Abstract
<jats:p>In historical genre studies pragmatic and sociolinguistic approaches overlap, and our background in philology, literature, and corpus linguistics/digital humanities (DH hereafter) shows in our assessment, making the approach multidisciplinary and eclectic. This entry presents the major tenets behind the view of genre as a pragmatic variable, as well as briefly outlining its place in the foundational ideas of historical linguistics, such as language variation, factors behind change, conceptualizations of speech and writing, and the relationship between synchrony and diachrony. The entry also briefly outlines the main approaches to genre that we consider of greatest significance to our historical pragmatic perspective, that is, literary theory, ethnographic and rhetorical approaches, and multidimensional studies. The entry includes a case study which concentrates on genres in DH and linguistic corpora, showing the genre variable together with sociolinguistic parameters in English historical corpora.</jats:p>