EDITORS: Elspaß, Stephan; Langer, Nils; Scharloth, Joachim; Vandenbussche, Wim TITLE: Germanic Language Histories 'from Below' (1700-2000) SERIES: Studia Linguistica Germanica 86 PUBLISHER: Walter de Gruyter YEAR: 2007
Marc Pierce, University of Texas at Austin
SUMMARY
This book consists of 30 papers originally presented at a conference held in Bristol in 2005, and is in some respects a successor to publications like Linn and McLelland (2002) and Langer and Davies (2005). It provides a rather different perspective on the histories of the Germanic languages; most traditional works in this area focus on ''language history from above'', i.e. give a bird's-eye view of changes leading to the development of the standard language, while brushing aside data from non-standard dialects and not considering changes that did not make their way into the standard language, thus resulting in an incomplete picture. Works like this book, on the other hand, attempt to fill in the gaps in the picture, via what Stephan Elspaß calls a ''worm's-eye'' view (4) of 'language history from below', developed by considering various types of data that more traditional studies ignore. The book is divided into five main sections, and there is also a brief and readable introduction by Stephan Elspaß (''A twofold view 'from below': New perspectives on language histories and historical grammar'' [3-9]).
The first section of the book, ''Language variation in letters, diaries and other text sources from below'', contains five papers. Marina Dossena's '''As this leaves me at present' - Formulaic usage, politeness and social proximity in nineteenth-century Scottish emigrants' letters'' (13-29) discusses a broad range of strategies used by letter writers to convey ideas like politeness and solidarity, including formulas and the description of seemingly unimportant details (e.g. the weather). Gertrud Reershemius, author of an interesting recent book on Low German in East Frisia (Reershemius 2004), examines ''Remnants of Yiddish in East Frisia'' (69-82), which draws its data largely from an anonymous rhymed dialogue called _Zweigespräch in Auricher Judendeutsch_ ['Dialogue in Aurich Jewish German'], performed in 1929 (unfortunately, this dialogue ''does not portray the Jewish vernacular as spoken by the Aurich community in the late 1920s, but rather recollects certain elements of the language'' [77]), and two word lists compiled by speakers born in 1911. These remnants of Yiddish point to a complicated sociolinguistic picture, involving Dutch, Standard German, Low German, Hebrew, Aramaic, as well as these remnants of Yiddish. The other papers in this section are '''Lower-order' letters, schooling and the English language, 1795-1834'' (31-43), by Tony Fairman; '''Doch mein Mann möchte doch mal wissen...' A discourse analysis of 19th-century emigrant men and women's private correspondence'' (45-68), by Nicola McLelland; and ''Eighteenth-century linguistic variation from the perspective of a Dutch diary and a collection of private letters'' (83-96), by Marijke van der Wal.
The second section, ''From past to present: Change from above - change from below'', contains seven papers. David Denison's ''Syntactic surprises in some English letters: the underlying progress of the language'' (115-127), addresses topics like the progressive passive, phrasal verbs, and preposition stranding found in a corpus of letters written to Richard Orford, an estate steward in Cheshire, between 1761 and 1790. Alexandra Lenz discusses ''The grammaticalization of _geben_ 'to give' in German and Luxembourgish'' (163-178), where the originally full verb _geben_ has developed into a copula, a passive auxiliary, and a subjunctive auxiliary, analyzing data from a wide range of regional varieties of German. Koen Plevoets, Dirk Speelman, and Dirk Geeraerts offer ''A corpus-based study of modern colloquial Flemish'' (179-188). Their study focuses on the emergence of the 'tussentaal' (literally 'in-between language'), a ''supraregional language variety that is highly similar to Belgian standard Dutch in many ways, but that still retains a lot of properties of the - Brabantic - dialects'' (179), in order to determine if it is ''a uniform language variety'' (179). (The short answer: no, because of various types of variation across registers.) The other papers in this section are '''Time and Tyne': a corpus-based study of variation and change in relativization strategies in Tyneside English'' (99-114), by Joan C. Beal and Karen P. Corrigan; ''YOU and THOU in Early Modern English: cross-linguistic perspectives'' (129-148), by Richard Dury; ''On the history of verbal present participle converbs in English and Norwegian and the concept of 'change from below''' (149-162), by Kristin Killie; and '''Tussentaal' as a source of change from below in Belgian Dutch. A case study of substandardization processes in the chat language of Flemish teenagers'' (189-203), by Reinhild Vanderkerckhove.
The next section of the book, ''Language norms and standardization in a view from below'', consists of seven papers. Ana Deumert offers another of her valuable studies of the history of Afrikaans (see Deumert 2004, among others) in '''zoo schrijve ek lievers my sort Afrikaans'. Speaker agency, identity and resistance in the history of Afrikaans'' (221-242). In this paper, Deumert aims to expand ''the notion of speaker agency in language history, looking not only at speakers as agents of change, but also as resisting change'' (222). Martin Durrell looks at the periphrastic subjunctive construction in the history of German in his '''Deutsch ist eine _würde_-lose Sprache'. On the history of a failed prescription'' (243-258), and notes that the best efforts of prescriptivist grammarians have been unable to eliminate this construction in certain contexts (specifically in antecedent clauses). The survival of another construction deplored by prescriptivists is the topic of Roswitha Fischer's ''To boldly split the infinitive - or not? Prescriptivist traditions and current English usage'' (259-73). Like the würde construction in German, most native speakers of English do not seem to object to split infinitives, and here Fischer traces the history of the construction, the prescriptivist tradition against it, and its actual use in contemporary English. The other papers in this section are ''Surinamese Dutch: The development of a unique Germanic language variety'' (207-220), by Christa de Kleine; ''Norm consciousness and corpus constitution in the study of Earlier Modern Germanic languages'' (275-293), by Amanda Pounder; ''Variability and professionalism as prerequisites of standardization'' (295-307), by Anja Voeste; and ''Putting standard German to the test: Some notes on the linguistic competence of grammar-school students and teachers in the nineteenth century'' (309-329), by Evelyn Ziegler.
The fourth section, ''Language choice and language planning'', contains eight papers. Kristine Horner (''Language and Luxembourgish national identity: ideologies of hybridity and purity in the past and present'' [363-378]) discusses the crucial role of language in the establishment and maintenance of a national identity in Luxembourg and argues in favor of a 'multidimensional' approach to language history. Péter Maitz discusses ''The death of Standard German in 19th-century Budapest. A case study on the role of linguistic ideologies in language shift'' (405-421), and concludes that language shift in Budapest ''was not directly motivated by sociological circumstances, but by knowledge related to language and by the attitudes and mentalities which linguistic nationalism as a linguistic ideology carried'' (418). Language shift involving German is also the subject of Agnete Nesse's ''1750-1850: The disappearance of German from Bergen, Norway'' (423-435). Nesse chronicles the gradual loss of German in various domains in Bergen, as well as its ultimate elimination, and connects these developments to the desire of ''a group of resourceful men ... to be an important part of the city's political and cultural elite'' (435), which could only be achieved by abandoning German for Norwegian. The other papers in this section are ''The choice between the German or French language for the German nobility of the late 18th century'' (333-341), by Steffen Arzberger; ''Flirting at the fringe - The status of the German varieties as perceived by language activists in Belgium's Areler Land'' (343-361), by Jeroen Darquennes; ''The planning of modern Norwegian as a sociolinguistic experiment – 'from below''' (379-403), by Ernst Håkon Jahr; ''Societal multilingualism and language conflicts in Galicia in the 19th century'' (437-447), by Stefaniya Ptashnyk; and ''New data on language policy and language choice in 19th-century Flemish city administrations'' (449-469), by Eline Vanhecke and Jetje De Groof.
The final thematic section, ''Reflections on alternative language histories'', is also the shortest, containing only two papers. Angelika Linke looks at ''Communicative genres as categories in a socio-cultural history of communication'' (473-493; the table of contents gives a slightly different title). This paper first defines and characterizes 'communicative genres' and then addresses ways to reconstruct them (e.g. using pictures). The last part of the paper attempts ''to outline how we can reconstruct communicative genres and evaluate their significance within the larger context of a history of communication'' (485), using 'the call' (brief visit) as a case study. The final paper in the volume is ''Deconstructing episodes in the 'history of English''' (495-513), by Richard J. Watts, who challenges three widely-accepted beliefs about the history of English (the longevity of English, the idea that the Great Vowel Shift is the major separator of Middle English and Early Modern English, and ''the belief in the social construction of ''Standard English'' as the language of the ''polite class'' of society'' [496]).
EVALUATION There is much to admire about this book. The breadth of languages discussed is impressive, as is the use of sources of data that have been neglected in more traditional approaches to historical linguistics. Many of the papers are very well-done; I particularly enjoyed the articles by Reershemius, Lenz, Deumert, Durrell, Maitz, Nesse, and Watts, among others, each of which offers a thorough, well-constructed, and interesting discussion of the relevant topic. Moreover, a number of the papers would make excellent supplementary readings for courses on various subjects. For instance, the paper by Durrell would fit nicely into a course on the history of German, as an illustration of the failure of prescriptivism (especially when used in conjunction with Elspaß 2005, another recent paper on the subject); the papers by Lenz and Maitz would also work well with such a course, in discussions of grammaticalization and language shift, respectively. There are a few typos and some stylistic infelicities that should have been eliminated, but they do not detract greatly from the genuinely high value of the work. The rather steep price of the volume ($157) will no doubt dissuade many from purchasing it, but it will hopefully be widely-read nonetheless.
REFERENCES Deumert, Ana. 2004. _Language standardization and language change: The dynamics of Cape Dutch_. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Elspaß, Stephan. 2005. Language norm and language reality. Effectiveness and limits of prescriptivism in New High German. In Nils Langer and Winifred Davies (eds), _Linguistic purism in the Germanic languages_. Berlin: de Gruyter. 20-45.
Linn, Andrew and Nicola McLelland (eds). 2002. _Standardization: Studies from the Germanic languages_. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Reershemius, Gertrud. 2004. _Niederdeutsch in Ostfriesland. Zwischen Sprachkontakt, Sprachveränderung und Sprachwechsel_. Stuttgart: Steiner.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER Marc Pierce is an assistant professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Texas. His main research interests are historical linguistics, Germanic linguistics, phonology, and the history of linguistics.
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