MEITS Blog


Plurilingualism in the flesh – tales from an academic’s travels

by Nicola McLelland

I’m just back from travels in Luxembourg (well, the airport!), Switzerland and Germany. German specialists like me love to cite Luxembourg and Switzerland as examples of societal multilingualism, where individual plurilingualism is very common. So it was interesting to experience the reality. Not all was entirely as I expected.

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A drop-down menu for languages? Historical-sociolinguistic research in the archives

by Andreas Krogull

Archives are wonderful places. They allow us not only to, quite literally, touch the past, but also to learn a lot about languages and how these were used centuries ago. As a historical sociolinguist working on the history of Dutch, I have visited countless archives over the past few years, mostly in the Netherlands, in order to collect data. Following the research tradition that is known as language history ‘from below’, I am particularly interested in handwritten sources from the private domain, such as letters and diaries. These first-person accounts give us unique insights into ‘ordinary’ language use, which has been neglected in traditional history writing, but can still be found in the archives

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