IntroductionSociolinguistic perspectives on historical multilingualism in Europe

Standard language histories have long been written against a monolingual backdrop. The assumption, embedded in nineteenth-century nation-building, was that societies naturally organized around a single dominant language. The multilingual turn in historical sociolinguistics rejects that assumption entirely. Wright's work from two thousand, which traced the multiple origins of standard English, was an early concrete challenge. Krogull and Rutten pick up that thread and argue it is time to reconstruct the multilingual layers that monolingual histories have systematically erased. To do that rigorously, they build a three-layer analytic framework. The first layer is contact-induced variation and code-switching, which includes lexical borrowing, hybrid practices, and languages woven together. Krogull and Rutten's own work on private letters finds Dutch and French so interwoven that no single dominant language can be identified. The second layer is language choice and shift, which examines which language gets used in which domain, and how that changes over time. The third layer is language ideology and metalinguistic reflection, which looks at how speakers and institutions talk about, debate, and evaluate language use. This includes Bellamy's analysis of nineteenth-century orthographic proposals for Luxembourgish and Galician, as well as Horner's study of strategic ambiguity in Luxembourg policy documents. Cutting across all three layers is a Silversteinian methodological commitment, drawn from Silverstein's nineteen eighty-five framework. Any linguistic fact should be analyzed at three levels: the concrete linguistic form itself, how people use it in specific social contexts, and how speakers and institutions reflect on and evaluate those uses. This three-level perspective is what integrates the framework and gives it analytical bite. However, there is a fundamental problem. The historical record is sparse, selective, and biased toward literate elites. Everyday multilingual practice leaves few traces. Rather than treating this as a dead end, the contributors reframe the issue. Hårstad turns to retrospective biographical accounts and life stories. Heinrich mines scattered archival sources and metalinguistic comments buried in reports, minutes, and memoirs. Horner reads what is intentionally silenced in policy texts. The approach is one of informational maximalism, a term from Janda and Joseph, gathering every contextual clue available and asking not just what the record says but what it conspicuously does not. Three underexplored cases show what this recovers. Rutten and Assendelft document a sustained French presence in the historical Netherlands from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Heinrich reconstructs Friedrichstadt's layered makeup — Low and High German, Dutch, Frisian, and Danish — and traces a language shift from Dutch to German, especially in the religious domain. Hårstad documents a multilingual Jewish community in Norway and a shift from Yiddish to Norwegian in the first half of the twentieth century. All three were largely invisible in national language histories. All three become visible through indirect sources. Krogull and Rutten's final argument is that the data problem is not merely technical. What you look for determines who counts. Choosing to read private letters, archival fragments, and retrospective life stories is also choosing to write communities back into history that monolingual narratives had quietly written out. This lecture was created by ennepō. Go to https://ennepo.ai to Discover, Create and Follow the latest research in your field. Read when you can. Listen when you want to.