Abstract
This issue of the Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics aims to contribute to our understanding of the role of merchants in language standardisation by focussing on how merchants can be seen as agents of linguistic change across various European vernaculars at various points in time. By analysing data from a varied set of languages, including Italian, Norwegian, Spanish, and Dutch, the authors provide insight into merchant writing in relation to language standardisation from different perspectives and at different times. The extant material available from merchants, their role as intermediaries in the commercial world, their functional and variable literacy, and their social and geographical mobility, all mean that merchant writing is able to offer unique insights into the vicissitudes of language history.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- The role of merchants in language standardisation
- Dialect levelling and merchant writing in Renaissance Italy
- The acquisition of sociolinguistic variation by multilingual merchants: the case of seventeenth-century Spanish
- Comparing the register of seventeenth-century Dutch business letters to private letters: formulaic language and French-origin items
- Dialect polishing and solidarity with ‘the others’: merchants as language creators in the 19th century
- Book Reviews
- Aneta Pavlenko: Multilingualism and History
- Thomas Rosén: Russian in the 1740s
- Matteo Tarsi: Loanwords and Native Words in Old and Middle Icelandic. A Study in the History and Dynamics of the Icelandic Medieval Lexicon, from the Twelfth Century to 1550 (Studies in Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 4)
- Markus Schiegg and Judith Huber: Intra-Writer Variation in Historical Sociolinguistics
- Julia Hübner: Norm und Variation. Paradigmenwechsel anhand frühneuzeitlicher Fremdsprachenlehrwerke. (Studia Linguistica Germanica 144)
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- The role of merchants in language standardisation
- Dialect levelling and merchant writing in Renaissance Italy
- The acquisition of sociolinguistic variation by multilingual merchants: the case of seventeenth-century Spanish
- Comparing the register of seventeenth-century Dutch business letters to private letters: formulaic language and French-origin items
- Dialect polishing and solidarity with ‘the others’: merchants as language creators in the 19th century
- Book Reviews
- Aneta Pavlenko: Multilingualism and History
- Thomas Rosén: Russian in the 1740s
- Matteo Tarsi: Loanwords and Native Words in Old and Middle Icelandic. A Study in the History and Dynamics of the Icelandic Medieval Lexicon, from the Twelfth Century to 1550 (Studies in Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 4)
- Markus Schiegg and Judith Huber: Intra-Writer Variation in Historical Sociolinguistics
- Julia Hübner: Norm und Variation. Paradigmenwechsel anhand frühneuzeitlicher Fremdsprachenlehrwerke. (Studia Linguistica Germanica 144)