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Non-anachronism in the historical sociolinguistic study of Portuguese

Abstract This paper discusses the methods that historical sociolinguists can use in order to avoid anachronism. It is argued that there are four practical ways of triggering a sense of scale, both for external variables that correlate with past language use and for the linguistic data that we inherited from past societies: by learning from social and cultural historians, by visiting judicial archives, by making scholarly digital editions, and by using corpus linguistic statistical procedures. The case study focused on here is Portuguese in the Early Modern period, from the sixteenth century to the early nineteenth century. The size of an ideal sample of informants is discussed, based on the demographic history of Portugal. Furthermore, social categories are established relevant in the context of Portuguese cultural history, taking into account the social world that made sense to Early Modern people. Next, I introduce a corpus of Early Modern letters containing a close-to-conversational register, and discuss two case studies. An analysis of spelling variation in the corpus shows the diachronic dialectal spread of a merger of sibilants. The statistical analysis of keywords shows the pervasiveness of register markers as well as some typical uses found in epistolary communication by social actors from different social strata.