ABSTRACT
When working with language change as a consequence of trade, the focus on the structure of the language should be accompanied by the question of why these structural changes happen in a certain place, at a certain time. Studying for example, the merger of the feminine and the masculine grammatical gender in the dialect of Bergen, Norway, we cannot ignore the fact that this change happened during the sixteenth century in the country’s largest and most international trading city. Therefore, internal questions such as How did the feminine and the masculine grammatical gender merge? must be combined with external questions such as How can we describe the speech community when this happened? The combination of language-internal and language-external approaches means that historical sociolinguistics is an interdisciplinary way to work. Still, it is clear that the goal of our research is to learn more about language and language use as such, which means that historical sociolinguistics is a branch of linguistics.
