***With apologies for cross-postings***

Dear colleagues,

You are warmly invited to the first WUN virtual seminar in the Germanic Languages and Migration series on Thursday, 4 February 2010 at 4 pm in the Roger Stevens Building LT16 at the University of Leeds. The seminar - live from the University of Wisconsin-Madison - will also be streamed at the University of Bristol, the University of Sheffield and the University of Southampton. For further details on venues please get in touch with me by email.

All welcome! 

best wishes,
Kristine


‘Social Networks and Language Contact in the Early Modern Dutch Republic’

Professor Robert Howell (University of Madison-Wisconsin)

Traditional dialectology has provided us with detailed maps of transitions from one dialect to the next along the entire continental Germanic dialect continuum, a contribution of inestimable value to our understanding of the history of German, Frisian and Dutch.  One salient and poorly understood feature of this dialect continuum is the peculiar position of cities in relation to the distribution of isoglosses.  In virtually every instance, cities and their immediate environs present a relatively homogeneous dialectal area surrounded by a tangle of isoglosses.  Using the development of the urban dialects of northern Dutch  in the Early Modern period, this paper investigates just why cities occupy this special place in the continental Germanic dialect continuum.  We argue that the development of new urban dialects results from rapid immigration-induced urban expansion followed by intense dialect contact and subsequent koineization, as in Kerswill and Williams (2000), Goss and Howell (2006) and Howell (2006).

Early dialectologists interested in archaic dialect features typically avoided study of  “corrupt” urban dialects, a clear recognition of the special status of these varieties.  Historical linguists have shown a strong tendency to interpret expansive features of urban dialects as the result of the alleged prestige of the urban variety.  Change in the urban varieties is seen as originating in the elite urban classes and then spread to speakers of lower socio-economic classes as they attempt to gain the prestige variety of the elite groups (cf. Kloeke 1927).  Following Hendriks (1998) and Hendriks and Howell (2000), and Goss (2002), this paper rejects this type of analysis, instead attributing innovations in the urban varieties to evolving network interactions among speakers of immigrant and native dialects, the majority of whom belonged to the lower socio-economic strata.  

The development of the Amsterdam city dialect is traced through the 16th and 17th centuries as the city grows from a small city of 14,000 inhabitants in 1500 to a major metropolis of 200,000 by the late 17th century.  The analysis argues that there are principled reasons for the relative phonological and morphological simplicity of urban dialects compared to their rural counterparts as illustrated by the development of the Amsterdam dialect.

		
Dr Kristine Horner
Lecturer in German and Sociolinguistics
Director of Postgraduate Studies in German/Russian
Department of German, Russian and Slavonic Studies
University of Leeds
Leeds LS2 9JT

www.leeds.ac.uk/german/staff/kristine_horner.htm