"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. "
" Stephan Elspaß, University of Augsburg, Germany; Nils Langer, University of Bristol, UK; Joachim Scharloth, University of Zurich, Switzerland; Wim Vandenbussche , Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium. "
" IntroductionStephan Elspaß: A twofold view “;from below“: New perspectives on language histories and historical grammar; I. Language variation in letters, diaries and other text sources from belowMarina Dossena: As this leaves me at present - Formulaic usage, politeness and social proximity in nineteenth-century Scottish emigrants“ letters; Tony Fairman: “;Lower-order“ letters, schooling and the English language, 1795 to 1834; Nicola McLelland: Doch mein Mann möchte doch mal wissen ... A discourse analysis of 19th-century emigrant men and women“s private correspondence; Gertrud Reershemius: Remnants of Western Yiddish in East Frisia; Marijke van der Wal: 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 belowJoan C. Beal/Karen P. Corrigan: “;Time and Tyne“: a corpus-based study of variation and change in relativization strategies in Tyneside English; David Denison: Syntactic surprises in some English letters: the underlying progress of the language; Richard Dury: YOU and THOU in Early Modern English: cross-linguistic perspectives; Kirstin Killie: On the history of verbal present participle converbs in English and Norwegian and the concept of “;change from below“; Alexandra Lenz: The grammaticalization of geben “;to give“ in German and Luxembourgish; Koen Plevoets/Dirk Speelman/Dirk Geeraerts: A corpus-based study of colloquial “;Flemish“; Reinhild Vandekerckhove: “;Tussentaal“ as a source of change from below in Belgian Dutch. A ca"
Stephan Elspaß, University of Augsburg, Germany; Nils Langer, University of Bristol, UK; Joachim Scharloth, University of Zurich, Switzerland; Wim Vandenbussche , Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium.
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