This study falls within the purview of the still relatively youthful discipline 'historical sociolinguistics'. Its central theme is the frequently postulated but rarely demonstrated interrelation between social environment and the language used by manual workers in the 19th century. On the basis of a pragmatic, text-linguistic analysis of some 100 letters written by Prussian miners against the background of the communicative socialization conditions obtaining at the time, the nature and structure of this interrelation is explored and described. Shared social and communicative values prove in this context to be the central mediators between language use and objective social conditions.