Abstract
The Old English period covers a time span of about five centuries from ca. 600 to ca. 1150 and offers a multilingual linguistic landscape where English coexists with Latin throughout the period and with French (Anglo-Norman) at the end in the transition to Middle English. Though the extant Old English documents amount to over three million words, the sociolinguistically-relevant information about them is fragmentary. So, “[the] most immediate question to be addressed is whether a sociolinguistic analysis is at all possible for the Old English period” (3). In Sociolinguistic variation in Old English: Records of communities and people, Olga Timofeeva answers the question with a definite affirmative, as supported by a number of case studies focusing on different data sources and methodological approaches.
The introduction in chapter 1 positions the studies in the book in the fields of sociology of language and social dialectology and points out the well-known problems of limited and non-representative data. After an overview of earlier work on Old English where sociolinguistic issues are taken into account, Timofeeva presents the types of texts in The dictionary of Old English web corpus (DOEC 2009) and evaluates their potential for sociolinguistic investigation. As data for her studies, she has chosen the Anglo-Saxon charters, which represent the charter genres of diploma, writ and will, the legal register, and the documentary text type, and the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, which represents the annalistic genre, historical register, and (historical) narrative text type. The introduction ends with definitions of the kinds of social networks explored in the studies. While social networks in a general sense are formed by strong and weak ties between individuals, Timofeeva’s focus is on “communities of practice” and “discourse communities.” As these two kinds of networks appear rather similar, she suggests that “perhaps what has to be distinguished is synchronic communities of practice that have all the ‘mutual’ characteristics with the face-to-face interaction component and conscious involvement in the joint enterprise, versus diachronic discourse communities that can maintain ‘common’ characteristics and norms without physical and social proximity to their colleagues and sometimes the impossibility thereof” (26).
In chapter 2, Timofeeva investigates the relationships between the actors associated with King Alfred’s court in the late ninth century as revealed by references to them in contemporary documents and the distribution of texts. She concludes that the scholars involved in Alfred’s reform program can be described as forming a coalition, engaged in an educational and political activity for a specific time, whereas the scribes of the royal writing office formed a more connected group which developed into a community of practice, joined by a mutual engagement for a common purpose and shared norms for specified tasks. Case studies of the words Angelcynn ‘the English people,’ expanding its scope from Anglians to English in general, and here ‘band, troop,’ referring to the enemies, in the documents produced by the network show concrete examples of how the distribution of lexical practices matches the spread of the political influence of Wessex.
Chapter 3 motivates the choice of legal documents, charters, as data for exploring sociolinguistic variation in the Old English period. In addition to being numerous, charters include social and contextual information about the people involved and carry traces of the legal practices of the period. To show that charters can be used as sources for studying networks, Timofeeva examines the sociological information in the Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England (2010) database, where over half of the sources consist of Old English and Latin charters. Investigating the popularity of names, their occurrences over geographical areas and time periods, as well as the professions and gender of the individuals, she finds both microlevel trends of naming traditions in families and in professional groups, and macrolevel trends of the influence of historical events, most notably the Viking Age and the Norman Conquest, on naming practices. As data for linguistic studies of charters, Timofeeva uses three databases: Anglo-Saxon Charters (2018), Electronic Sawyer (2010-), and DOEC (2009). The chapter finishes with a presentation of the charter forms investigated in the following chapters.
Chapter 4 starts with a presentation of the main components, or the protocol, of diplomas and the social and administrative structures involved in producing them. The first case study of this chapter investigates witness lists in diplomas from the time of King Alfred and his elder brothers. The names in the lists reveal social networks of the actors involved in the production and diffusion of the documents and those networks in turn reveal hierarchical structures reflecting political changes. The second case study focuses on another element in the diplomas: the dispositive clause in Latin, which expresses the document’s main announcement of transfer of land, property, or rights. Examining the Anglo-Saxon Charters (2018) database, Timofeeva shows how the choices of verbs and verb forms in the dispositive clauses reveal differences in the discourse practices between scriptoria, which formed stable communities of practice at a local level. Through contacts between the permanent local groups and the royal assembly, some of the local practices spread, suggesting emerging conventions for the legal genre. With the centralization of royal power in the ninth century, the royal writing office developed into a permanent group of professional scribes, which has the properties of a community of practice.
Chapter 5 examines the development of the genre of royal writs from late ninth to late eleventh century. After defining the genre and describing the component parts of writs as well as her corpus, Timofeeva presents a case study of the salutation-notification template in writs and other official genres. She traces the origin of the template to official notices, reflecting oral practices, as seen in letters and prefaces. Examining the choices of address forms, speech act verbs, and attitudinal adverbials, Timofeeva shows how the choices are used in similar ways, expressing the social status of the interlocutors; for instance, in initial salutations, subordinates and equals are greeted freondlice ‘in a friendly manner,’ whereas superiors are addressed eadmodlice ‘in a humble manner.’ Moreover, the writ template stays the same until the shift to Latin as the language of administrative documents in the late eleventh century. Though the exact form of the template has changed, reflections of it still survive for instance in formulas of the type Greeting: Know Ye that, found in UK letters patents and in US presidential commissions.
Examining the relations between established linguistic norms, social status, gender and individual actors, chapter 6 suggests that the actors involved in the production and distribution of wills can be characterized as a discourse community; though they follow common discourse practices and develop norms for their genre, they do not form a group that meets regularly, and thus do not constitute a community of practice. The chapter starts with a presentation of the corpus of wills, their function as notifications of bequest, their orality, and the types of extant wills, as well as the conventional components of wills. The first case study investigates variation of three features by subperiod and archive. The uses of dispositive verbs show clear differences according to archive and genre: (ge)unnan ‘to grant’ emerges as the norm in legal genres starting from Wessex and East Anglia and the choice of grammatical case for the object of the verb reveals archive-specific preferences. In addition to variation by archive, choices of preposition in “after my death” adverbials reveal genre-specific preferences distinguishing wills from other charter genres, and a tendency for female donors to use the innovative variant. As an exceptionally high proportion—close to a third—of wills are associated with women, the second case study focuses on variation by gender and reveals that the wills by women tend to use more elaborate politeness strategies for soliciting patronage and stronger curses against those who disobey the bequeather found in the sanction clauses at the end of the will. This can be motivated by the more vulnerable social and economic position of women. The third case study looks at two sociolinguistic outliers, whose wills do not conform to the conventions of wills, as notifications of bequests addressed to a patron, but resemble writs, as documents addressed to private individuals, royal officers or local courts. In her will, Leofgifu, a female landowner, addresses a queen and not, as expected a king, which may be motivated by a personal relationship or loyalty to the queen. The hermit Mantat’s will shows his high social status by the use of the first person plural in self-references and a final benediction addressed to the royal couple instead of the expected sanction clause. The observed variation and the exceptions tally with the characterization of the actors involved in will-making as a discourse community.
Chapter 7 adopts a language-contact perspective and studies the multilingual situation within the community of practice consisting of the royal clerks and the local courts in England after the Norman Conquest. Investigating professional terminology in sixty documents selected from those in Bates’s (1998) Regesta regum Anglo-Normannorum: The acta of William I, 1066-1087, Timofeeva identifies twenty-four English and twenty-seven Norman French loans. Some English terms were borrowed into Latin by Anglo-Saxon scribes and remained in use after 1066, reflecting the continuity of local usages, while others were borrowed by Norman scribes as specific professional terms. Morphological and other properties of Norman loans suggest poor proficiency in English and unfamiliarity with local Latin among the Norman scribes. These findings suggest that the chancery personnel changed from English to Norman soon after 1066. An examination of the network of chancellors, scribes and bishops in William I’s administration supports this conclusion, showing changes spreading from the high levels of the society within one generation. Despite the change of personnel and the shift to Latin, there was continuity of some discourse practices, which were replicated in Latin, for instance in the genre of writs. The chapter ends with an appendix presenting the lexical information about the English and Norman terms in the Latin data.
In the epilogue in chapter 8 Timofeeva calls the book an experiment “to explore the possibilities of a sociolinguistic enquiry in the Old English period” (175). The impressive amount of detail presented in the book shows that it was a worthwhile experiment and the possibilities are many. The case studies included in the experiment provide inspiring examples of what can be done with fragmentary and seemingly limited data and how combining pieces of information from various sources can reveal patterns of both synchronic variation and diachronic change, as well as developments of genre conventions. The studies also foreground the fact that a language does not exist in linguistic isolation, and thus it is important to consider the multilingual context where English existed even in its early stages in order to describe the interconnections between the languages used by the people in the communities. The book can be read, on the one hand, as a methods handbook, showing what can be done when the usual tools of sociolinguists are not possible to use. On the other hand, it can be read as a sociolinguistic history and a sociology of the linguistic situation in the Old English period, with focus on the genres of charter and chronicle. Either way, the reader is served with a buffet of micro- and macrolevel findings and observations, which point to paths of further enquiries.
