Germanic Standardizations

This volume presents a comparative, socio-historical study of the Germanic standard languages (Afrikaans, Danish, Dutch, English, Faroese, Frisian, German, Icelandic, Low German, Luxemburgish, Norwegian, Scots, Swedish, Yiddish as well as the Caribbean and Pacific Creole languages). Each of the 16 orginal chapters systematically discusses central aspects of the standardization process, including dialect selection, codification, elaboration and diffusion of the standard norm across the speech community, as well as incipient processes of de-standardization and re-standardization. The strongly comparative orientation of the contributions allow for the identification of broad similarities as well as intriguing differences across a wide range of historically and socially diverse language histories. Two chapters by the editors provide an overview of the theoretical background and rationale of comparative standardization research, and outline directions for further research in the area. The volume will be of interest to language historians as well as sociolinguists in general.

This volume presents fourteen case studies of standardization processes in eleven different Germanic languages. Together, the contributions confront problematic issues in standardization which will be of interest to sociolinguists, as well as to historical linguists from all language disciplines. The papers cover a historical range from the Middle Ages to the present and a geographical range from South Africa to Iceland, but all fall into one of the following categories: 1) shaping and diffusing a standard language; 2) the relationship between standard and identity; 3) non-standardization, de-standardization and re-standardization.

'Germanic Philology: Perspectives in Linguistics and Literature' offers new, compelling, and thought-provoking contributions to the field of Germanic Linguistics. Nine authors from three different continents (North America, Europe, and South America) present in this edited volume their latest research on such diverse topics as Old High German, Old Saxon and Early New High German poetry, Yiddish, German Heritage speakers in the U.S., Germanic language periodization, paleography, and gender issues in Modern Standard German. 'Germanic Philology: Perspectives in Linguistics and Literature' strives to rekindle dialogue and discourse about topics in Germanic Linguistics while at the same time providing innovative and interesting talking points to the discipline in an international, trans-Atlantic framework. The articles featured in this volume will appeal to students and instructors of Germanic Linguistics alike as well as to anyone interested in this subject.

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.

The papers in this volume focus on the dynamics of one specific cell in morphological paradigms – the genitive. The high amount of diachronic and synchronic variation in all Germanic languages makes the genitive a particularly interesting phenomenon since it allows us, for example, to examine comparable but slightly different diachronic pathways, the relation of synchronic and diachronic variation, and the interplay of linguistic levels (phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics). The findings in this book enhance our understanding of the genitive not only by describing its properties, but also by discussing its demarcation from functional competitors and related grammatical items. Under-researched aspects of well-described languages as well as from lesser-known languages (Faroese, Frisian, Luxembourgish, Yiddish) are examined. The papers included are methodologically diverse and the topics covered range from morphology, syntax, and semantics to the influence of (normative) grammars and the perception and prestige of grammatical items.

Purism is an aspect of linguistic study which appeals not only to the scholar but also to the layperson. Somehow, ordinary speakers with many different mother tongues and with no formal training in linguistics share certain beliefs about what language is, how it develops or should develop, whether it has good or bad qualities, etc. The topic of linguistic purism in its many realisations is the subject of this volume of 19 articles selected from the contributions presented at a conference at the University of Bristol in 2003. In particular, the articles deal with the relationship of purism to historical prescriptivism, e.g. the influence of grammarians in the 17th and 18th centuries, to nationhood, e.g. the instrumentalising of purism in the standardisation of Afrikaans or Luxembourgish, to modern society, e.g. the existence of puristic tendencies in computer chatrooms, to folk linguistics, e.g. lay perceptions of different varieties of English, and to academic linguistics, e.g. the presence of puristic notions in the historiography of German or English.

This book provides an insight into the standardisation process of German in eighteenth-century Austria. It describes how norms prescribed by grammarians were actually implemented via a school reform carried out by educationalist Johann Ignaz Felbiger on the order of Empress Maria Theresa. Quantitative and qualitative analyses were undertaken of certain Upper German features (e-apocope, the absence of the prefix ge- and the ending -t in past participles, and variants of the verb form sind) in reading primers, issues of the Wienerisches Diarium / Wiener Zeitung and petitionary letters. These reveal how such variants became increasingly 'invisible' in writing. This process of 'invisibilisation', i.e. a process of stigmatization which prevents the use of certain varieties and variants in writing, can be attributed to a number of factors: Empress Maria Theresa's appeal for a language reform, the normative work by eighteenth-century grammarians, the implementation of educational reforms, and the early introduction of East Central German variants in newspaper issues.

This important contribution to the sociolinguistics of Asian languages breaks new ground in the study of language standards and standardization in two key ways: in its focus on Asia, with particular attention paid to China and its neighbours, and in the attention paid to multilingual contexts. The chapters address various kinds of (sometimes hidden) multilingualism and examine the interactions between multilingualism and language standardization, offering a corrective to earlier work on standardization, which has tended to assume a monolingual nation state and monolingual individuals. Taken together, the chapters in this book thus add to our understanding of the ways in which multilingualism is implicated in language standardization, as well as the impact of language standards on multilingualism. The introduction, Chapter 6 and Chapter 8 are free to download as open access publications. You can access them here: Introduction: https://zenodo.org/record/5749388#.YaiwuNDP3cs Chapter 6: https://zenodo.org/record/5749522#.Yaiw-9DP3cs Chapter 8: https://zenodo.org/record/5749586#.Yai0RNDP3cs