La parola ai testimoni: (nuove) fonti d’archivio e storie delle lingue

The value of archives for historians is undoubted, and this equally applies to language historians, whose studies of manuscript and early printed sources underpin investigations of grammar, vocabulary, spelling, and even phonology. Such studies, however, have typically concentrated on “standard” texts, i.e. literary, diplomatic, and religious compositions, and – more recently – on codifying materials, i.e., usage guides, grammars, and dictionaries. It is only over the last couple of decades that a new approach to historical linguistics has developed, giving even more importance to archives. In this innovative methodological framework, a wider range of sources is considered, in an attempt to study language history “from below,” i.e. on the basis of documents written by men and women of all social classes and levels of education, so as to analyze authentic, spontaneous usage in a much more representative sample of texts. In this contribution I aim to outline the role of archives in this kind of studies, paying special attention to documents pertaining to the experience of nineteenth-century emigration from Scotland to the US. In the second part of my paper I will also present some crowdsourcing projects launched by American repositories for the transcription of digitized materials.