The framework for this work is the still young discipline of historical sociolinguistics. The central theme is the often postulated but rarely substantiated interaction between the social life world and the language use of workers in the 19th century. The analysis explores how this relationship is shaped, and what external and internal factors influence language use in various ways, through a pragmatic text-linguistic analysis of about 100 letters from Prussian miners. The foundation for the analysis, as well as the explanation of the text structure found in the letters, is the precise reconstruction of the historical context of language actions: on the macro level, it encompasses the communicatively relevant living and socialization conditions of the miners in their families, schools, and workplaces, and on the micro level, the rules and norms of letter writing that were applicable at the time.