The Beginning of Quantitative Sociolinguistics in the Nineteenth Century

In 1898, a young Dane, Anker Jensen (1878–1937), published a pioneering study in which he investigated the linguistic situation in Aaby, then a village and parish located just west of Aarhus (the second-largest city of Denmark, in Jutland), and today an integrated part of the city. Anker Jensen’s article can safely be considered the first sociolinguistic study in a Danish context, and it may in fact be the world’s first quantitative sociolinguistic study altogether. Jensen’s research was ahead of its time, and written in Danish, and for these reasons it has gone largely unnoticed internationally. In this article, we present an introduction to Anker Jensen’s Aaby study, providing background information and additional context for modern readers, as well as offering an overview of the author’s collected works, both published and unpublished. We also briefly discuss our translation into English of the original 1898 article. The translation is likewise published in this issue of Historiographia Linguistica.