Linguistics ante litteram in the Learned Journals of the Enlightenment

This article examines the role of eighteenth-century learned journals in centralizing and structuring scholarly disciplines, with a focus on linguistics ante litteram. It considers whether these publications shaped the formation of distinct scholarly fields. The study offers an overview of early modern journal research, focusing on corpus-based methods, before embarking on a comprehensive approach to early modern journals through a number of case studies. After exploring the information included in the Gelehrte Journale und Zeitungen project, it looks at how journals indexed and labeled linguistic topics and traces the evolution of language research terminology. The findings reveal a lack of discipline-specific classification in early modern journals, implying that the rapid pace of publishing hindered thematic organization. Nonetheless, journals may have subtly aided the development of nascent disciplines by acting as arenas for terminological exploration.