1 34 The Reconstruction of Prestige Patterns in Language History ANNI SAIRIO AND MINNA PALANDER-COLLIN 1. Introduction Prestige in language essentially refers to the social evaluations that speakers attach to a language rather than to the characteristics of the language system as such. The prestige of a language or a variety is closely connected to the prestige of its speakers, so that a variety gains prestige if the speakers have prestige, whereas the variety of low-prestige people has low prestige. As quantifiable prestige (physical or material) is not easily obtained, it is “transferred to attributes of the prestigious persons”, which are easier to imitate and acquire; such non-quantifiable attributes include language (Joseph 1987: 31). Prestige patterns relate to language variation and change as in all societies there are different languages, regional dialects, and different ways of speaking (i.e. styles, registers, codes or discourses), and speakers attribute different statuses to these different varieties in an ideological “hierarchy of languages” (Grillo 1989: 1–3) and select the linguistic forms they use accordingly. The reconstruction of prestige patterns in language history, thus, deals with the reconstruction of attitudes of language users towards certain languages and varieties and the reconstruction of relationships between groups of people and the social dynamics of the community. It is also about exploring language in use and placing a language in its social, economic and political 1 This is a pre-print of an arcle published in The Handbook of Historical Sociolinguiscs, ed. by Juan M. Hernández-Campoy and J. Camilo Conde-Silvestre (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). 1