces in human consciousness, cemeteries preserve and communicate individual and collective histories that are reflective of the societies and cultures in which we find ourselves. Cemeteries document, memorialize, and provide space for members of a society and culture in virtual perpetuity. As a result, a cemetery's gravestones constitute an integral part of a society's language ecology, both as a display of language within its public landscape, and as part of an ongoing conversation between the living and the dead, the past and the present. This manuscript analyzes gravestones among the Pennsylvania Dutch, a heritage language community that has existed in North America since its early colonial period. Their gravestones, as artifacts of their material culture, reveal not only the normativity of multilingualism in early American immigrant communities, but also the changes to that multilingualism resulting from ideologies about monolingualism. Concurrent with the changes in the linguistic repertoire on gravestones were changes to their visual and epitaphic aspects. As a result, this study calls for a more nuanced investigation of the interaction between material culture and multilingualism to understand more about historical language ecologies of heritage language communities.
The commentary discusses the opportunities and challenges of using epitaphs on gravestones as a source for historical sociolinguistics based on the studies by Vajta, Kolehmainen and Wessman, Liebscher and Stolberg, Brown, and K & uuml;hl in the Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics (2026) all focusing on gravestones in multilingual communities. The commentary points out the paradoxical nature of gravestones shaped in the dichotomies of past and present, private and public, and informational and symbolic language use. Moreover, complexities arise when considering the multiple stakeholders and audiences such as the deceased, the family, the community, the public, the nation and, not least, the stone masons. This paradoxical nature makes epitaphs and gravestones a rewarding but nevertheless complicated source for historical sociolinguistic research.
This paper explores the legacy of key language policy decisions taken during the tenure of one of the earliest Governors of the British Colony of Mauritius, Sir James Macaulay Higginson (1851-1857). Tasked with overseeing the day-to-day running of an island where the majority of the population was of Indian origin, he is recognised for his efforts to establish the first schools targeted at children of Indian descent. Focusing specifically on his decision to select an Indian vernacular language as a medium of instruction in these schools, this paper looks at a series of recommendations put forward by Higginson culminating, among others, in the labelling of Mauritian Bhojpuri (MB) as 'Hindoo dialect' and eventually as 'Hindustani' or 'Hindi'. It uses his correspondence with various officers from the Colonial Office as well as the different Ordinances put forward by him as its primary focal point. Paying particular attention to the period of January 1854 to October 1857, it examines the circumstances leading to the misnaming of MB and looks at the consequences of this decision in colonial Mauritius.
This study examines the use of third-person singular inflections -th and -s in Early Modern English sermons, adopting a micro-sociolinguistic approach. Focusing on linguistic data from the Corpus of Sermons in Early Modern English (CoSEME), it aims to explain how and why the -th form was retained longer in religious language despite the broader linguistic shift to the -s form. The paper employs third-wave sociolinguistic theories and analyses the data within two frameworks: discourse community and community of practice. By investigating sermons from three generations of preachers, the study identifies a notable divergence in the use of -th forms, linking these patterns to religious identity and practice. The findings reveal that -th forms gained social meaning as markers of solemnity and authenticity within the religious domain, particularly among certain religious communities. The analysis highlights a complex interplay between language, community, and identity, demonstrating that the use of -th forms was influenced by sociopolitical factors, individual agency, and communal linguistic norms. The paper contributes to understanding the role of social meaning in historical language variation and change, offering insights into how specific linguistic features may be maintained within genres to project identity and align with community values. It also assesses the utility of sociolinguistic community frameworks for analysing the social significance of linguistic variation in historical contexts.
This article puts forward the hypothesis that a small number of lingua francas (LFs) can be historically observed as having reached a special status and manner of use. Termed here lingua cosmopolitanas (LCs), the proposed distinctive group is exemplified by languages such as Sanskrit, Classical Arabic and Latin, representing a distinctive quasi-universal communicative phenomenon not adequately observed in research. To test this hypothesis, our study compares six LFs in terms of broad sociolinguistic characteristics. These include, on the one hand, post-4th-c. Sanskrit, post-8th-c. Classical Arabic and post-9th-c. Latin, conjectured as potentially LCs, and, on the other hand, post-18th-c. French, post-16th-c. Spanish and post-18th-c. KiSwahili in international use, as likely not of such additional status. The results of the comparison show the former as distinctive, with five characteristics separating them from the three latter LFs. They are found to include (a) loss of native speaker reference; (b) becoming the implicit conduit of the times; (c) fixedness of norm in writing; (d) extreme longevity in stable form; and (e) emergence of and co-existence with 'daughter' languages. The findings are then discussed in terms of paradigms describing natural language as a phenomenon in general and LF as a concept in particular. In addition, English is also discussed in the same terms, as potentially an LC in statu nascendi, and tested against the deduced signifiers.
This article strives to offer the historical sociolinguistic context needed to understand the use of Turkish loanwords in the informal Western Armenian spoken today. It does so by proposing a new framing for pre-twentieth-century Armenian dialects that underscores their openness to contact-induced change. This new framing aims to counter purist currents in scholarly and popular discourses that have treated loanwords in Armenian - Turkish and otherwise - as examples of corruption, contamination, and perversion, thereby vilifying them and erasing awareness of their longstanding normalcy and ubiquity in spoken varieties of Armenian. I begin by delving into this study's contributions to two distinct audiences: historical sociolinguists and scholars of Armenian history and linguistics. After a brief overview of Armenian dialects in the nineteenth century, I draw on insights from contact linguistics and on a corpus of largely untapped Armenian-language materials to draw attention to contact features in one of the most well-documented Armenian dialects of the Ottoman Empire: the Armenian dialect of Istanbul. Here I focus specifically on Turkish contact features found at the lexical level in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and illustrate how studying them can offer historians new lines of inquiry and entry points into the largely unexplored social histories of Armenians in the Ottoman capital and beyond. I end with a brief look at how Ottoman Armenian intellectuals actively worked to stigmatize, pathologize and invisibilize Turkish contact features in the second half of the nineteenth century and how the ideologies they invented continue to shape the way many Western Armenian speakers use and think about language today.
