Rethinking Historical Multilingualism and Language Contact ‘from Below’. Evidence from the Dutch-German Borderlands in the Long Nineteenth Century

Bibliographic Data

ID6054996
AuthorsAndreas Krogull (0000-0003-2271-9422, University of Cambridge, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume45
Issue2
Pages147-170
Publication date2021-05-04
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueDutch Crossing (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0309-6564 • E-ISSN: 1759-7854
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/03096564.2021.1943620
OpenAlexW3185989071
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited32

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

German · Ideology · Language contact · Linguistics · Multilingualism · Neuroscience of multilingualism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · History · Law · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity · Multilingual Education and Policy

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