Courses

The HiSoN 2026 Summer School offers a series of advanced courses in historical sociolinguistics, covering a wide range of languages, periods, and methodological approaches. Courses are taught by internationally leading scholars and combine theoretical discussion with empirical case studies.

Teachers and course titles

Carolina Amador-Moreno (University of Extremadura)
Orality and the study of Irish English spoken discourse in historical sources

James Clackson (University of Cambridge)
Sociolinguistic variation in ancient languages

Simeon Dekker (Justus Liebig University Giessen)
The development of Middle Ruthenian as a literary language in an Early Modern multilingual environment: integrating philological and sociolinguistic perspectives between East and West

Chiara Fedriani (University of Genoa)
Diachronic socio-pragmatics: The evolution of requests in the history of Italian

Matthias Kappler (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice)
The sociolinguistics of an empire: Multilingualism and multigraphism in the Ottoman world

Oliver Mayeux (University of Cambridge)
The historical sociolinguistics of creoles and pidgins

Ulrike Vogl (Ghent University)
Differentiating Dutch: Language naming and metalinguistic debates in the Low Countries and beyond

Course descriptions

Detailed course descriptions and bibliographies are available in the following document:
[Download the course abstracts (PDF)]