Volume 9, Issue 1

This article examines the language shift and the accompanying changing status of French and German in the Erlangen Huguenot community (southern Germany) during the approximately 150 years following the first French immigrants settling in Erlangen in 1686. Our quantitative analysis is based on a diachronically-balanced corpus of 314 archival sources transmitted from this community and provides an overview of the language shift from French to German over time. The linguistic choices are influenced by the social group of the writers and addressees, the direction of communication and the domain of the texts. Our qualitative analysis focuses on multilingual texts and linguistic practices throughout the time period examined and traces the changing status of the two languages in the community, from French as the dominant language in the earlier years, to the use of German in conceptually oral texts with retention of French in school contexts and by the consistory, to French as a social symbol of the intellectuals in the early 19th century. Our paper provides empirical accounts for an under-researched context of language shift and contributes to historical sociolinguistic research on historical language contact, multilingualism, and linguistic identity.

In the 19th century, Cockney, the traditional working-class accent of London, underwent a significant change in how it was perceived and described. At the beginning of the 19th century the public discourse on the Cockney accent was restricted to a few linguistic shibboleths such as the interchange of /w/ and /v/ (represented in spellings such as weal , winegar , or vell ) and h-dropping, and mentioned by orthoepists and orthographically reproduced by some novelists. By the end of the 19th century, detailed Cockney descriptions and depictions had emerged, leading to the social and cultural construction – the enregisterment  – of the Cockney dialect. This paper documents this process by systematically analysing various types of published meta-discourse for both the linguistic forms (shibboleths) mentioned and the social meanings associated with them, especially in the form of so-called ‘characterological figures of personhood’. It further analyses conflicting language ideologies that Cockney was subject to in the 19th century, and which influenced its enregisterment process.

Written culture in high and late medieval Scandinavia is characterized by a long and complex relationship between the Latin written tradition and the older native runic one. One product of the intersection of these traditions are several epigraphs where Latin, vernacular, Latin alphabet, and runes are combined. The aim of this paper is to propose a framework for analysing such bilingual and biscriptal inscriptions which takes into account two fundamental aspects of language and script choice: (1) the literacy of those involved in the production and reception of the texts, and (2) the role of the indexicality of languages and scripts in the shaping and representation of identities. The paper draws on epigraphic analyses and modern sociolinguistic approaches to written multilingualism and shows that an interdisciplinary method can further our understanding of the relationship between the Latin and vernacular written cultures, their status relative to each other, and their social functions in medieval Scandinavia.

Within the framework of Historical Sociolinguistics and using a corpus of ego-documents written by Spaniards from different social backgrounds, this study analyses the sociolinguistic profiles of three phenomena of variation and change that took place in two critical periods in the history of Spanish: the Golden Age and the Early Modern Spanish. The study focuses on three standard variants that would end up displacing several vernacular forms whose use was much more widespread in Golden Age Spanish: (a) the use of the complementiser que in doxastic predicates depending on the verb creer [’believe, think’], to the detriment of the variant creer + Ø ; (b) the analogical pronoun quienes in relative clauses with an explicit human antecedent (’estos son los niños a quienes me dirigí’ [‘these are the children I spoke to’]), as opposed to the traditional relative quien ; (c) the diffusion of the demonstrative pronoun allí [‘there’] at the expense of allá . Despite the success of the standard variants in the eighteenth century, the three cases of variation show different sociolinguistic conditioning, which in turn is closely related to several parameters, such as the speed and robustness of the respective changes, the typology of the variables and the linguistic constraints at work in each case.

This paper explores the potential of using a historical sociolinguistic approach to interrogate the extensive lists of personal names found in medieval libri vitæ . So far, these lists have mainly been exploited in historical and a few onomastic studies, with a focus on name etymology and personal naming practices. Both the linguistics of the names and sociolinguistic perspectives remain to date underexamined. In this contribution, we explore possible sociolinguistic research questions, and present methodological challenges and preliminary results on the basis of four case studies from two examples, the libri vitæ of Thorney Abbey and Reichenau. The case studies examine autographs, choice of script and language, and dialect adaptation. Our main interest lies in the modelling and explanation of graphic and linguistic variation in the names. Our particular focus is on the status of the respective vernacular languages involved (Old English and Old High German) and in the conclusions we can draw from these documents about their underlying writing traditions in general, and scribal training and practices in particular.