Volume 4, Issue 2 -

A literary standard for Icelandic was created in the nineteenth century. The main architects of this standard were scholars of Old Norse-Icelandic language and literature who turned to the language of the medieval Icelandic literature for linguistic models. Consequently, the resulting standard included a number of features from earlier stages of the language. This standard was successfully implemented despite the relatively weak institutional infrastructure in nineteenth-century Iceland. It is argued in this paper that the first Icelandic novel, Piltur og stúlka , appearing in 1850 and again in a revised edition in 1867, played an important role in spreading the standard. The novel championed the main ideological tenets of the prevailing language policy, and at the same time it was a showcase for the new standard. A rural love story set in contemporary Iceland, the novel was a welcome literary innovation. Most importantly, the subject matter appealed to children and adolescents in their formative years, and the novel thus became a powerful and persuasive vehicle for the new linguistic standard.

Based on a corpus composed entirely of texts close to the pole of communicative immediacy, mainly private letters from the sixteenth, eighteenth and twentieth centuries (c. 1960), this paper analyses the results of a variationist study on the historical evolution undergone by the Spanish modal periphrases with three distinct auxiliary verbs ( haber, tener, deber ). Using the heuristic tools of the comparative method, the data show that variation has been constrained by a handful of common factor groups over almost five centuries. Nonetheless, with the odd exception, these factors have conditioned each verb in a different way. Moreover, the sense of this variation changes as time goes by, with especially relevant reorganisation in the first part of the twentieth century. Furthermore, there is a notable association between these constraints and the degree of markedness and the frequency of the conditioning contexts, giving support to a usage-based approach to language change in which cognitive processes such as entrenchment play a decisive role. These data also allow a particular profile to be traced for each modal verb in the history of Spanish, in which tener and haber finally undergo a complementary distribution, whereas deber follows a different pattern. After several centuries of stagnation, tener becomes the star in the deontic firmament of spontaneous communication, diffusing abruptly as a change from below in the twentieth century, and replacing haber , which had been the unmarked variant for centuries.

A collection of traditional and ‘old life’ stories recorded in the late 1940s is used to reconstruct the sociolinguistic situation of the Enets community in Northern Siberia from the 1850s until the 1930s. The Enets had regular contacts with a number of neighbouring indigenous peoples (Nganasans, Tundra Nenets, Selkups, Evenkis, Dolgans) and later with Russian newcomers. The oral histories often comment on language use, and as a result we can reconstruct not only the languages that the Enets people used in this period, but also the contexts in which they used them. The Enets community’s multilingualism was typically characterized by command of key neighbouring languages, with the occasional command of other more (geographically and socially) remote ones. With close neighbours, language choice seems to have had limited social load, while in cases of trade or agonistic contact, the choice of language in interethnic communication seems to have followed a principle of asymmetric convergence towards the language of the party with the greatest contextual social power. The analysis is founded on a database of dozens of communicative events mentioned in the oral stories (over 50 are analyzed). Ongoing fieldwork on the modern sociolinguistic situation suggests that until quite recently there was considerable stability in the sociolinguistic norms governing multilingual interaction among the Enets.

The present article demonstrates how research on confiscated late-seventeenth-century letters allows us to gain insight into linguistic practices of second and third generations of Dutch-speaking migrants who lived in the German city of Hamburg, in a predominantly Low German region. The historical background of the preserved Heusch correspondence, spoken and written communication in merchant circles, and foreign language learning will be discussed. Apart from examining features such as epistolary formulae, ellipsis, and code switching, the question is also addressed of the degree to which interference from Low (or High) German is found. An analysis of the letters reveals both adoption of the Low German reflexive pronoun sick and a diverse pattern of using the relative particle so , which is shown to be a clear case of adopting (and maybe even extending) a supraregional German relativisation strategy.