What are the points of contact between the study of language and the study of history? What are the possibilities for collaboration between linguists and historians, and what prevents it? This volume, the proceedings of an international conference held at the University of Bristol in April 2009, presents twenty-two articles by linguists and historians, exploring the relationship between the fields theoretically, conceptually and in practice. Contributions focus on a variety of European and American languages, in historical periods from the Middle Ages to the present day. Key themes at the intersection of these two disciplines are the standardization and classification of languages, the social and demographic history of medieval and early modern Europe, the study of language and history ¿from below¿, and the function of language in modern politics. The value of interdisciplinary collaboration is demonstrated in a wide-ranging set of case studies, on topics including language contact in Northern and Central Europe, the relationship between peninsular and transatlantic Spanish, and new approaches to the recent histories of Nicaragua, Luxembourg and Bulgaria. The volume seeks out the interdependencies between the two fields and asks why exchanges between linguists and historians remain the exception rather than the rule.

Contents: Steffan Davies/Nils Langer/Wim Vandenbussche: Language and History, Linguistics and Historiography: Interdisciplinary Problems and Opportunities - Patrick Honeybone: History and Historical Linguistics: Two Types of Cognitive Reconstruction? - Nicholas M. Wolf: History and Linguistics: The Irish Language as a Case Study in an Interdisciplinary Approach to Culture - Brian D. Joseph: Historical Linguistics and Sociolinguistics: Strange Bedfellows or Natural Friends? - Nicola McLelland: From Humanist History to Linguistic Theory: The Case of the Germanic Rootword - Agnete Nesse: Editorial Practices and Language Choice: 'Low German Language Monuments' in Norway - Robert Evans: Official Languages: A Brief Prehistory - Tomasz Kamusella: Classifying the Slavic Languages, or the Politics of Classification - José del Valle: Linguistic History and the Development of Normative Regimes: The Royal Spanish Academy's Disputed Transatlantic Authority - Juan R. Valdez: Colouring Language: Pedro Henríquez Ureña's Representations of Spanish and Dominican Identity - Laura Villa: 'Because When Governments Speak, They Are Not Always Right': National Construction and Orthographic Conflicts in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Spain - Gijsbert Rutten/Rik Vosters: As Many Norms as There Were Scribes? Language History, Norms and Usage in the Southern Netherlands in the Nineteenth Century - Anneleen Vanden Boer: Language and Nation: The Case of the German-Speaking Minority in Belgium - Richard Ingham: The Decline of Bilingual Competence in French in Medieval England: Evidence from the PROME Database - Rembert Eufe: Merovingian Coins and Their Inscriptions: A Challenge to Linguists and Historians - Remco Knooihuizen: The Use of Historical Demography for Historical Sociolinguistics: The Case of Dunkirk - Judith Nobels/Marijke van der Wal: Linking Words to Writers: Building a Reliable Corpus for Historical Sociolinguistic Research - Helmut Graser/B. Ann Tlusty: Sixteenth-Century Street Songs and Language History 'From Below' - Juan Manuel Hernández-Campoy: Mood Distinction in Late Middle English: The End of the Inflectional Subjunctive - Lisa Carroll-Davies: Identifying the Enemy: Using a CDA and Corpus Approach to Analyse Sandinista Strategies of Naming - Krassimir Stoyanov: Ritualized Slogan Lexis in the Bulgarian Press during the Times of Violent Contradiction in Ideologies (1944-1947) - Kristine Horner/Melanie Wagner: Remembering World War II and Legitimating Luxembourgish as the National Language: Consensus or Conflict? - Michela Giordano/Federica Falchi: John Stuart Mill and Salvatore Morelli: Language as a Social Tool in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Italy.

Nils Langer is Reader in German Linguistics at the University of Bristol. His primary research interests lie in the area of historical sociolinguistics and he is currently working on language contact in Schleswig-Holstein in the nineteenth century.
Steffan Davies is Lecturer in German at the University of Bristol. He studied History and German at the University of Oxford, writing his doctoral thesis on the literary, cultural and historiographical treatment of Albrecht von Wallenstein in the `long nineteenth century¿.
Wim Vandenbussche is Professor of Dutch Linguistics at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He teaches courses on Dutch and Germanic language history, as well as on various aspects of sociolinguistics. His research is situated in the domain of historical sociolinguistics, with particular attention to the language situation in Flanders during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.