ABSTRACT
The oral and the vernacular have so monopolized sociolinguistic research as to push into the background a broad segment of the range of variation: written material. For instance, when vernacular features acquire social saliency, they generally disappear from correspondence, while being widely used to represent popular speech in play material. Written documents must always be contextualized relative to other texts in the same genre and to texts from other genres. Historical linguistic researchers often refer to comedies (plays), arguing that their language is more representative of the oral than the language of letters. Written documents from the past are not “bad data”; they become so if contrasted strictly with contemporary oral material, gathered by methods that stress certain types of register. Historical sociolinguistics accesses the oral code through the written medium for lack of an alternative. Contemporary situations are different, as both oral and written media are accessible but the oral receives the most attention.
