Olga Timofeeva's Sociolinguistic variation in Old English makes a novel contribution to the nascent field of historical sociolinguistics in demonstrating how even formulaic, legalistic texts can be carefully examined for evidence of sociolinguistic variation. Timofeeva surveys several historically and demographically critical moments in the Old English period (from the fifth to twelfth centuries), particularly the era of Alfred the Great and the period of significant language contact under William I. To do so, she considers different genres as representative of different factors that condition variation (e.g. region and gender) and analyzes them in conjunction with facts about authorship and societal structure.
Chapter 1 presents the theoretical background and the corpus of texts that forms the basis of the study. Timofeeva makes a compelling case for the treatment of legal texts as speech-related genres, given their reliance on performative speech acts and their oral performance before public audiences. She also reconstructs two distinct types of communities in which Old English linguistic norms emerged and spread: discourse communities vs. communities of practice. The former is characterized by a set of shared traditions that transcend time and space and can be spread via documents themselves, while the latter entails in-person communication and the deliberate development of shared linguistic practices at specific moments in time.
Chapters 2, 3, and 7 provide a reconstruction of linguistic communities: King Alfred's court (chapter 2), the Norman scribes that accompanied William I (chapter 7), and the more anonymous communities interacting with legal documents of different genres, to the extent that they can be differentiated on the basis of occupation, gender, and region (chapter 3). Chapters 4–6 each focus on a legal genre. In chapter 4, Timofeeva reconstructs regional variation in the writing of diplomas, which can be associated with different Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and where we can observe the growing influence of Alfred's West Saxon court. Chapter 5, on writs, demonstrates how the social standings of the author and addressee are reflected in the choice of salutations and speech act verbs. Chapter 6, on wills, provides an opportunity to examine gender-based variation, given a large number of female authors.
This work is likely to be of interest to historical linguists, given its nuanced treatment of lexical and morphosyntactic change in Old English, and to sociolinguists who are interested in the viability of synchronic variationist concepts in bygone communities. It may also be of value to legal scholars, since it illustrates the social origins behind traditions of legal writing that survive to this day. The methodology and conclusions are accessibly written, and individual chapters are self-contained enough to be assigned as case studies in historical linguistics courses. In particular, chapter 2 on King Alfred's court is a compelling study of the propagandistic coinage of new terms for the political goal of uniting the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, and chapter 7 is a reconstruction of Norman-English language contact-in-progress following the Norman Conquest, which serves as a much-needed contribution to our understanding of the mechanisms of contact-induced change at greater time depths.
