Bøker i Historical Sociolinguistics-serien

This book focuses on the nineteenth century as the time when language became an important part of the cultural identity of speakers, communities and nations. It seeks to explore why and how certain linguistic varieties were excluded from written discourse, in other words, why they remain invisible to contemporary readers and modern historians.

This volume examines the use of French in European language communities outside France from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. Each chapter offers unique insight into the existence of francophonie in a given language community and the volume as a whole explores broad sociolinguistic and sociohistorical questions about the function of French.

This book analyses a set of rarely described regional Spanish varieties spoken throughout much of the northern Peruvian Andes (Cajamarca, La Libertad and Ancash) from a sociohistorical and dialectological perspective. What are the main dialectological features of these varieties? Are these features the same ones that shape southern Andean Spanish, a variety formed mainly through contact with Quechua and Aymara? Which of these features are distinctly outcomes of contact with Culle, the main substrate language of the region, which was mentioned in colonial and postcolonial documents but is now extinct? How are these features linked to the postcolonial history of the region, marked by the Catholic evangelization enterprise and an economy of plundering based on agriculture, weaving and mining? Thorough consideration of these matters allows the author to critically assess the standard notion in Hispanic linguistics that considers Andean Spanish as a single, homogeneous code. The study sheds new light on how the regional varieties of Spanish in America were shaped over time and proposes ways of delving into language history in postcolonial contexts, where a written European language has been superimposed on a set of native codes previously lacking written traditions.

In what ways has language been central to constructing, challenging and reconfiguring social and political boundaries? This volume focuses on how language functions as a marker of identity, drawing on case studies across Europe.