Multilingual Practices in Language History: English and Beyond

In this volume, the authors frame their exploration of the ''standard language culture'' -that is, a community in which there is general subscription to the ideology of one correct, or canonical form of language-through the optic of multilingual practice in Europe, both historically and synchronically. Among the overarching goals of the volume, the contributors seek to assess how far standard language ideology pervades very disparate European cultures, by assessing the extent to which changing multilingual practices have been shaped by the standard language culture. The scope of the subject matter is therefore very broad, and attempts to portray an often dynamic picture.

2018

This paper intends to give a comprehensive survey about issues of historical​ multilingualism and has been written for undergraduate students.

English as a Contact Language, eds. Daniel Schreier, Marianne Hundt, 2012

2018

The perspective of time At this point, we may ask how old multilingualism and linguistic diversity really are. It is not just the world of today which is multilingual; the past has had its fair share too. Many languages have vanished, and from Anglosaxon and Etruscan via Ostrogothic, Punic and Sumerian to Tocharian, Vandal and Wiradhuri we can draw up a long list of extinct languages 16-some of which we may still know today, if they have been preserved in writing and deciphered; while others we may still know of, if at some point somebody has cared to leave a mention or a name. When we travel back in time, what we find is that, at each and every stage of the written record for the past 5,000 years, there have always been many languages in the world. Three millennia BCE, Uruk in Sumer, the city of Gilgamesh and cuneiform writing, was a large multilingual metropolis 17-and so were many other city states in the Ancient Orient, such as Babylon, Ebla, Hattusa, Mari, Niniveh, Nippur or Palmyra. Ever since those ancient times, monolingualism may have been a most powerful dream, ideal or norm, 18 but the fact is that there has always been linguistic diversity in the world. Going back in time from today's multilingual New York 19 and London 20 to the time of Uruk, we can track its existence at all intermediate stages of known history-in eighteenth-century Europe, 21 the Renaissance. 22 and the Middle Ages 23 no less than in the Roman Empire, 24 the Celtic and the Germanic world, 25 the Hellenistic World, 26 Persia, 27 the Phoenician Mediterranean, 28 as well as the pre-classical Orient, 29 and beyond this along the Silk Road and farther. 30 As Rankin put it: "It is not easy to assume the monolingual uniformity of any inhabited area in ancient time." 31 And before Uruk? Here, as Steven Fischer has observed, 32 there is "an absolute boundary of linguistic reconstruction" in "the teeming linguascape of 10,000 years ago." Beyond that boundary, we move into evolutionary time-when it may well have taken very long indeed, from the earliest beginnings of language (perhaps about 100,000, or possibly 200,000 years ago) 33 until the final assemblage of the disparate components-such as vocal imitation and language play, signaling behavior and communicative interaction, speech sound

Edition Open Access eBooks, 2018

The perspective of time At this point, we may ask how old multilingualism and linguistic diversity really are. It is not just the world of today which is multilingual; the past has had its fair share too. Many languages have vanished, and from Anglosaxon and Etruscan via Ostrogothic, Punic and Sumerian to Tocharian, Vandal and Wiradhuri we can draw up a long list of extinct languages 16-some of which we may still know today, if they have been preserved in writing and deciphered; while others we may still know of, if at some point somebody has cared to leave a mention or a name. When we travel back in time, what we find is that, at each and every stage of the written record for the past 5,000 years, there have always been many languages in the world. Three millennia BCE, Uruk in Sumer, the city of Gilgamesh and cuneiform writing, was a large multilingual metropolis 17-and so were many other city states in the Ancient Orient, such as Babylon, Ebla, Hattusa, Mari, Niniveh, Nippur or Palmyra. Ever since those ancient times, monolingualism may have been a most powerful dream, ideal or norm, 18 but the fact is that there has always been linguistic diversity in the world. Going back in time from today's multilingual New York 19 and London 20 to the time of Uruk, we can track its existence at all intermediate stages of known history-in eighteenth-century Europe, 21 the Renaissance. 22 and the Middle Ages 23 no less than in the Roman Empire, 24 the Celtic and the Germanic world, 25 the Hellenistic World, 26 Persia, 27 the Phoenician Mediterranean, 28 as well as the pre-classical Orient, 29 and beyond this along the Silk Road and farther. 30 As Rankin put it: "It is not easy to assume the monolingual uniformity of any inhabited area in ancient time." 31 And before Uruk? Here, as Steven Fischer has observed, 32 there is "an absolute boundary of linguistic reconstruction" in "the teeming linguascape of 10,000 years ago." Beyond that boundary, we move into evolutionary time-when it may well have taken very long indeed, from the earliest beginnings of language (perhaps about 100,000, or possibly 200,000 years ago) 33 until the final assemblage of the disparate components-such as vocal imitation and language play, signaling behavior and communicative interaction, speech sound

Multilingua, 2016

This article serves as an introduction to a collection of four articles on multilingual practices in speech and writing, exploring both contemporary and historical sources. It not only introduces the articles but also discusses the scope and definitions of code-switching, attitudes towards multilingual interaction and, most pertinently, the interfaces between code-switching and translation. The article shows that code-switching and translation share a number of features, yet have rarely been treated together. However, as there is a definite need to examine code-switching phenomena – particularly bilingual reiteration, which not only helps crossing language boundaries but also has other functions – from a variety of perspectives, including translation and interpreting studies, the article encourages closer collaboration between code-switching research and translation studies. It is possible to envisage a continuum of multilingual processes and products, with completely monolingual, u...

Multilingual practices in medieval Britain, 2024

This chapter considers research published over the last two decades on the linguistics of medieval multilingualism as evidenced in all sorts of text types, including work published by our honorand and her collaborators. As historical multilingualism has now become such a burgeoning field, Pahta's contribution to the use of corpus-building and searching for evidence of historical multilingualism can be seen as pioneering. The research considered in this chapter reveals the ubiquity of multilingual practices, the discourse-organizing functions of code-switching, the functional properties of switches, the relevance of abbreviations and their frequency, and the major contribution of Romance borrowings to nuancing the English lexicon. Code-switching, in particular, played an important role in vernacularisation processes, accompanying the shift from French to English in the fifteenth century, and as an intermediate stage in the shift from Latin to English in civic records. Further, work has been carried out on multilingual practices involving Middle Dutch, Old Norse,

2009

2018

The perspective of time At this point, we may ask how old multilingualism and linguistic diversity really are. It is not just the world of today which is multilingual; the past has had its fair share too. Many languages have vanished, and from Anglosaxon and Etruscan via Ostrogothic, Punic and Sumerian to Tocharian, Vandal and Wiradhuri we can draw up a long list of extinct languages 16-some of which we may still know today, if they have been preserved in writing and deciphered; while others we may still know of, if at some point somebody has cared to leave a mention or a name. When we travel back in time, what we find is that, at each and every stage of the written record for the past 5,000 years, there have always been many languages in the world. Three millennia BCE, Uruk in Sumer, the city of Gilgamesh and cuneiform writing, was a large multilingual metropolis 17-and so were many other city states in the Ancient Orient, such as Babylon, Ebla, Hattusa, Mari, Niniveh, Nippur or Palmyra. Ever since those ancient times, monolingualism may have been a most powerful dream, ideal or norm, 18 but the fact is that there has always been linguistic diversity in the world. Going back in time from today's multilingual New York 19 and London 20 to the time of Uruk, we can track its existence at all intermediate stages of known history-in eighteenth-century Europe, 21 the Renaissance. 22 and the Middle Ages 23 no less than in the Roman Empire, 24 the Celtic and the Germanic world, 25 the Hellenistic World, 26 Persia, 27 the Phoenician Mediterranean, 28 as well as the pre-classical Orient, 29 and beyond this along the Silk Road and farther. 30 As Rankin put it: "It is not easy to assume the monolingual uniformity of any inhabited area in ancient time." 31 And before Uruk? Here, as Steven Fischer has observed, 32 there is "an absolute boundary of linguistic reconstruction" in "the teeming linguascape of 10,000 years ago." Beyond that boundary, we move into evolutionary time-when it may well have taken very long indeed, from the earliest beginnings of language (perhaps about 100,000, or possibly 200,000 years ago) 33 until the final assemblage of the disparate components-such as vocal imitation and language play, signaling behavior and communicative interaction, speech sound

On the Multiplicity of Languages and Multilingualism, 2021

This article is devoted to explicating the origin of many languages in the world and their development towards the dissemination of one leading language from among all the others. The drive for the selection of such singular language, which has become an international interest in our age of globalization, was caused, in my opinion, by imperial conquests which were followed by the quick development of colonial languages that reached the level of culturally and economically advanced countries. As a result, English became the modern international language. Along with international languages, national languages are also maturing. Cooperation between the two categories (international and national tongues) ensures a balanced language situation in any particular country. The tendencies of such cooperation at the global and national levels, as well as at the level of individual linguistic abilities, are shown below. Key words: multiplicity of languages, multilingualism, a single international language, interaction of the three levels of linguistic development. Historical roots of linguistic multiplicity In general, the term multilingualism is used in two senses: firstly, as designating the plurality of the existing languages, and, secondly, as mastering by an individual not one, but several languages. To remove this ambiguity, for the first meaning I will use the term 2