The chapter explores what type of sources can help us understand multilingualism in the past. Since direct observation and elicitation techniques are not available, tackling the “poor data problem” is one of the key issues in the study of historic multilingualism. The chapter focuses on the late Habsburg Monarchy and its linguistically exceptionally diverse populations. Scholars frequently draw on the ethnographic maps, demographic data, and language laws that have come down to us from historic times to make sense of this diversity. Important as these sources are, they only offer a bird’s eye view of the realm’s multilingualism. Other sources are needed to explore its functioning in day-to-day life in particular communities. The chapter argues that memoirs, late-Habsburg satirical magazines, and criminal court records can all serve this purpose. They afford unique glimpses into everyday life in the past and allow us to reconstruct the workings of historical multilingualism in terms of its social underpinnings and linguistic outcomes.

This paper argues that the observations of scholars are shaped by the historically conditioned ideological presuppositions they hold about what language is and what characteristics of speakers it conveys. European observers in the nineteenth century – linguists, explorers, natural scientists – brought one broad set of ideas to the task of observation. They presumed that languages are like organisms, firmly bounded, revealing speakers’ essence. Within these assumptions, observers differed according to their disciplinary interests and their differing social relations to the people they observed, as shown by widely varying reports about the languages of peoples in Northwestern Siberia.

The Low Countries have a tradition of language contact and conflict and, after a short overview of the situation, the main focus of this chapter will be on “Colonial Dutch”, i.e., language planning and practice in some of the former colonies of the Netherlands, including Indonesia, Suriname, and the Caribbean islands. In doing so, this chapter will provide some answers to the fascinating question of why colonial Dutch failed to become a global lingua franca, as opposed to English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese that did (partially) succeed in doing so.

This chapter demonstrates that because of the fusion of the verb and the resultative via reanalysis, the syntactic position for a patient noun between them was eliminated so that the originally intervening patient noun needed to be rearranged somewhere in the sentence on the basis of the following principle: the patient noun was introduced in preverbal position by the disposal marker if it was definite, and was introduced by the first verb of the verb-copying construction if it was indefinite. This issue is related to the motivations for the emergence of the verb-copying construction and the unmarked SOV structure, all of which were entirely innovative in Modern Chinese.

In the volume’s afterword, the founder of the Discourse–Pragmatic Variation and Change Research network assesses how the field has expanded over recent decades, and offers suggestions for its future development. The afterword discusses the strengths of this volume, including the breadth and diversity of topics covered. It calls for further studies of discourse–pragmatic variation in contact settings, for cross–linguistic comparisons, and for studying languages other than English, arguing that such analyses will facilitate exploration of how discourse–pragmatic variation and change manifests across languages. It also recommends an expansion of data sources, methodological approaches and theoretical frameworks, arguing that such expansion will diversify the kind of research questions discourse variationists can be pursue.

English exerts a major influence on other languages, and borrowing is a significant product of language contact. This includes the borrowing of discourse–pragmatic items such as politeness formulas, greetings, expletives, and so on (Andersen 2014; Andersen 2017; Peterson 2017; Terkourafi 2009). This chapter considers two English–based forms that are used as discourse–pragmatic items in Norwegian alongside domestic alternatives with the same function. This includes please, used in requests alongside the domestic variant vær så snill, and sorry used in apologies alongside unnskyld and beklager. Individual corpus tokens are assessed for their illocutionary force, with a view to exploring the pragmatic conditioning of speakers’ choices of borrowed versus domestic forms. It is shown that the English forms are not replacing their domestic equivalents, but the data show signs of a division of labor and there are contexts where only one variant form is allowed. The study is based on four different corpora of spoken Norwegian: Ungdomsspråk i Norden (UNO), Norsk talemålskorpus (NoTa), the Big Brother corpus and the Scandinavian Dialect Corpus.

This study provides a real–time analysis of variation in the use of consequence markers (ça) fait (que), donc, alors and English borrowing so in two genetically related varieties of Canadian French. It is based on corpora collected in the 1970s and 2010s in Montreal, Quebec, a majority francophone environment, and Welland, Ontario, a minority francophone environment. Comparison of the two corpora reveals that Montreal and Welland French had already started to diverge in the 1970s in relation to variant inventory, variant frequency, and constraints on their use and that intercommunity divergence has intensified over time. Among the manifestations of divergence, one can mention the emergence of connector so in Welland in the 1970s and its subsequent growth, at the expense of vernacular variant (ça) fait (que). This stands in contrast with a marked increase of (ça) fait (que) and its diffusion to all social groups in Montreal over time. The evolution of standard variant alors reveals another facet of intercommunity divergence. In Montreal, it has undergone a sharp decline and is becoming obsolescent in the speech of the younger generations; however, in Welland, it evidences stability. Our study discusses some of the (extra)linguistic factors accounting for such patterns of divergence.

This chapter offers an analysis of the shifting fortunes of Latin, English and French between the mid eleventh and early thirteenth centuries, through the lens of linguistic ecology, drawing evidence from metalinguistic commentary in narrative sources, surviving texts, prosopography and onomastics and the findings of the linguistic subdiscipline of language contact. It argues for distinguishing between the period between 1066 and 1140, when the relatively high status English had enjoyed before the Norman Conquest reduced primarily at the hands of Latin, from that between 1050 and 1215, when emergence of French as a literary language, coupled with other late-twelfth-century social changes, more significantly diminished English’s importance as a written language. The chapter closes with some reflections on the factors that condition language choice in multilingual societies, rejecting a simple equation of language and identity.

Language contact is at the base of potential changes in language, whose extent may vary considerably depending on the degree of multilingual interaction. Therefore, the study of language contact is key to the understanding of the evolutionary dynamics of language. The Romance linguistic landscape cuts across multiple possible contact-setting types, and the empirical evidence for contact-induced change involving Romance is abundant. The Romance languages thus qualify as an ideal testbed for language contact studies. This chapter highlights the difference between innovative and conservative effects of language contact and discusses borrowing as the fundamental process and result of contact-induced language change, distinguishing between RL and SL agentivity, and between matter borrowing and pattern borrowing. Several case studies of borrowing are presented in relation to different components of grammar, namely phonology, prosody, morphology, and syntax. The upper limits of borrowing are discussed (in terms of areal formation and mixed language genesis) and a number of predictors of grammatical borrowing are reviewed. Issues concerning the so-called borrowability hierarchies are critically addressed.

This chapter presents an overview of the main lingua francas of the world. The theoretical framework is Ecosystemic Linguistics, a branch of Ecolinguistics which sees language as communication or communicative interaction, not primarily as a system. The system does exist, but in order to facilitate understanding. It is shown that lingua francas such as Swahili, Fanakalo, Lingala, Kituba, and Sango (in Africa), Chinook Jargon, Mobilian Jargon, Nahuatl, Lingua Geral/Nheengatu, and Quechua (in the Americas), and Malay and Filipino (in Asia), among others, confirm this view of language. They are mainly used in situations of contact between speakers of mutually unintelligible languages, in which case the main concern is with mutual understanding, not with the construction of grammatical sentences. It is also shown that one of the main causes of the emergence of lingua francas is colonization.

The evolution of the Romance languages from Latin was significantly shaped by the numerous language contact environments, which resulted from conquest, colonization, and trade. This chapter traces the development of the largest Romance languages throughout Europe, with emphasis on the known or postulated effects of language contact. The chapter continues with an account of the spread of Spanish, Portuguese, and French to the Americas, together with the ensuing contacts with indigenous languages and languages of voluntary and involuntary immigration and the formation of Afro-Romance creole languages.

Medieval and classical periods in African history are a particular focus of this survey of language contact patterns seen on the African continent. The effects of languages associated with empires and kingdoms are shown to vary widely, with many such languages remaining influential even in the present day. Disentangling earlier patterns of language contact is a necessary step for those interested in reconstructing and classifying African languages. The great time depth and diversity found within each of the major African language phyla is mirrored by a dizzying array of contact patterns both within and across these phyla.

This chapter discusses how migration and trade as historical sociocultural processes have contributed to language spread and language contact situations in Latin America. It explores how language contact situations in Latin America have been dynamically created and changed by the movement of peoples and exchange of things and ideas through space and time, focusing on three kinds of linguistic outcomes: language spread, the emergence of multilingualism, and the development of contact languages. The discussion is framed by an interdisciplinary framework, focusing on the internal and external histories of indigenous languages of Latin America, from the initial peopling of the New World up to contemporary situations of language contact.

Codeswitchingching, well known as a speech style in which bilinguals alternate languages between or within sentences, has recently been joined by a new term, translanguaging, which is widely used in bilingual education with a similar meaning. Among a variety of perspectives within the translanguaging literature, some scholars have adopted deconstructivism, the view that discrete languages and multilingualism do not actually exist. Deconstructivists see translanguaging as a theoretical alternative to codeswitching, as codeswitching implies internalized linguistic diversity. In this chapter, the author argues that the political use of language names (a concern of deconstructivists) can and should be distinguished from the social and structural idealizations used to study linguistic diversity, favoring what the author calls an Integrated Multilingual Model of bilingualism, contrasted with the Unitary and Dual Competence models. The author further distinguishes grammars from linguistic repertoires, arguing that bilinguals, like everybody, have a single linguistic repertoire but a richly diverse mental grammar, a viewpoint the author calls a multilingual perspective on translanguaging.

This chapter outlines the history of the development and spread of what became what we now know as the Sinitic (Chinese) languages and the effects that migrations, cultural contact, and national policies had on the development. This includes the initial migrations into Asia and then again from the Yellow River valley to the surrounding areas. These later migrations were generally into areas where other people already lived, and so there was mixing of the people and the cultures. This is one factor that created the different branches of Sinitic (“Chinese dialects”). The last section is on language coexistence in Modern China.

The sociolinguistic situation of the Channel Islands has meant that English has been spoken there alongside the native language, Norman, for several centuries, albeit in a diglossic relationship, with English assuming “High” functions (administration, legislation, education, media, and so forth) and Norman “Low” functions (familiar discourse with family and friends). The fact that, today, all speakers of the three extant varieties of Insular Norman (Jèrriais, Guernesiais, and Sercquiais) are also fluent in English has had far-reaching linguistic consequences in that the Norman spoken in the Channel Islands has diverged from the varieties spoken on the French mainland, and distinctive local varieties of Channel Island English have developed. Based on original data, this chapter provides an overview of the sociolinguistic setting that gave rise to this language contact and discusses some representative examples of contact-induced influence in the lexis, phonology, and morphosyntax of both Channel Island Norman and Channel Island English.