ABSTRACT
In this book, sociolinguistics has been put to the test of time. We hope to have shown in the course of our discussion how modern sociolinguistic models can indeed be fruitfully applied to earlier states of a language like English. But we have also shown how these models need to be fed with period-specific information: it is not possible to use the present to explain the past without access to knowledge of past societies in their own right. This is particularly true of the analytic methods developed for studying independent variables such as social status. The historical sociolinguist’s task is therefore to establish a historically valid basis for analysing social distinctions. Our findings fully support the sociolinguistic approach by indicating that social factors significantly correlate with the diffusion of morphosyntactic changes in real time in the Tudor and Stuart periods.
