Volume 49, Issue 3

This paper discusses code-switching in the records of a Protestant brotherhood which were kept by Scottish emigrants in the Polish city of Lublin in the late 17th century. This manuscript material has not been analyzed linguistically yet. Indeed, Scottish migration to the Continent in the early modern period has only recently been studied with more attention by historians while a linguistic assessment of the writings composed by the Scots in the emigrant context is still pending. The analysis shows how Latin, the universal language of administration, and Polish, the language of the host community, helped Scottish writers to construct authoritative and context-sensitive texts, or literacy events (Sebba 2012). The discussion identifies pragmatic and discourse-related differences between switches to Latin and to Polish, and pays due attention to the questions of the socio-historical background, language status, genre and channel in the context of historical code-switching.

During the brief era of German colonialism in the Pacific (1884-1914), German was in contact with a large number of languages, autochthonous as well as colonial ones. This setting led to language contact in which German influenced and was influenced by various languages. In 1900, Western Samoa came under German colonial rule. The German language held a certain prestige there which is mirrored by the numbers of voluntary Samoan learners of German. On the other hand, the preferred use of English, rather than German, by native speakers of German was frequently noted. This paper examines linguistic and metalinguistic data that suggest the historical existence of (the precursor of) a colonial variety of German as spoken in Samoa. This variety seems to have been marked mainly by lexical borrowing from English and Samoan and was, because of these borrowings, not fully comprehensible to Germans who had never encountered the variety or the colonial setting in Samoa. It is discussed whether this variety can be considered a separate variety of German on linguistic grounds.

This article investigates the interaction between the developing Standard Lithuanian and spoken dialects as reflected in lower class writing (correspondence written by emigrants and to emigrants). More specifically the article focuses on the choice and use of those phonological or morphological variables that are the most salient in the scribes' dialects, in order to establish and define those features that indexed "standard" for lower class writers in the first half of the twentieth century. The data consists of sixty-five letters (17,990 word tokens) written by twenty-four individuals between 1905 to 1939. Analysis revealed that lower class scribes did not write pure dialect, but rather shifted toward the "intended" standard. At least two writing strategies toward the "intended"standard - imitation and conscious adoption of "standard" spellings (generalization) - are outlined in the article. Graphic representation (non-vernacular spellings) of certain phonological features was first visually memorized in the high frequency words and later generalized (consciously modified) to all positions. The use of memorized spellings of certain words, as well as later conscious choices to use standard spellings rather than graphic representation of their local dialects indicate that less educated writers perceived written and spoken varieties as distinct.

This paper discusses the correspondence between Finnish emigrants living in North America and their families and friends at home in Finland. This correspondence dates from the latter part of the nineteenth century, and concerns the first generation of emigrants. Sending and receiving letters in nineteenth-century Finland can be understood as a communicative practice of the local community, because letters were written collectively, and a literate person typically acted as a scribe in the community. Even reading and receiving a letter was a collective act of hearing. Linguistically, the collective nature of letter-writing is reflected in the different manifestations of polyphony in the texts. This article will focus on the polyphony of the immigrant correspondence, analysing who are allowed to have a voice of their own, and how the different voices are reconstructed in the letters. This analysis will focus particularly on conveying polyphony through the use of person marking in Finnish.

In 1820, the Cape of Good Hope, a British colony since 1795, became the new home to c. 4,500 English-speaking settlers. Correspondence surviving from this period in reference to this settlement enables insights into early nineteenth century letters, a still understudied area. Moreover, it provides a good setting to disambiguate the term letter from an internal, bottom-up perspective. Such a perspective may offer "a key for disclosing historical forms of communication" (Hübler and Busse 2012: 1) as first-order phenomena. This is achieved in an analysis of categorial labels (keywords) and metacommunicative clues found in the internal correspondence of the Colonial Office, a British government department, in the years 1820-1821. The results of the analysis provide a partial answer to what the label letter meant for this professional community. Adding a researcher’s perspective to such a description allows proposing a twofold approach to "the letter" as an analytic category in the study of historical correspondence.

The present study deals with the process of a-prefixation in the mid-nineteenth-century dialect(s) of a selected part of South Carolina. This phenomenon is said to have been brought to America with immigrants from the southern parts of Great Britain. For the purpose of the study, a corpus of Civil War letters has been compiled in such a way as to assure at least relative geographical and social homogeneity. Specifically, letters written by soldiers of the rank of private hailing from three counties located in South Carolina, i.e. Greenville, Pickens, and York, found their way to the corpus. Since these privates wrote as they spoke, elements of the spoken idiom are presumed to transpire in their correspondence. On the basis of this corpus both quantitative and qualitative studies of the grammatical phenomenon known as a-prefixation have been carried out. Their purpose is to verify whether the constraints proposed by Walt Wolfram for the twentieth century context also hold in the case of a century earlier. Finally, this investigation looks at the process of prefixation from the perspectives of idiolects and community grammars.