Historical sociolinguistics

To date, dialect and language contact settings have typically been treated within separate research traditions. However, a connection between these fields is missing, especially when it comes to linguistic contact scenarios where both phenomena coexist. To address this theoretical lacuna, this project will focus on late 19th- and early 20th-century Brussels, as the continuous immigration movements from the surrounding Flemish provinces combined with a gradual linguistic shift from Dutch to French in the city create a fertile context to study dialect contact and language contact in conjunction. Simultaneously, this project aims to make a more empirical contribution by investigating the underexposed role of dialect contact and bottom-up standardization processes in Brussels during this period, as well as the multilingual repertoires of its inhabitants, thereby counterbalancing the monolingual view which often prevails in existing literature. Within a corpus of letters written by Flemish immigrants in fin-de-siècle Brussels I will analyze different dimensions of linguistic variation and change, i.e. inter-individual, inter-generational, longitudinal and intra-individual variation. By doing so, I will elucidate how linguistic practices respond to a context of migration and dialect contact within a broader situation of intensive language contact and large-scale societal language shift.