Taal en Tongval - Volume 65, Issue 1, 2013

This paper introduces the field of historical sociolinguistics and gives a brief impression of the advances made during the last three decades. Furthermore, the relationship between local and international perspectives is stressed, while discussing the papers in the present Taal & Tongval issue. Finally, new research perspectives and the importance of using original archive sources come to the fore.

Dutch speakers may or may not have contributed a certain amount of lexical material to modern East Anglian dialects. There is a much stronger case to be made, however, for arguing that Dutch speakers did have a rather profound infl uence on the morphology of East Anglian English, dating from the time when almost forty percent of the population of the capital of East Anglia, Norwich, were refugees from the Low Countries. That infl uence was indirect, and mediated through mechanisms of linguistic change associated with language contact.

This article provides an initial overview of a subject which has to date received litttle academic attention: the use of Dutch in early modern Britain. The picture that emerges is that the Dutch language was used in a variety of social contexts, including the church, work, the home and at court, in particular that of the Anglo-Dutch King, William III. Although for most of those who used the language in Britain Dutch was their mother tongue, there were also Britons who learnt the language, such as those who married Dutch-speakers; merchants who traded with the Dutch and other Britons; such as the famous scientist, Robert Hooke.

This paper takes issue with the traditional (standard-oriented) account of codifi cation in French commonly presented in histoires de la langue. In them the seventeenth-century grammarians are portrayed (a) as being engaged, in a detached and rational way, in a programme of intellectual and aesthetic perfection of the language, and (b) as being the country’s linguistic legislators, working (teleologically) to design and set up a standard variety of French for the benefi t of future generations. Our paper tries to show, fi rst of all, that when we set the process of codifi cation in French within its broad sociolinguistic context, we see the extent to which it was contingent on wider social concerns: codifi cation did not happen in an atmosphere of serene detachment and rationality but was conditioned throughout by the social tensions endemic in a city the size of Paris. The paper then looks at the particular role of grammarians, notably Vaugelas, and notes that he himself makes no claim to be initiating or directing the process of linguistic change, but merely to be refl ecting usage. While the grammarians give preference to salient variants possessing the highest social value (bon usage), it cannot be said that they actually set those values. These emerge from a consensus involving directly or indirectly the whole community. The development in the speech of a big city the size of Paris is traditionally seen in terms of top-down standardisation, but it is preferable to see it in terms of dialect-mixing and koineisation. What we see refl ected in many of Vaugelas’ Remarques is one of the processes involved in koineisation isolated by Peter Trudgill and labelled as ‘reallocation of variants’: the community tacitly accommodates linguistic variants left over from earlier instances of dialect-contact within its overall scheme of socio-stylistic variation.

During the seventeenth century, the use of diminutive suffixes in Dutch was changing: the [kə] suffix was making way for the present-day Standard suffix [jə] – a transition which involved many hybrid suffixes – and the present-day substandard [i] also made its entrance. In this paper, the use of the different types of diminutives in private letters of the seventeenth-century Letters as Loot corpus will be examined for regional and social variation. This corpus consists of 595 letters – 545 of which are private – written by men and women of different social backgrounds. Its contents enable historical (socio)linguists to extensively examine seventeenth-century Dutch from the perspective of the language history ‘from below’ for the first time. However, examining the seventeenth-century diminutive suffixes is a difficult enterprise, for the various spelling forms in the letters frequently obscure the difference between the phonological types of suffixes [i] and [jə]. In order to shed new light on the history of Dutch diminutive suffixes, this paper also presents a method of analysis to categorise particular spelling forms as particular phonological types of suffixes.

The paper discusses variation and change in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch, reviewing the importance of two types of explanation, the first focusing on dialect contact resulting from immigration as the locus of change, the second stressing the importance of writing conventions. Using a unique corpus of private letters from all social ranks, we discuss various phonological and morphosyntactic variables. We argue that ego-documents offer unique opportunities for historical (socio)linguistics, providing an unprecedented view of the vernacular. At the same time, writers did not consistently put their local dialect to paper. Writing practices such as morphological and syllabic orthographic principles caused the written code to move away from the vernacular. Supralocalization and graphemization, which are topics at the core of historical sociolinguistics, have to be taken into account by anyone interested in the communicative strategies which ordinary people used when they needed to write. At the same time, since supralocalization and graphemization may impede research on spoken language phenomena, they should also be addressed by researchers primarily interested in spoken language phenomena such as dialect contact.