Volume 6, Issue 1 -

The paper returns to the complex question of the sociolinguistic history of Italy during the Renaissance. The traditional historiography of the Italian language adopts a teleological perspective, often defining the codification of Italian in 1525 with the publication of Pietro Bembo’s Prose della volgar lingua . This approach means that less attention has been devoted to other processes of language change, as well as less focus on areas outside Tuscany. Using the major historical grammars of Italian, I highlight cases of variation which emphasize the non-uniformitarian nature of the standard. One major process while the standard was evolving was the formation of a koine or ‘common language’. This was the main feature of language change throughout much of north Italy. Recent research into the histories of non-Italo Romance varieties have suggested that standardization and koineization are not mutually exclusive processes. Rather, they are best characterised by a ‘top-down’ vs. ‘bottom-up’ approach respectively, with many points of intersection. The paper transposes these notions onto the sociolinguistic landscape of Renaissance Italy, allowing for further insight into how Italian was codified in particular, and the relationship between standards and koines more generally.

This article considers the case of Cornish, a Celtic language that was in decline in the south-west of Great Britain from the early medieval era until the end of the eighteenth century, when its last recorded native speakers died out. At the point when a language under pressure eventually succumbs to forces of language shift, its role in representations of a distinct sociocultural identity might be expected to die with the medium itself. Yet a sense of cohesion at the group level has been observed to endure long after a shift to another language has occurred, with the obsolescent variety retaining a role in the maintenance of group boundaries. In situations of language shift, the meanings of such social constructions can change considerably, and the obsolescent variety may retain ideological associations with the group as an iconized symbol of identity. The analysis presented in this paper is based on an examination of the historical record as well as a synthesis of recent sociological research on Cornish. Attention will be drawn specifically to the manner in which the language has functioned as an icon of identity since the nadir of its decline as a spoken vernacular, through the ‘Cornish Revival’ of the twentieth century to the present day.

Using a study of the historical phenomenon of Franco-Russian bilingualism in imperial Russia as its point of departure, this article has three interlocking aims. First, it reflects on the common interest that historical sociolinguists and certain types of historian have in language use and language choice. Secondly, building on recent work by historical sociolinguists, it considers the ways in which historians’ and historical sociolinguists’ investigation of such matters as the social, political, cultural and literary functions of the French language in lands where French was not the mother tongue can be broadened and deepened by familiarity with each others’ findings. Thirdly, it seeks to illuminate the role of linguistic meta-discourse in the sort of grand narratives about the history and culture of national communities in which historians may be interested. In the specific case I examine, the narratives concern the relationship of Russia to the West, the wholeness or fragmentation of the Russian nation, the effects of cultural borrowing, the nature of Russian national identity and culture and the degree to which Russia is historically and culturally exceptional. In pursuit of these aims, I hope to illustrate the importance of linguistic matters in the history of societies, polities, and cultures and the potential that an interdisciplinary approach has to lend scholarship on these matters richer context and finer nuance than work which falls purely within either the historical or the historical-sociolinguistic domain tends to yield.

This paper places literary recreations of Lancashire English into the context of enregisterment and the sociolinguistics of spelling. Using the Salamanca Corpus , I examine Lancashire dialect writings published between 1700 and 1900 representative of both dialect literature and literary dialect to determine the repertoire of forms that were circulated in representations of the dialect. More specifically, my aim is to identify the respellings employed to highlight the pronunciation features that may have been noticeable at the time and associated with a Lancashire identity. I argue that the socially meaningful choices made by Lancashire writers can be seen as authenticating practices whereby the dialect was constructed and circulated, having authenticity effects concerning how it was experienced by the audience. The analysis treats respellings as sociolinguistic variables that are quantified to measure the relative salience of the phonological features they represent. It focuses on three of the commonly occurring traits found in the corpus, namely the MOUTH, GOAT, and PRICE diphthongs, showing that such an approach may give insight into their degree of salience, whilst providing a window into how the Lancashire dialect was perceived during this time.

Even though the Balkans constitute one of the most prominent examples of linguistic areas, little is known about the actual processes and mechanisms contributing to the shaping of this area. Most of the assumptions are based on macro-level analyses and describe the linguistic changes observed in terms of generalising tendencies such as increase in analytism or simplification of structures. In order to approach the processes underlying contact-driven change and area formation, however, the focus needs to be shifted to the micro-level, i. e. the individuals and their communicative practices. Among the rare sources allowing to assume this actor-centred perspective is Gjorgji Pulevski’s trilingual dictionary of Macedonian, Albanian and Turkish from 1875, which on the orthographic and morphological level allows for insight into a multilingual speaker’s perceptions the languages s/he is exposed to and makes use of in her/his every day communicative practice. The present paper discusses the structural parallels between Macedonian and Turkish observed in the dictionary. It illustrates in how far these parallels may contribute to our understanding of the specific kind of individual multilingualism that provided the basis for the morphosyntactic developments observed for the Balkan linguistic area, and may also help to shed light on the more general nature of these developments. It is suggested that these processes evince an increase in morphological transparency, i. e. morphem-to-function mapping, as the most salient and probably most effective outcome of largely imperfect multilingualism.