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It is with great sadness that I hereby inform the readers of Multilingua of the sudden and tragic death of Alan Kaye on 31 st May. Alan was on research leave in the United Arab Emirates when he was diagnosed for bone cancer on 1 st May. His son Jeremy, who travelled to the UAE where Alan was undergoing radiation therapy, reports that the cancer had already metastasized infecting many of his major organs. Jeremy brought his father back to the U. S. on 22 nd May, where, with his immune system already gravely weakened by the therapy, he died of pneumonia nine days later.

‘In looking back upon the history of ordinary people, we are not merely trying to give it a retrospective political significance which it did not always have, we are trying more generally to explore an unknown dimension of the past.’ (Hobsbawm 1998: 270) The historiography of modern Western languages has traditionally concentrated on unification and standardization processes. This approach was deeply rooted in 19 th and early 20 th century (language) ideologies and (language) politics. The language discourse in many Western countries displayed a remarkable collaboration of linguists with politicians, historians and writers in constructing a picture of unified nations with autonomous cultural, especially literary and linguistic, traditions that were sometimes projected backwards to the Middle Ages and beyond. Hence, generations of scholars and teachers have presented language history as a long march toward a uniform standard. Variation and other linguistic digressions were usually either ignored or stigmatised as corrupted language and not considered as suitable data for linguistic research. Up to the end of the 20 th century, many textbooks on national language histories were dominated by this teleological view, portraying ‘classical’ authors as role models for language norms and style. As such, language history was largely reduced to the study of literary language, often coinciding with the high variety employed and received by only a tiny minority of the population. ‘Non-standard’ variation – let alone language use from the non-elite – was usually regarded as corrupt and vulgar and, in an act of ‘sanitary purism’ (Milroy 2005, 324–326) or ‘verbal hygiene’ (Cameron 1995), simply cleansed from textbooks.

The mass literacy drives of the 19 th century have proved to be a landmark in German language history, as for the first time the majority of the people in the German-speaking countries were able to participate in the culture of writing. The full impact of the spread of writing among the lower social classes on language variation and change has, however, not yet been recognised in language historiography. With examples from grammar and spelling in private emigrant letters, the present article strongly argues for an alternative approach to language historiography, using such texts as a starting-point for a ‘language history from below’.

This article gives a detailed description and discussion of seven applications for poor relief, as found in the archives of English County Record Offices. All letters were written by or for poor writers between 1795 and 1834. As the variety used in these letters is not ‘Standard’, nor ‘dialect’, the second part of the article is devoted to the question of how this variety relates (or does not) to traditional linguistic views on standardisation. Contrary to the prevailing ‘standard language ideology’, it will be claimed that the present letters can only be interpreted adequately through a linguistic theory ‘which treats all varieties of English equally and discards none’. … in writing the history of powerless people, drawing on conventional, published sources is far from enough. Adam Hochschild (2002: 104)

On the basis of private documents (letters, diaries), this article discusses the language use of Canadian French writers from different social classes from the beginning of the 18 th century to the end of the 19 th century. It first examines the relationship between the writers and the norm and their use of conservative and innovative features with regard to spelling and grammar. Next, it looks into the extent to which non-standard spelling use could be paralleled with vernacular use of morpho-syntactic features. ne montre pas mon griffonage jan ai honte moi-même ‘Do not show my scribbles, I am ashamed of them’ (18 th century)

This paper analyses a number of typical features of lower-class writing in 19 th -century Finland. The data consists of business letters written by local traders and farmers. These letters are compared to letters by Forest Finns, a group of early Finnish migrants to Scandinavia. The business letters are marked by three distinct influences: the older literary tradition, local dialects and the ‘rising literary genres’ of the 19 th century. On the basis of the morpho-phonological level of the corpus texts, it will be argued that the lower-class writers intended to write a standard language, not a dialect.

This contribution focuses on letters written by private soldiers from Denmark around the middle of the 19 th century. It investigates whether there were statistically significant differences in the orthographic skills between the social groups into which the rural male population could be classified at that time. Apart from the writers' social rank, I look at the correlation between the percentage of norm divergence and the correspondents' place and time of birth, as well as the length of the letter and the repeated use of specific types of divergences by the correspondents.

This article discusses the written Dutch of lower class writers in 19 th century Bruges (Flanders, Belgium). None of the scribes conformed to any of the prestige norms for Dutch spelling at the time. They all used an idiosyncratic orthography instead, full of variability but not chaotic. On the level of style and syntax, these texts are characterised by ‘stylistic breakdown’. The combination of these orthographical and stylistic features was not typical for lower class writing as such. In Bruges, middle and upper class writers displayed similar writing patterns, but they abandoned this ‘style’ for the standard earlier than the lower class writers did.

Elizabeth Martin, Marketing Identities through Language: English and Global Imagery in French Advertising . Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2005, xv + 286pp. (Helen Kelly-Holmes) Vijay K. Bhatia, Jan Engberg, Maurizio Gotti and Dorothee Heller (eds.), Vagueness in Normative Texts . Bern: Peter Lang, 2005, 474 pp. (Gina Poncini) Adrian Blackledge, Discourse and Power in a Multilingual World . Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2005, pp. 252. (Joanna Pawelczyk) Joanna Thornborrow and Jennifer Coates (eds.), The Sociolinguistics of Narrative . Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2005, 299 pp. (Aleksandra Galasinska) Mike Baynham and Anna De Fina (eds.), Dislocations/Relocations. Narratives of Displacement . Manchester/Northampton: St. Jerome, 2005, 262 pp. (Aleksandra Galasinska)