Oops, diachronic

Having promised Shirley that we would not be using linguistic terminology without explaining it, I have just realised that I used the term 'diachronic' in my post about our project, and that I still haven't explained it. So here goes.

'Diachronic' is the study of how something changes over time, so 'diachronic dialectology' is the study of how dialects change over time, and 'diachronic linguistics' is the study of how a language or languages change over time. 'Diachronic' stands in opposition to 'synchronic', which is the study of something at a particular point in time, so 'synchronic linguistics' is the study of the particular form of a language or languages at a given historical moment.

Of course, in practice, it is simply not possible to be solely either 'diachronic' or 'synchronic'. In order to study change over time, it is important to have an understanding of the state of the language at different times. Conversely, in order to study the state of the language at a given moment, it is impossible to ignore the fact that the language is as it is because of historical change. In particular, variation within a language at any given point is always the result of changes spreading through the linguistic system.

Personally, I find myself much more drawn to diachronic approaches than synchronic ones. In the case of our project, what particularly interests me is the fact that, as Norman Blake has noted, authors "for the most part borrow [] non-standard language from other writers rather than going out into factories or farms to record the exact language". In other words, dialect representation is a literary tradition, and I'm very interested in exploring how that literary tradition changed during the period 1800-1836.