ABSTRACT

European language histories, including the history of Dutch, have often been portrayed as broadly linear developments towards one uniform standard language. In this biased account, rooted in the nation-building era around 1800, language diversity and multilingualism were largely rendered invisible. Against the background of clearly segregated spaces, politically and linguistically, border settings have particularly challenged the monolingual ideology of ‘one nation–one language’. Taking a historical-sociolinguistic perspective, this article focuses on the Dutch-German borderlands in the long nineteenth century as an intriguing case to investigate historical multilingualism and language contact ‘from below’. Despite the growing importance of nation-states and their standard languages, it is shown that multilingual practices and contact phenomena can still be traced in handwritten archival documents from the private sphere. Illustrative examples come from various family archives in the border area as well as from a unique collection of letters written by (Low) German labour migrants to their Dutch employer. These sources give evidence of the Dutch-German borderlands as a multi-faceted sociolinguistic space well into the nineteenth century. Moreover, they suggest that established theories of multilingualism and language contact may require rethinking in order to account for less clear-cut and more fluid practices in the past.

摘要

欧洲语言的历史，包括荷兰的历史，经常被描绘成迈向宽线形发展的一个统一标准语言。在这个植根于 1800 年左右的国家建设时代的有偏见的描述中，语言多样性和多语制在很大程度上被掩盖了。在政治和语言上明显隔离的空间背景下，边界设置特别挑战了“一国一语”的单语意识形态。从历史社会语言学的角度来看，本文将 19 世纪的荷德边境作为一个有趣的案例来研究历史上的多语言现象和“自下而上”的语言接触。尽管民族国家及其标准语言的重要性日益增加，但事实表明，仍然可以在私人领域的手写档案文件中追溯多语言实践和接触现象。说明性的例子来自边境地区的各种家庭档案，以及（低）德国劳工移民写给荷兰雇主的独特信件集。这些资料表明，荷德边境一直是 19 世纪的多方面社会语言空间。此外，他们认为，多语制和语言接触的既定理论可能需要重新思考，以解释过去不那么明确和更流畅的实践。