Multilingual Practices in Language History: English and Beyond

Päivi Pahta, Janne Skaffari, Laura Wright

Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG, Dec 18, 2017 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 369 pages

Texts of the past were often not monolingual but were produced by and for people with bi- or multilingual repertoires; the communicative practices witnessed in them therefore reflect ongoing and earlier language contact situations. However, textbooks and earlier research tend to display a monolingual bias. This collected volume on multilingual practices in historical materials, including code-switching, highlights the importance of a multilingual approach. The authors explore multilingualism in hitherto neglected genres, periods and areas, introduce new methods of locating and analysing multiple languages in various sources, and review terminology, theories and tools. The studies also revisit some of the issues already introduced in previous research, such as Latin interacting with European vernaculars and the complex relationship between code-switching and lexical borrowing. Collectively, the contributors show that multilingual practices share many of the same features regardless of time and place, and that one way or the other, all historical texts are multilingual. This book takes the next step in historical multilingualism studies by establishing the relevance of the multilingual approach to understanding language history.

Contents

• I Introduction: 3
• A tale of mutual enrichment: 19
• II Borderlands: 39
• Codeswitching in the Oxford English Dictionary?: 61
• 5 A semantic field and texttype approach to latemedieval multilingualism: 77
• 6 Codeswitching and contact influence in Middle English manuscripts from the Welsh Penumbra Should we reinterpret the evidence from Sir Gawai...: 97
• 7 Codeswitching in the long twelfth century: 121
• III Patterns: 145
• A corpusbased analysis: 171
• 10 Mining macaronics: 199
• The importance of language neutrality in codeswitching from medieval Ireland: 223
• 12 Latin in recipes? A corpus approach to scribal abbreviations in 15thcentury medical manuscripts: 243
• IV Contexts: 275
• The case of solidarity: 299
• On the rarity of vernacular codeswitching: 319
• 16 A multilingual approach to the history of Standard English: 339
• Index: 359

About the author

Päivi Pahta, University of Tampere, Finland; Janne Skaffari, University of Turku, Finland; Laura Wright, University of Cambridge, UK

Bibliographic information

• Title: Multilingual Practices in Language History: English and Beyond; Volume 15 of Language Contact and Bilingualism [LCB]
• Editors: Päivi Pahta, Janne Skaffari, Laura Wright
• Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG, 2017
• ISBN: 1501504940, 9781501504945
• Length: 369 pages
• Subjects: Language Arts & Disciplines / Linguistics / General; Language Arts & Disciplines / Linguistics / Historical & Comparative; Language Arts & Disciplines / Linguistics / Sociolinguistics