The Sheffield sessions take place in the conference room of the Humanities
Research Institute: http://www.shef.ac.uk/hri/facilities.html.
Roel
--
Dr Roel Vismans
Senior Lecturer in Dutch
Head of Germanic Studies
School of Modern Languages & Linguistics
University of Sheffield
Jessop West
1 Upper Hanover Street
Sheffield, S3 7RA
tel: + 44 114 222 4919 (direct line)
+ 44 114 222 4396 (school office)
fax: + 44 114 222 2888
email: [log in to unmask]
http://www.shef.ac.uk/german/staff/roelvismans
Centre for Dutch Studies http://dutchcentre.group.shef.ac.uk/
Centre for Comparative Linguistic Research
http://www.shef.ac.uk/linguistics/index.html
Quoting Kristine Horner <[log in to unmask]>:
> ***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
>
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