Multilingualism and the Early Modern City : Language and Society in Norwich (1500–1750)

In 1565, migrants escaping religious persecution and economic hardship in the Low Countries began to arrive in the city of Norwich in eastern England. Many of the migrants spoke Dutch, whilst others spoke French, with some speaking both languages. By 1578, the migrants, known locally as Strangers, accounted for about 40 per cent of Norwich’s population. The city therefore had three language communities: English, Dutch, and French. Members of each language community used Latin, making early modern Norwich a quadrilingual city. In this book, Christopher Joby examines the language practices that emerged in early modern Norwich and the epistemic outcomes of contact between these four languages. He does this from multiple perspectives, devoting chapters to language education, language practices by social domain, language varieties, the outcomes of lexical interference, proper names, and translation. The final chapter, on language shift, examines the processes by which Norwich returned by the mid-eighteenth century to being an essentially monolingual, Anglophone, city. This is the first book-length study of the language practices and outcomes of contact between languages in an early modern European city, and will be of interest to scholars of multilingualism, historical sociolinguistics, contact linguistics, dialectology, translation studies, and British and European early modern history.