Volume 39, Issue 1 - Special issue: Sociolinguistic perspectives on historical multilingualism in Europe

The paper tests two assumptions in loanword research: the diffusion assumption and the graduality assumption. The diffusion assumption holds that lexical borrowings typically gain in frequency over time and diffuse across the community. The graduality assumption implies that borrowings enter the recipient language as non-integrated code-switches and eventually integrate into the grammar of the recipient language. These assumptions are inherently diachronic and are here tested on historical data. We investigate loanwords from French as found in the Language of Leiden Corpus. This corpus comprises Dutch textual materials related to the city of Leiden. It covers the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and was built specifically to investigate the influence of French on historical Dutch, which is sometimes described in terms of frenchification. The corpus comprises 8,767 established lexical borrowings from French. We show that there is scant empirical evidence for the diffusion and graduality assumptions.

Language shift is a complex phenomenon. This paper analyzes the shift from Dutch to Low and High German among the Remonstrants of Friedrichstadt, a community of religious refugees from the Netherlands to the Duchy of Schleswig, over a time period of approximately 300 years in a data-driven approach. It shows that language shift can happen at different levels and at different points of time even within the same domain. This picture of differing and diverging processes of language shift then poses new questions, concerning the interplay of such shifts. Especially the argument that Low German supported the long use of Dutch in Friedrichstadt has to be questioned. To grasp this multi-layered phenomenon, this paper also calls for a broad data approach considering different sources to complete the picture.

This paper examines multilingual practices in private letter writing, focusing on the case of Dutch-French multilingualism in the Early and Late Modern history of the Low Countries. In line with recent developments in historical sociolinguistics, which have foregrounded the multilingual repertoires of individuals and social groups, we argue that the two contact phenomena traditionally labelled as ‘language choice’ and ‘code-switching’ are closely intertwined rather than discrete objects of research. Based on an extensive dataset of family correspondence from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, the paper first provides quantitative evidence of monolingual and multilingual writing practices. Taking into account diachronic and sociolinguistic factors, we show who used Dutch alongside French (or vice versa) with whom and when, and under which circumstances. Against the background of solid empirical data, the complementary qualitative analysis then zooms in on a low-frequent yet widespread phenomenon, viz. multilingual (Dutch-French) letters without a clearly dominant main language, which may constitute a code choice in its own right. More generally, we emphasise that monolingual and multilingual types of family correspondence represent a continuum of practices rather than categorical language choices, also in historical, written text sources.

Discussions of orthography for recently standardised languages frequently focus on the extent to which spelling proposals resemble orthographic models of dominant existing standard languages, leading to tensions around notions of hybridity, differentiation and equivalence. This article examines an influential spelling proposal in the 19th century for Luxembourgish and one for Galician respectively in a comparative analysis of relationships in these early codification works between the nascent standard, the orthographic influence of dominant existing standard languages and the metalanguage of the text. The comparative methodology combines discursive approaches with a social semiotic analysis of the proposed spellings to develop a comprehensive framework for identifying both explicit and implicit meaning conveyed through the proposed orthographies. Whereas the authors’ metacommentaries explaining the proposed spellings aligns largely with a dominant standard language model (for example, German or Spanish respectively in these case studies), the iconic representations at the graphemic level suggest other convergences (for example, French or Portuguese) that are not always expressly formulated in the metalinguistic explanations. The fluid shifting between the influential orthographic norms of other languages continues to emerge in discussions about the spelling of Luxembourgish and of Galician from the 19th century until the present-day.

Documenting a historical language loss is a demanding endeavour, not least because relevant data from the past is typically sparse and fragmentary. This paper focuses on the investigation of a relatively recent language shift that occurred approximately 100 years ago. It exhibits significant methodological challenges, due to the limited empirical data available. The study centres on members of the Jewish minority in Norway, who predominantly spoke Yiddish when they immigrated from territories within the Russian Empire between the 1870s and the First World War. The overall trend suggests a relatively rapid shift into Norwegian as the dominant language over a couple of decades. By the end of the Second World War, Yiddish was basically moribund in Norway, largely due to the Holocaust, which devastatingly decimated the Jewish minority. However, more in-depth knowledge of these processes has so far been elusive, primarily because sources from the first two generations of immigrants are scarce. Moreover, this scarcity was intensified by the systematic seizure and disposal of Jewish families’ property during the Second World War. This paper seeks to address possible ways to remedy the extensive lack of concrete documentation from the early history of this minority group, limited to the 1880–1940 timeframe. Specifically, the focus is on utilising indirect reporting of linguistic practices and language choices found in sources such as biographies, memoirs, newspaper articles, local history, literature and other texts that comprise individuals’ life stories . The main assertion is that, when adeptly employed, these sources can provide valuable insights into historical language conditions, shedding light on the motivations behind language maintenance and shift, even in retrospect.

Language officiality is best understood in relation to the specificities of the dynamic spatial-temporal context in which is it situated. While the analysis of present-day language policy can present challenges, historical sociolinguistic research is compounded by the paucity of records, obstacles in accessing key documents and, quite importantly, potential issues of researcher reflexivity. A further dimension of complexity exists given that language policy may be explicitly or implicitly formulated. Instances of ambiguity in policy documents may be potentially strategic, although difficulties exist in locating evidence as to whether such ambiguities may be considered as intentionally strategic by policy makers. With attention to the ideological and discursive dimensions of language policy, this paper investigates the ratification of the 1948 constitutional amendments in Luxembourg – following Nazi-German occupation during World War II – which involved the elimination of named languages from the constitution. This paper examines the ways that (strategic) ambiguity bears similarities to silence in that it may simultaneously constitute an absence and a presence. In historical sociolinguistic research, it is therefore imperative to be aware of the potential limitations of empirical data and to offer equal consideration to the analysis of what is and is not said.