THE SOCIAL DIFFUSION OF LINGUISTIC INNOVATIONS IN FIFTEENTH CENTURY ENGLAND: CHANCERY SPELLINGS IN PRIVATE CORRESPONDENCE

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to apply the conclusions of recent sociolinguistic studies on the spread of innovations to the historical implementation of standard English. In particular, we believe that the attempts by James and Lesley Milroy at correlating standardisation, prestige norm focusing and the upward social aspirations of some speakers with the analytic tool of social networks may yield fruitful conclusions as regards the social diffusion of the Chancery standard in the late fifteenth century. In view of the uniformitarian principle formulated by Labov, we believe that historical stages of language development were possiblv subject to constraints similar to those afecting contemporary speech communities, to the extern that the linguistic behaviour of late fifteenth century speakers may have been determined by attitudes to prestige, by social and spatial mobility as well as by the everyday contacts and the personal circumstances of individuals. If this is so, the profile of those members of the community who adopted and transmitted the Chancery north in the period may be reconstructed. With this purpose in mind we interid to trace a number of variables related to Chancery usage in the sections of last fifteenth century private correspondence included in the diachronic part of the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts. The references to social (sex, age, social status), geographical (dialect) parameters, as well as to type of interaction appended to each text in the Corpus will help us to draw a picture of the speakers who innovated and diffused the new north at that time.