Germanic Language Histories 'from Below' (1700-2000)

Stephan Elspaß, Nils Langer, Joachim Scharloth, Wim Vandenbussche, Stephan Elspaß, Nils Langer, Joachim Scharloth, Wim Vandenbussche

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9783110193350
• eBook ISBN: 9783110925463
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Alemán

Focusing on the sociolinguistic history of Germanic languages, the current volume challenges the traditional teleological approach of language historiography. The 30 contributions present alternative histories of ten 'big' as well as 'small' Germanic languages and varieties in the last 300 years. Topics covered in this book include language variation and change and the politics of language contact and choice, seen against the background of standardization processes of written and oral text genres and from the viewpoint of larger sections of the population.

Table of contents

• Introduction
• A twofold view ‘from below’: New perspectives on language histories and historical grammar
• I. Language variation in letters, diaries and other text sources from below
• “As this leaves me at present” – Formulaic usage, politeness and social proximity in nineteenth-century Scottish emigrants’ letters
• ‘Lower-order’ letters, schooling and the English language, 1795 to 1834
• “Doch mein Mann möchte doch mal wissen ...” A discourse analysis of 19th-century emigrant men and women’s private correspondence
• Remnants of Western Yiddish in East Frisia
• Eighteenth-century linguistic variation from the perspective of a Dutch diary and a collection of private letters
• II. From past to present: Change from above – change from below
• ‘Time and Tyne’ corpus-based study of variation and change in relativization strategies in Tyneside English
• Syntactic surprises in some English letters: the underlying progress of the language
• YOU and THOU in Early Modern English: cross-linguistic perspectives
• On the history of verbal present participle converbs in English and Norwegian and the concept of ‘change from below’
• The grammaticalization of geben ‘to give’ in German and Luxembourgish
• A corpus-based study of colloquial ‘Flemish’
• ‘Tussentaal’ as a source of change from below in Belgian Dutch. A case study of substandardization processes in the chat language of Flemish teenagers
• III. Language norms and standardization in a view from below
• Surinamese Dutch: The development of a unique Germanic Language variety
• “Zoo schrijve ek lievers my sort Afrikaans”. Speaker agency, identity and resistance in the history of Afrikaans
• “Deutsch ist eine würde-lose Sprache”. On the history of a failed prescription
• To boldly split the infinitive – or not? Prescriptive traditions and current English usage
• Norm consciousness and corpus constitution in the study of Earlier Modern Germanic languages
• Variability and professionalism as prerequisites of standardization
• Putting standard German to the test: Some notes on the linguistic competence of grammar-school students and teachers in the nineteenth century
• The choice between the German or French language for the German nobility of the late 18th Century
• Flirting at the fringe – The status of the German varieties as perceived by language activists in Belgium’s Areler Land
• Language and Luxembourgish national identity: ideologies of hybridity and purity in the past and present
• The planning of modern Norwegian as a sociolinguistic experiment – ‘from below’
• The death of Standard German in 19th-century Budapest. A case study on the role of linguistic ideologies in language shift
• 1750–1850: The disappearance of German from Bergen, Norway
• Societal multilingualism and language conflicts in Galicia in the 19th century
• New data on language policy and language choice in 19th-century Flemish city administrations
• V. Reflections on alternative language histories
• Communicative genres as categories of a cultural history of communication
• Deconstructing episodes in the ‘history of English’
• Index