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In this talk I will begin by presenting some examples from seventeenth-century French of how, using a large multi-genre database (Frantext, www.frantext.fr), it is possible to track the spread of change and how it embeds across different genres (the genres in Frantext ranging from correspondence and first-person travel narratives to poetry and tragedy in verse). These case studies are helpful in addressing a number of questions, including which changes seem to diffuse ‘from above’ (Rutten and Vosters 2020) and which rather come ‘from below’ (Elspaß 2020); and which textual sources best reflect ‘authentic’ usage or indeed are closest to reflecting spoken usage. They also raise questions as to whether it is possible to create a continuum of genres with those that are more ‘progressive’ or are early adopters of change at one end, and those which resist change at the other. I will then go on to discuss some of the challenges surrounding this work, including the theorization (or lack of theorization) of text types and genres in different corpora and the lack of comparability between them in the way they categorize different text types and genres.
In the past two decades, the interest in historical multilingualism spilled over from historical sociolinguistics into the study of ancient societies (Adams, 2003; Clackson et al., 2020; Elder & Mullen, 2019; Jonker et al., 2021; Mullen, 2013; Mullen & James, 2012; Papaconstantinou, 2010; Vierros, 2012), medieval polities (Bloemendal, 2015; Classen, 2016; Jefferson & Putter, 2013; Johns, 2002; Pahta et al., 2018; Trotter, 2000) and early modern empires and nation-states (Burke, 2004; Fortna, 2010; Gallagher, 2019; Gilbert, 2020; Judson, 2006; Murre van den Berg et al., 2020; Offord et al., 2018; Prokopovych et al., 2019; Wolf, 2015). The field of multilingualism, however, has remained impervious to these developments: textbooks and handbooks continue to treat multilingualism as a quintessentially modern phenomenon or, alternatively, as a phenomenon so universal and uniform that its basic concepts are unaffected by time and space. My goals in this lecture are: (a) to reflect on the reasons behind this one-sided ‘ignorance pact’, (b) to outline the uncomfortable implications of recent historic findings for multilingualism as a field and (c) to challenge the adoption of the modern conceptual toolbox in historical sociolinguistics. I will argue that to understand linguistic diversity across time and space we need new theoretical models, agendas and conceptual tools, unmoored from the present-day political preoccupations and social concerns.
Much work has been done on standardisation in recent years, on how standards emerge and why, and the ideologies that surrounds them. New handbooks have appeared, covering wide aspects of the historical development of standardisation including for specific language families (Ayres-Bennett & Bellamy 2021; Lebsanft & Tacke 2020). Now, it is “safe to state that standardization studies has become one of the prominent and prolific subdomains of European sociolinguistics over the past two decades” (Vandenbussche 2022: 222). As new data become available, researchers have attempted to refine the available models further, in order to seek better clarification around how standards arise, both contemporary ones and historical. In the main, these models have focussed on factors of selection (Pickl 2020), as well as codification, and to a lesser degree, prescription (Ayres-Bennett 2016; Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2017). Some researchers have sought to rethink the trajectory of standards entirely, looking at how historical variation might be incorporated into the emergence of standards and their histories (Pillière & Lewis 2018; Brown 2020; Wright 2020).
This talk takes a long view of language history in and around the Mediterranean to consider various typologies of dialect contact in the past, and how best to model such contact in the currently available models of standardisation. The question of ‘norms’ in historical perspective can be interpreted in different ways, sometimes overlapping with the notion of ‘standard’ and sometimes not. Specifically, the paper looks at various ways in which norms of communication were negotiated at different periods of dialect contact, to verify if and how such norms can be explained within Haugen’s model and revisitations of this model in standardisation theory (Rutten & Vosters 2020). Using a corpus of merchant letters, religious texts, and diplomatic correspondence, I consider how standards (and their ideologies) are projected onto situations of dialect contact in the past, particularly when the varieties do not themselves standardise (Walsh 2021). Despite the longevity of Haugen’s model, its explanatory power is left wanting in various historical situations when aspects of codification and prescription during standard language formation are projected onto the past. Overall, the paper argues for further refinement of the currently available models of standardisation, in order to provide a more accurate description of the linguistic variation present in historical contexts.
