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Geolinguistic documentation of multilingual areas: Selected papers from the Eighth International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 8), Leipzig, May 2015
Abstract
Language Variation - European Perspectives VI showcases a selection of papers from the 8th International Conference on Language Variation in Europe which was held in Leipzig in 2015. The volume includes plenaries by Miriam Meyerhoff and Steffen Klaere (“The large and the small of it: Big issues with smaller samples in the study of language variation”), Martin Haspelmath and Susanne Maria Michaelis (“Analytic and synthetic: Typological change in varieties of European languages”) and Jürgen Erich Schmidt (“Dynamics, variation and the brain“). In addition, the editors have selected 11 papers which exemplify the breadth of research on European languages. The contributions to this volume encompass languages as varied as Swedish, Greek, Galician, Dutch, German, Swedish, English (including English-lexified contact varieties), French, Spanish, Croatian, Luxembourgish and Romani. The variety of theoretical frameworks and methodological perspectives and particularly the combination of different methods attests to the scope of research currently being conducted on language variation and change in European languages.
This article responds to the current interventions regarding spatio- and linguistic diversity in the digital humanities (DHs). Previous work has focused on the practitioners of DHs themselves, the diversity of projects, the geographical diversity of peoples and places which such projects represent, and others. Some literature has considered multilingual DH, whether a non-Anglophone DH is possible, or a DH ‘accent’. This article pushes these boundaries further by considering forms of historical linguistic hybridity for languages, language varieties, and groups of people that are no longer extant. It considers one text in particular, the Dictionnaire de la langue franque, to show that, although ‘mixed’ languages are the norm in all societies, forms of hybridity are often left by the wayside in favour of increasing heterogeneity. This observation, in turn, leads to a taxonomy of definitional elusiveness.
