Published in Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics
This issue of the Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics aims to contribute to our understanding of the role of merchants in language standardisation by focussing on how merchants can be seen as agents of linguistic change across various European vernaculars at various points in time. By analysing data from a varied set of languages, including Ital...
Published in Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics
Published in Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics
This article aims to assess the extent to which merchant language in Renaissance Italy can be said to have undergone a process of dialect levelling. Merchant letters in the Italian context are characterised by their high degree of verb allomorphy, both verbal and nominal. Previous investigations have shown that this degree of allomorphy is much mor...
Published in Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics
Published in Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics
Published in Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics
In this article, we examine, quantitatively and qualitatively, Dutch business letters written by merchants, focusing on formulaic phrases and French suffix borrowing. The letters are part of the Prize Papers, the collection of documents confiscated by the English during times of warfare. We compare these business letters to private letters from the...
Published in Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics
In this article, the linguistic choices of a group of young merchants and merchants’ sons are discussed. Living in Bergen in the second half of the 19th century, they wrote Danish and spoke a dialect marked by centuries of dialect and language contact. Most of them had some competence in German, some also in English and French. When Romanticism and...
Published in Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics
Published in Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics
This article analyzes an unpublished corpus of 131 letters written in Spanish by four Dutch merchants during the seventeenth-century (1669–1677). The aim of the investigation is to determine whether the variation found in these letters was internal, external, or both, and to study the factors that favored each source. To do so, I will look at vowel...
Published in Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics
