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 womens 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 case study of substandardization processes in the chat language of Flemish teenagers;III. Language norms and standardization in a view from belowChrista de Kleine:Surinamese Dutch: The Development of a Unique Germanic Language Variety;Ana Deumert: Zoo schrijve ek lievers my sort Afrikaans. Speaker agency, identity and resistance in the history of Afrikaans;Martin Durrell: Deutsch ist einewürde-lose Sprache. On the history of a failed prescription;Roswitha Fischer:To boldly split the infinitive or not? Prescriptive traditions and current English usage; Amanda Pounder:Norm consciousness and corpus constitution in the study of Earlier Modern Germanic languages;Anja Voeste: Variability and professionalism as prerequisites of standardization;Evelyn Ziegler:Putting standard German to the test: Some notes on the linguistic competence of grammar-school students and teachers in the nineteenth century;IV. Language choice and language planningSteffen Arzberger:The choice between the German or French language for the German nobility of the late 18th Century; Jeroen Darquennes:Flirting at the fringe - The status of the German varieties as perceived by language activists in Belgiums Areler Land;Kristine Horner:Language and Luxembourgish national identity: ideologies of hybridity and purity in the past and present;Ernst Håkon Jahr:The planning of modern Norwegian as a sociolinguistic experiment from below; Péter Maitz:The death of Standard German in 19th century Budapest. A case study on the role of linguistic ideologies in language shift; Agnete Nesse:1750-1850: The disappearance of German from Bergen, Norway;Stefaniya Ptashnyk: Societal multilingualism and language conflicts in Galicia in the 19th century;Eline Vanhecke/Jetje De Groof:New data on language policy and language choice in 19th-century Flemish city administrations;V. Reflections on alternative language historiesAngelika Linke:Communicative genres as categories of a cultural history of communication;Richard J. Watts:Deconstructing episodes in the history of English