Nowe perspektywy i zadania historii języka polskiego

Abstract

Studying history of language is the oldest area of linguistics, as its beginnings can be traced back to the 19th century. Hence, it has functioned and developed under changing scientific paradigms, adopting their methods of description and ways of approaching research material. The subject of interest in the discipline is particularly broad, as it encompasses the entirety of texts and phenomena that appeared in the past. The description of linguistic phenomena in broad cultural and social context remains the main objective of historical linguistics; as a result, it benefits from the insights provided by many disciplines such as history, sociology, communication studies, cultural studies, and literary criticism. The 21st century brought new opportunities for the development of historical linguistics, which was enabled by two factors: development of digital technologies and the Internet and emergence of new research methods. The former has widened the access to historical material thanks to digital libraries and the development of electronic dictionaries which register lexical resources in different stages of language evolution. The latter has made it possible to present a new synthesis of the history of Polish from the perspective of such disciplines as historical sociolinguistics, linguistic genre studies, and communication studies.