Germanic Language Histories 'from Below' (1700-2000)

Introduction
Stephan Elspaß: A twofold view 'from below': New perspectives on language histories and historical grammar;
I. Language variation in letters, diaries and other text sources from below
Marina Dossena: "As this leaves me at present" - Formulaic usage, politeness and social proximity in nineteenth-century Scottish emigrants' letters; Tony Fairman: 'Lower-order' letters, schooling and the English language, 1795 to 1834; Nicola McLelland: "Doch mein Mann möchte doch mal wissen ..." A discourse analysis of 19th-century emigrant men and women's private correspondence; Gertrud Reershemius: Remnants of Western Yiddish in East Frisia; Marijke van der Wal: Eighteenth-century linguistic variation from the perspective of a Dutch diary and a collection of private letters;
II. From past to present: Change from above - change from below
Joan C. Beal/Karen P. Corrigan: 'Time and Tyne': a corpus-based study of variation and change in relativization strategies in Tyneside English; David Denison: Syntactic surprises in some English letters: the underlying progress of the language; Richard Dury: YOU and THOU in Early Modern English: cross-linguistic perspectives; Kirstin Killie: On the history of verbal present participle converbs in English and Norwegian and the concept of 'change from below'; Alexandra Lenz: The grammaticalization of geben 'to give' in German and Luxembourgish; Koen Plevoets/Dirk Speelman/Dirk Geeraerts: A corpus-based study of colloquial 'Flemish'; Reinhild Vandekerckhove: 'Tussentaal' as a source of change from below in Belgian Dutch. A case study of substandardization processes in the chat language of Flemish teenagers;
III. Language norms and standardization in a view from below
Christa de Kleine: Surinamese Dutch: The Development of a Unique Germanic Language Variety; Ana Deumert: "Zoo schrijve ek lievers my sort Afrikaans". Speaker agency, identity and resistance in the

Stephan Elspaß, University of Augsburg, Germany; Nils Langer, University of Bristol, UK; Joachim Scharloth, University of Zurich, Switzerland; Wim Vandenbussche , Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium.

"Insgesamt handelt es sich um ein sehr detailreiches Buch, das dem an variationslinguistischen Fragestellungen interessierten Leser Einblicke in die historische Soziolinguistik und historische Pragmatik bietet und zahlreiche Forschungsperspektiven aufzeigt."Verena Teschke in: Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik 2/2009 "There is much to admire about this book. The breadth of languages discussed is impressive, as is the use of sources of data that have been neglected in more traditional approaches to historical linguistics."Marc Pierce in: Linguist List 19.2184

"Insgesamt handelt es sich um ein sehr detailreiches Buch, das dem an variationslinguistischen Fragestellungen interessierten Leser Einblicke in die historische Soziolinguistik und historische Pragmatik bietet und zahlreiche Forschungsperspektiven aufzeigt."
Verena Teschke in: Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik 2/2009

"There is much to admire about this book. The breadth of languages discussed is impressive, as is the use of sources of data that have been neglected in more traditional approaches to historical linguistics."
Marc Pierce in: Linguist List 19.2184