Place: University of Lausanne, Switzerland, Amphimax (Route de la Sorge 9, 1015 Lausanne), Room 412 [ONLINE PARTICIPATION POSSIBLE, see end of the page]<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dates: 6-7 February 2025<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Organisers: Prof. Anita Auer (Lausanne)<\/a> and Prof. Markus Schiegg (Fribourg)<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n DESCRIPTION<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2005, thus 20 years ago, Stephan Elspa\u00df\u2019s monograph Sprachgeschichte von unten. Untersuchungen zum geschriebenen Alltagsdeutsch im 19. <\/em>Jahrhundert<\/em> was published. This work and particularly the concept of \u2018language history \u201cfrom below\u201d\u2019 has significantly raised historical linguists\u2019 awareness of the importance of the choice of sources and their writers for their investigations and, as a consequence, for the construction of different language history narratives (see for instance Vandenbussche & Elspa\u00df 2007; Elspa\u00df, Langer, Scharloth & Vandenbussche eds. 2007). The concept has also become one of the central perspectives embraced by the relatively young field of historical sociolinguistics. Within that field, and concerning different language histories, researchers have collected new data sources that represent the voices of the non-elite, e.g. everyday language captured in ego-documents, depositions, etc., which allow for a complementary perspective to the hitherto dominant \u2018language history \u201cfrom above\u201d\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The last two decades have also seen a fast advance in the field of corpus linguistics and the creation of digital tools to analyse (historical) data. These developments also led to advances in the field of historical sociolinguistics as a number of data collections and corpora have been created, serving for linguistic investigations; see for example the section on methodological innovations in S\u00e4ily, Nurmi, Palander-Collin & Auer (eds.) 2017, and the Corpus of Historical Patient Documents<\/em> including more than 4\u2019000 letters and other texts written by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century patients from German psychiatric hospitals (https:\/\/copadocs.de<\/a>; Schiegg 2022).<\/p>\n\n\n\n This international workshop aims to bring together scholars working on West Germanic languages in the field of historical sociolinguistics who take a \u2018language history \u201cfrom below\u201d\u2019 approach in their research combined with corpus linguistics and digital approaches. In that, the workshop wants to mark the 20th<\/sup> anniversary of the introduction of the concept and shed light on how digital approaches have changed the analysis of relevant data sources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The international workshop is organized as the final event of the SNSF-funded project \u201cThe Language of the Labouring Poor in Late Modern England\u201d (2020\u20132025; PI Anita Auer) in collaboration with the recently finished research project \u201eFlexible Schreiber in der Sprachgeschichte\u201c (2017\u20132023; PI Markus Schiegg).<\/p>\n\n\n\n References:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Elspa\u00df, Stephan (2005). Sprachgeschichte von unten. Untersuchungen zum geschriebenen Alltagsdeutsch im 19. Jahrhundert. <\/em>T\u00fcbingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Elspa\u00df, Stephan, Nils Langer, Joachim Scharloth & Wim Vandenbussche (eds) (2007). Germanic language histories \u2018from below\u2019 (1700<\/em>\u20132000)<\/em>. Berlin & New York: de Gruyter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n S\u00e4ily, Tanja, Arja Nurmi, Minna Palander-Collin & Anita Auer (eds) (2017). Exploring Future Paths for Historical Sociolinguistics<\/em>. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Schiegg, Markus (2022). Flexible Schreiber in der Sprachgeschichte. <\/em>Intraindividuelle Variation in Patientenbriefen (1850<\/em>\u20131936)<\/em>. Heidelberg: Universit\u00e4tsverlag Winter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Vandenbussche, Wim & Stephan Elspa\u00df (2007). Introduction: Lower class language use in the 19th<\/sup> century (Special issue). Multilingua<\/em> 26: 147\u2013150.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n WORKSHOP SCHEDULE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 6 February 2025<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp.unil.ch\/lalp\/files\/2025\/01\/patientenbriefe-kfb6270.jpg\")
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