Method of the Dialect History and the Historical Sociolinguistics in the Examination of the Historical Texts Enikő Gréczi-Zsoldos Institute of Hungarian Literature and Language [email protected] Keywords: linguistics, history of language, dialect history, historical sociolin- guistics, reconstruction The database for the socio-historical linguistics will include patterns of varia- tion in speech and writing in contemporary societies, and written texts of all kinds from earlier periods, including reports by historians and grammarians. The methodological question is how to extract the social informations from the sources. Sociohistorical linguistics therefore has certain concerns in common with the traditional philological method of textual interpretation. What needed a way of combining the rich philological tradition with the recent work on quan- titative methods, discourse analysis, literacy as well as with historical phonol- ogy, syntax, semantics and pragmatics.1 What is recoverable depends on the richness of the textual corpus, with represents the major source of evidence be- fore the period when tape recordings become available. There is a great need for re-examining the textual tradition to the location of the texts in their socio- historical context, i. e. where they fit into the registers available at the time. Historical dialectology might be defined as the study of diachronic, di- atopic and social variation in the historical records of languages. Insofar as it is historical it deals with time: the varieties spoken at particular points in history and the transitions between these points. Insofar as it is a study of dialects, it deals with variation across geographical and social space, broadly understood. The granularity with which we may observe the variants themselves, as well as their distribution across these key dimensions, is constrained by the quality, quantity and dispersion of the data itself. The English termin: dialect means not just the geographical variations of language, but also the social variations and the standard of language, too. 1 SÁROSI Zsófia, „Történeti szociolingvisztika – nyelvtörténet más megközelítésben”, Magyar Nyelv, 99(2003) 4. sz. 434−447., 435–436. — 161 — University of Miskolc Faculty of Arts – Research Almanac Mihály Hajdú isolates the terminology: historical dialect research and dia- lect history.2 The historical dialect research examines a single sub-area through the Hungarian dialect as a whole.3 The method of the dialect history examines the history of a well-defined dialect region.4 My examination is the history of the language of the 17th century in Nógrád county based on that methodology.5 In 1957, the first volume of studies was published in Hungarian language science, which seeks to systematicise the history of the Hungarian dialects. Lo- ránd Benkő’s summary of his work have been a guide to Hungarian dialect his- tory research for decades.6 The methodological difficulty of the reconstruction of the history of dialects is the head-to-hand problem. Often, the dictater of the text and the notation of the text are not same. We try to infer the former verba- lity from the written texts: how spoke the people once. The possibility of recon- struction within a sociolinguistic theory depends on the recovery of past events, as all form of historical enquiry do. In other words, we attempt to re- construct information that is not directly available or has been lost; in doing so, we are in a sense ‘creating history’. The primary evidence for the past is the same, whether the historical linguist regards himself as sociolinguist or not; namely, the texts which survive. The special problem for the sociolinguist, how- ever, is that of interpreting, or taking into account context in a systematic way. We can examine first some of the more purely particle problems in dealing with historical data. The fundamental methodological fact that historical linguists have to face is that they have no control over their data. His view is that the job of the historical linguist is to make the best of bad data – ‘bad’ in the sense that it may be corrupted or many times removed from the actual productions of na- tive speakers. It may happen that the copyist is not a native speaker of the va- riety or the language of the text he is copying. In this case, the text could not be taken as representative of the written language of any speaker or community. There are obvious connections between spoken and written language. The examining of the language use in 17th century based on archival re- sources from 1600−1699 in Nógrád county of Hungary. I wonder whether the former speech can be reconstructed from the written texts and what language layers of the former language use can be unstitched from the archival sources. 2 HAJDÚ Mihály, „Adatok a XVII. század ö-zéséhez”, Magyar Nyelv 83(1987) 443−447. 3 E.g. BÁRCZI Géza, Régi magyar nyelvjárások, Különlenyomat a Magyar Népkutatás kézikönyvéből, (Budapest: Néptudományi Intézet, 1947); PAPP László, Nyelvjárástörténet és nyelvi statisztika, (Bu- dapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1963) 4 E.g. ABAFFY Erzsébet, Sopron megye nyelve a XVI. században, (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1965) 5 GRÉCZI-ZSOLDOS Enikő, Nógrád vármegye nyelve a XVII. században, Adatok, források és tanulmá- nyok a Nógrád Megyei Levéltárból 52, (Salgótarján: Nógrád Megyei Levéltár, 2007) 6 BENKŐ Loránd, Magyar nyelvjárástörténet, (Budapest: Tankönyvkiadó, 1957) — 162 — Method of the Dialect History and the Historical Sociolinguistics This study required the methodological complexity outlined above. Its discipli- nary pillars: the dialect history, the historical sociolinguistics, the language ge- ography and the paleography. The localization is usually an advantage in the linguistic research. If the language relic contains the location of the note, it is highly likely appears the local dialect. However, in some cases, localization is misleading, e. g. when we want to conclude to the mother tongue or dialect of the writer because the birthplace of the document is not always the same as the letter’s native lan- guage or dialect. It is uncertain because the linguistic dominance of the ,,head” (who dictates the text) may be presents in the language of the document. On the other side, the scriveners and the students and the writers who can writes in the earlier centuries (the ,,deáks”) after their studies may not have stayed at their birthplace, but they moved to a new workplace, often to another dialect region. The apparatus and the person who gives them a job may be affected the language status of the texts. We find that the writers of the texts sometimes in- corporate allogeneic language elements into the written language of a dialect area. The „deáks”, the scriveners were the most educated persons in the con- temporary society. They are the ones who can read and write, especially their job was to write letters and the documents in the court. Therefore in this social class starts the aspiration for the linguistic unification. So the texts written by the educated scriveners often was not in dialect form. Often the writers of the official documents orient to a written language norm avoiding the dialects. The gradiation of this depends on the literacy, erudition even the social modality of the text writers. But because in this century the spoken language was the dialect form penetrate through the written texts. Can not be all documents to be seen as the sources of the dialect history. The dialect forms of the present or recent past can be help the regional delimitation of the consequence which can be filtered from the material of the former archival documents. An important element of the methodology is the so- called ascending method. Its main point is the comparison of the spoken and written texts in the same region: to compare the currently talking dialect with a reconstructed dialect and to make a comparison between standard and the language versions. It is difficult to determine which are the dialectal language forms in the history of a language. It is also the question: which area or part of the language community can be linked this forms, this language versions; when start the changes and how long they maintain their potency. László Papp un- derlines that the synchronous state of a linguistic period in its geographical di- versity can be reconstructed after a thorough detection, moreover it may be — 163 — University of Miskolc Faculty of Arts – Research Almanac possible to explore the history of the dialect of a region based on the repre- sentative studies.7 The knowledge of the historical-social context in power is a part of a com- plex historical study. The researchers of the language can’t miss the knowledge of the contemporary society, economic and settlement history, the method of the language geography, to follow the migrations, to explore the historical back- ground, to construe the relationship between the landscape and the people li- ving in it. Loránd Benkő notes in his paper that the life of the dialects is a com- plicated process, not easy to squeeze into the methodological schemes.8 In the research of the language use of Nógrád county in the 17th century alongside the complex methodological framework has an important role the method of the language geography, too. This method has connection with the disciplines examining the socio-cultural background as well as the horizontal examination of the language. Heinrich Löffler defines the language as a social formation. He emphasizes in his paper that the mutually compatible ingredients and active ingredients in a culture landscape are the language, the society and the geography.9 The lin- guistic space and linguistic boundaries in the researches of Maurer and Wrede are given not only linguistic-geographically but also sociological meaning. From the history researches of the German and French language (particularly in the works of G.