Volume 5, Issue 1 -

This paper aims to assess whether the emerging research paradigm of the new speaker may be useful in the study of language history. This question is tackled by exploring the dynamics which arose between Florentines and non-Florentine learners in sixteenth-century Italy. At the time, notwithstanding the peninsula’s linguistic fragmentation, the written language came to be progressively standardised around an archaic variety of Florentine (the fourteenth-century vernacular used by Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio). Florentines, initially, had no active role in this process and literary Florentine was living an autonomous life, becoming, at the written level, a “learner” variety progressively influenced by its new users. If at first Florentines themselves saw the emerging exogenous written standard in negative terms, they were not immune to its influence – an influence which grew stronger as the century progressed. The dynamics which arose between Florentines and learners concerning linguistic ownership appear similar to the ones which exist between “traditional” linguistic minorities and new speakers in some present-day revitalisation contexts. It is argued that the “new speaker” lens, mainly employed in the field of endangered languages, is valuable for capturing the dynamics which emerge between different groups during historical processes of language standardisation.

This paper aims to investigate the distribution of periphrastic DO and verbal - s in the south west of England using the FRED-s corpus . The data supports the earlier reported suggestion that the two features are in complementary distribution with regard to region: in counties where one feature is favoured, the other feature is disfavoured and speakers who use one feature tend not to use the other feature. However, there is some overlap as some speakers in the FRED-s corpus use both features, giving support to an idea, earlier proposed, of a transitory area in which a possible change takes place where speakers drop the use of DO and adopt verbal - s . Furthermore, the data shows an interesting tendency where periphrastic DO favours the habitual verbal aspect, whereas verbal - s favours the punctual verbal aspect. These findings could indicate that the two features have a different grammatical function. However, the overall frequency with which these two features occur is very low and seems to suggest that they are disappearing. Moreover, their use seems to be limited to short originally Germanic words, suggesting that the two features only occur in contexts where they were originally used, but are not productive.

This paper investigates what role eighteenth-century newspapers played in the disappearance of e -apocope in Austria. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of this Upper German feature in two contexts (the e -apocope in plural nouns and singular dative forms) trace diachronic variation in the Wienerisches Diarium/Wiener Zeitung in order to evaluate the role that newspapers played in the selection and dissemination of language norms. The results show that this newspaper disseminated the final - e in plural forms before it was prescribed by contemporary eighteenth-century grammarians active in Austria, indicating that newspapers – among other texts written by the educated classes – contributed to the selection as well as dissemination of particular variants. The use of dative - e was, however, less consistent, with a qualitative analysis revealing preferences by individual correspondents. This challenges current scholarly assumptions on the homogeneity of language practice within the text type newspaper . Instead, this article argues that historical newspapers have to be seen as a compilation of texts rather than as homogeneous texts.

The settlement New Denmark in the Canadian province of New Brunswick, founded in 1872 by Danish immigrants, represents an exceptional case of long-time maintenance of immigrant Danish. Based on a mapping of the social networks within a group of 39 New Denmark Canadians of Danish heritage, the community is characterized as a language enclave ( Sprachinsel ). Diachronic changes in language use is mapped onto changes in community structures by aligning the findings with the framework of verticalization. The paper further pinpoints a number of linguistic features which either by their existence or by their frequency distribution characterize New Denmark Danish as different from North American Danish in general by relying on qualitative and quantitative analyses of the speech produced by 39 speakers (approximately 120,000 tokens). These features include fossilized items from older stages of Danish as well as a number of bilingual verb phrases created by the New Denmark potato growers of Danish heritage. The study of these verb phrases illustrates how a bilingual community exploits pre-existing cross-linguistic similarities of their two languages to the maximum, thus pointing to the interplay of systemic possibilities (the genetic-typological closeness of English and Danish) with sociodemographic factors (a dense network of Danish speakers) and individual speakers’ linguistic choices.

Change in norms for the use of address forms and change in the actual usage of these forms are an important part of the history of any language. By investigating how certain grammatical features are chosen for specific pragmatic meaning, we deepen our understanding of the relationship between language and society. These changes can be described from several angles by focussing on intralinguistic factors (which linguistic features are used) or on social factors. In this article, we will take both perspectives into consideration by looking at the forms of pronominal address that have been used in Norway, as well as how and why they have changed. The data is drawn primarily from radio and weekly magazines, the popular media of the twentieth century.