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Arend Mihm: Frühneuzeitliche Sprachmodernisierung und Sprachspaltung. Zu Status und Entstehung der niederländisch-hochdeutschen Zweisprachigkeit

The European language modernization processes of the early modern period were accompanied by the extensive adoption of foreign languages for internal communication among the upper classes of the individual societies. The emergence of this new multi­lingualism is in at least partial conflict with well-established ideas of language unification in the period and raises the additional question of whether, as usually assumed, language modernization can have originated exclusively in the written domain. The article discusses these problems on the basis of fresh empirical data from a recently completed DFG project that examines the emergence of Dutch–German bilingualism in northwestern Germany in the seventeenth century. New findings emerge about the typology of contact-induced language change, the differential roles of speech and writing in, and the sociocultural causes of, early modern language modernization.