Volume 10, Issue 2 - Special Issue: The role of merchants in language standardisation; Special Issue Editors: Anita Auer (Université de Lausanne) and Josh Brown (University of Western Australia)

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.

This article aims to assess the extent to which merchant language in Renaissance Italy can be said to have undergone a process of dialect levelling. Merchant letters in the Italian context are characterised by their high degree of verb allomorphy, both verbal and nominal. Previous investigations have shown that this degree of allomorphy is much more present in merchant texts than in other text genres immediately preceding codification in the 1500s. This article continues this line of research, showing how a process of dialect levelling occurs in a corpus of merchant writing sent from Milan in the late 1300s and early 1400s. Specifically, it focuses on 1pl. verb endings and the presence of voicing in past participles to show that Tuscan linguistic items infiltrated and then spread into neighbouring dialectal areas, such as Gallo-Italian, that is typologically distinct from Tuscan. Since this process of levelling was occurring at the same time as literary Tuscan was spreading, sometimes mediated also by merchants, the article also discusses these issues. While focus is placed on the contribution of merchant language in Renaissance Italy, the article can be seen as a case-study as evidence of language evolution ‘from below’. Overall, it argues that historical sociolinguistics provide powerful tools which help to show the various processes identified during standardization.

This article analyzes an unpublished corpus of 131 letters written in Spanish by four Dutch merchants during the seventeenth-century (1669–1677). The aim of the investigation is to determine whether the variation found in these letters was internal, external, or both, and to study the factors that favored each source. To do so, I will look at vowel variation in this corpus. Since standard vowel variants were being selected in seventeenth-century Spanish, the research questions addressed in this work are the following: Did multilingual merchants acquire the emerging standard of the moment? Did multilingual merchants contribute to the selection of standard variants? Did multilingual merchants acquire the sociolinguistic variation of that period? How did multilingual merchants differ from L1 speakers and why? How did linguistic and social factors influence this variation? The results revealed a great amount of intra- and inter-speaker vowel variation, and this variability was a matter of both internal and external factors. Therefore, this study argues that, while multilingual merchants acquired some of the standard variants that were being selected in the emerging standard Spanish of the seventeenth century, they reported linguistic variation that can be explained considering the context of use and the socio-economic conditions underlying their acquisition of linguistic repertoires.

In this article, we examine, quantitatively and qualitatively, Dutch business letters written by merchants, focusing on formulaic phrases and French suffix borrowing. The letters are part of the Prize Papers , the collection of documents confiscated by the English during times of warfare. We compare these business letters to private letters from the same source, and address the question whether the business letters constitute a particular register. The business letters, written by upper and upper-middle ranked male merchants from the seventeenth century, appear to differ from private letters written by people with a similar social profile. Frequent formulae highly characteristic of seventeenth-century private letters occur to a much lesser extent, if at all, in the business letters. Other formulae, some including Romance origin items ( Laus deo, saluut, cordiale ), occur more frequently in the business letters. The frequency of verbs with the French-origin suffix - eren is found to be higher in the business letters than in the private letters. Functional explanations are presented for these register differences: formulaic language is correlated with writing experience, and the use of French-origin items may be connected to the common vocabulary used in international trading networks. Similarities in phrasing are also revealed in a qualitative analysis of examples of private and business letters by the same writer. This finding demonstrates how similar private and business letters often were, thus challenging the idea of distinct registers.

In this article, the linguistic choices of a group of young merchants and merchants’ sons are discussed. Living in Bergen in the second half of the 19th century, they wrote Danish and spoke a dialect marked by centuries of dialect and language contact. Most of them had some competence in German, some also in English and French. When Romanticism and nation building became dominating ideas in Norway, the merchants’ European culture and their mixed dialect did not seem appropriate. These men therefore turned their backs on both city culture and city language and started studying Old Norse and rural dialects as part of a movement promoting a language called Landsmål . They formed an organization called Vestmannalaget ‘The Association of Westmen’ in 1868, with the aim of helping to create a new Norwegian standard. In other places in Norway, those working for this new standard language usually had a rural background, and their mission was to promote pride in and the use of their own dialects and their own culture. The Association of Westmen however, aimed to learn a refined version of the dialects of the less privileged classes. This was controversial in the social class to which they belonged, and most of them did not linger on in the Landsmål movement as adults. They were young radicals who paved the way so that others, with closer ties to rural Norway, could take over the linguistic struggle.