ABSTRACT
It is true that researchers of the earlier varieties of a language cannot gather their data in the same way as a person studying present-day languages. The standard sociolinguistic methods, such as interview and elicitation, are automatically excluded. Recordings of spoken language are available only from the last century onwards. What serves as primary data necessarily represents written language and, as Labov says (1982: 20), ‘the fragments of the literary record that remain are the result of historical accidents beyond the control of the investigator’.
