Are Evolving Paradigms in Sociolinguistics Turning It into a Well-Developed Discipline?

Abstract

The current review aims at highlighting the main theoretical assumptions of historical sociolinguistics associated with its origins with special attention given to how these theoretical assumptions can assist language activists in their endeavor to provide the right conditions for analyzing linguistic variations and changes. Clearly, this review is organized around closely related paragraphs accompanied by commentaries on the historical sociolinguistics. This review provides a clearly written and concise introduction to the origins, philosophical developments, motivations, and main paradigms in historical sociolinguistics with a particular focus on the basic research done in the field over the last four decades with its diverse foundations in sociolinguistics, social history, historical linguistics, histories of individual languages, corpus linguistics, philology, discourse studies, socio-pragmatics, and traditional dialectology. Comparing the first four decades based on the studies conducted in the area, it is clearly observed that various studies have been carried out based on genre, speaker variables, and integration, respectively. This review also demystifies the fundamental distinction between principles and generalizations.