Iryna Farion

Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine

Diachronic Sociolinguistics: History of the Term and the Branch of Linguistics

© Farion I. D., 2014

The subject of the suggested research is a new sub-branch of sociolinguistics – diachronic sociolinguistics: its sources, subject of research, objectives and terminological definition. Analysis of the linguistic thought has showed the formation of this separate branch of socio-linguistics during a centennial period, beginning with some concepts in the classic papers of Jan Baudouin de Courtenay, then Ferdinand de Saussure and such remarkable representatives of the French Sociolinguistic School as Antoine Meillet and Joseph Vendryes. The famous researcher Orest Tkachenko was the first Ukrainian linguist to pay attention to the problems of methodology of diachronic linguistics. Polish researches, in particular Witold Taszycki and Barbara Otwinowska, suggested a unique sociohistorical factual collation and analysis of sociolinguistic factors against the background of philosophic and cultural dimensions of a changeable epoch.

Keywords: diachronic sociolinguistics, external history of the language, social pressure, evolution of the language.

During the century the linguistic science gradually reached the justification of theoretical differentiation of three historical disciplines, each having its own narrow subject of research: historical grammar (the history of inner language structure), history of literary language (the history of functional styles of the language) and diachronic sociolinguistics (the history of social pressure on the language i.e. the pressure of a language community on the language). However, the term of diachronic linguistics has been defined only in the contemporary dictionary of sociolinguistic terms (2006): “Diachronic sociolinguistics (retrospective sociolinguistics) is a branch of sociolinguistics that researches the correlation between genuine linguistic and extralinguistic parameters in dynamics. Diachronic sociolinguistics establishes connections between the facts of language history and the facts of the history of a society in which a specific language functions, i.e. correlation relations between the dynamics of language development and those social historical and cultural changes that characterize the evolution of this society and its institutions. Diachronic sociolinguistics focuses on revealing the common basis of the language and society characterizing the evolution of this society and its institutions”.