Towards multilingual language histories: Dutch in context and contact

This research program starts from the observation that language histories, because of their focus on just one language, often ignore multilingualism and multilingual practices, while every language history is in fact just a history of contact between languages. We want to bring about a change of perspective here by using a series of case studies to focus on less obvious multilingual elements in the history of Dutch, in order to provide building blocks that can lay the foundations for a new and profoundly multilingual view of language history overall.
We will thus carry out various language-historical studies on Dutch in the Southern Netherlands, in contact with other languages, and from the perspective of the speakers themselves. It is not the language an sich that interests us, but rather the use of language in a broader social and often multilingual context. The research has three main goals: (1) we want to make previously overlooked languages and their language use visible, (2) we want to broaden our view and also look at phenomena in the social or geographical margins of language history, previously considered less important but perhaps just now particularly relevant, and (3) we want to show the continuity between language use in the past and how we interact with language now, in order to better understand the present through the past and in order to gain a better understanding of language history through a view of the linguistic present.
We focus for this study on individuals in particular and non-obvious multilingual contexts, considering changes over time, and paying attention to the connections between past and present. Our overarching goal is to gain new insights into language history, which may lead us to a better understanding of multilingualism in the past and today. In the longer term, this research aims to provide an example for similar studies in other language areas, where a multilingual rethinking of the concept of language history is also needed.