Het meertalige familiearchief als microkosmos: taalkeuze en taalshift binnen de Leidse hugenotenfamilie Luzac (1691–1866)

This paper investigates the phenomena of language choice and language shift in the extensive archives of the Luzac family, a family of Huguenot migrants based in the Dutch city of Leiden. Spanning the late seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, the archival material is examined from two complementary angles in order to gain insights into the historical multilingualism of the Northern Netherlands. We first present a macrolevel analysis of the family archives in their entirety, diachronically and across domains. We then take a more qualitative, micro-level perspective on the private family correspondence of three generations. Despite some methodological challenges, the study of a family archive as a multilingual ‘microcosm’ proves to be a fruitful approach to investigate the linguistic choices of originally French(-speaking) migrants in a historically Dutch(-speaking) environment. More generally, this case study demonstrates the dynamics and the complexity of individual and societal multilingualism, language choice and language shift

Researching language attitudes based on historical data

This chapter outlines how historical data can be used for research on language attitudes, concentrating on the field of historical sociolinguistics. It first discusses methodological challenges when working with historical data. Since historical (socio-)linguists cannot elicit data, they rely on the written and typically fragmented data available, which provide limited access to the attitudes of individuals. Furthermore, the boundaries between language attitudes and language ideologies are less sharply drawn in historical sociolinguistic research than in research on present-day data. Attitudes and ideologies are usually not addressed separately and often set in other linguistic contexts, such as language standardisation, linguistic purism, and prescriptivism. The second section of the chapter provides an overview of promising text sources that can be utilised to study language attitudes in the past, including normative texts, ego-documents, and statistical accounts, discussing both their potentials and drawbacks. The third section explains how these sources can be analysed, focussing on discourse-analytical and corpus-linguistic methods. To illustrate the main points made in this chapter, two case studies (one on German and one on Dutch) are presented. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of emerging trends in historical sociolinguistics, particularly the move towards studying language attitudes in multilingual settings.<br/

Rethinking Historical Multilingualism and Language Contact 'from Below': Evidence from the Dutch-German Borderlands in the Long Nineteenth Century

European language histories, including the history of Dutch, have often been portrayed as broadly linear developments towards one uniform standard language. In this biased account, rooted in the nation-building era around 1800, language diversity and multilingualism were largely rendered invisible. Against the background of clearly segregated spaces, politically and linguistically, border settings have particularly challenged the monolingual ideology of ‘one nation–one language’. Taking a historical-sociolinguistic perspective, this article focuses on the Dutch-German borderlands in the long nineteenth century as an intriguing case to investigate historical multilingualism and language contact ‘from below’. Despite the growing importance of nation-states and their standard languages, it is shown that multilingual practices and contact phenomena can still be traced in handwritten archival documents from the private sphere. Illustrative examples come from various family archives in the border area as well as from a unique collection of letters written by (Low) German labour migrants to their Dutch employer. These sources give evidence of the Dutch-German borderlands as a multi-faceted sociolinguistic space well into the nineteenth century. Moreover, they suggest that established theories of multilingualism and language contact may require rethinking in order to account for less clear-cut and more fluid practices in the past.Language Use in Past and Presen

The observee’s paradox: Theorizing linguistic differences between historical ego-documents

Ego-documents are at the heart of historical sociolinguistics. Contrary to what a label such as ego-document may suggest, Early and Late Modern ego-documents constitute a heterogenous group of genres comprising, among others, private letters, diaries and travel journals. Empirical studies have shown that there are important linguistic differences between private letters on the one hand, and diaries/journals on the other. The latter often seem surprisingly standard-like or formal. Theoretical models of register variation and conceptual orality can partially explain the differences, without however offering a full explanation of the surprising formality of diaries/journals. We argue that it is crucial to take into account recent work by social historians concerning diaries/journals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Diary-writing was an inherently reflexive practice allowing authors to reflect on their lives, and to create a textually fixed point of reference. Authors of diaries had a variable and multilayered audience in mind of known and unknown readers. We introduce the observee’s paradox: while creating private texts for themselves in which they were their own observers and observees, authors of diaries also reckoned with unknown readers in a possibly distant future, which prompted them to shift into a more formal or standard-like register.Language Use in Past and Presen

Wenn Heimaten auf Welt treffen. Hinweise zur Konzipierung von interkulturellen / -religiösen Begegnungsreisen

Interkulturelle und interreligiöse Begegnungsreisen im globalen Nord-Süd-Kontext sind gängige Praxis der evangelischen Erwachsenenbildung. Dieser Artikel soll denjenigen, die bereits Begegnungen durchführen, als Reflexionsfolie für ihre bisherige Arbeit dienen. Denjenigen, die solche Reisen bisher noch nicht durchgeführt haben, möchte dieser Artikel Mut machen, sich auf das Abenteuer Begegnung einzulassen. (DIPF/Orig.

Reviving the genitive. Prescription and practice in the Netherlands (1770–1840)

Historical metalinguistic discourse is known to often prescribe linguistic variants that are not very frequent in actual language use, and to proscribe frequent variants. Infrequent variants that are promoted through prescription can be innovations, but they can also be conservative forms that have already largely vanished from the spoken language and are now also disappearing in writing. An extreme case in point is the genitive case in Dutch. This has been in decline in usage from at least the thirteenth century onwards, gradually giving way to analytical alternatives such as prepositional phrases. In the grammatical tradition, however, a preference for the genitive case was maintained for centuries. When ‘standard’ Dutch is officially codified in 1805 in the context of a national language policy, the genitive case is again strongly preferred, still aiming to ‘revive’ the synthetic forms. The striking discrepancy between metalinguistic discourse on the one hand, and developments in language use on the other, make the genitive case in Dutch an interesting case for historical sociolinguistics. In this paper, we tackle various issues raised by the research literature, such as the importance of genre differences as well as variation within particular genres, through a detailed corpus-based analysis of the influence of prescription on language practices in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Dutch.Language Use in Past and Presen

Assessing Dutch-French language choice in private family correspondence: from intra-writer variation to the bigger picture

The present paper examines Dutch-French language choice in the history of the Northern Low Countries, focussing on the private domain in the nineteenth century. Seeking to assess the phenomenon from a quantitative perspective, while meaningfully integrating the role of intra-writer variation, we present two complementary approaches. On the basis of a substantial dataset of private family correspondence, we first illustrate a quantitative methodology that allows us to systematically study the sociolinguistics dynamics that determine language choice. The variables under investigation include gender constellations and familial relationships. Secondly, we zoom in on intra-writer variation in three selected family archives, taking a more qualitative perspective in order to add valuable nuances to the ‘bigger picture’.NWOLanguage Use in Past and Presen

Implementation and acceptance of national language policy: the case of Dutch (1750-1850)

The paper discusses implementation and acceptance as crucial elements of a historical-sociolinguistic reappraisal of Haugen’s well-known theory of standardization. The case study that we focus on is the Dutch language in the second half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century. In this period, Dutch became an object of political control. Significant aspects of the nationalization of language were the establishment of an officialized orthography (1804) and grammar (1805), which were to be used in the national school system. Education was the societal domain in which the national government tried to secure the transmission of the national language norms. We study the implementation and acceptance of official language norms from two perspectives, viz. by focusing on teaching materials developed for the new national school system, and by analyzing a recently compiled corpus of original language data from this period. We argue that implementation and acceptance, though relatively understudied topics in standardization studies, can usefully be operationalized, and turned into empirical questions that historical-sociolinguistic analysis can answer.Language Use in Past and Presen

Afscheidsgroeten diachroon: constanten en veranderingen in Nederlandse brieven (1660-1840)

Descriptive and Comparative Linguistic

Language Planning as Nation Building

The decades around 1800 constitute the seminal period of European nationalism. The linguistic corollary of this was the rise of standard language ideology, from Finland to Spain, and from Iceland to the Habsburg Empire. Amidst these international events, the case of Dutch in the Netherlands offers a unique example. After the rise of the ideology from the 1750s onwards, the new discourse of one language–one nation was swiftly transformed into concrete top-down policies aimed at the dissemination of the newly devised standard language across the entire population of the newly established Dutch nation-state. Thus, the Dutch case offers an exciting perspective on the concomitant rise of cultural nationalism, national language planning and standard language ideology. This study offers a comprehensive yet detailed analysis of these phenomena by focussing on the ideology underpinning the new language policy, the institutionalisation of this ideology in metalinguistic discourse, the implementation of the policy in education, and the effects of the policy on actual language use