Lecture | Sociolinguistics & Discourse Studies Series
Bridging Micro- and Macro-Sociohistorical Perspectives: A Study of Multilingual Practices in a Franco-Manitoban Family Correspondence (1939–1999)
- Date
- Friday 8 May 2026
- Time
- Serie
- Sociolinguistics & Discourse Studies Series
- Address
-
Herta Mohr
Witte Singel 27A
2311 BG Leiden - Room
- 0.24
Abstract
In recent years, family letters have become an increasingly valued source of study in the field of historical sociolinguistics (see e.g. Thomas 2017; Sowada 2021; Krogull/Rutten 2025). This type of epistolary exchange, as Martineau (2013: 141) notes, represents “a microcosm of linguistic communities”, enabling researchers to explore linguistic phenomena, such as multilingual practices examined here, that extend beyond familial communication and can be attested across diverse linguistic, geographic and temporal settings.
Before contributing noteworthy conclusions and hypotheses to historical (and contemporary) sociolinguistics, it is necessary to contextualise phenomena such as codeswitching, borrowing and transference – occurring at lexical, syntactic, semantic and orthographic levels – from both micro and macro perspectives. Following Klippi (2017: 130), who adopts an externalist view of linguistic knowledge, this project examines each individual’s written communication within a Canadian French family correspondence through a dynamic retelling of their linguistic biography and their immediate and broader social surroundings. This approach aligns with the interactional and communicative nature of language and acknowledges the individual’s degree of agency and fluctuating creativity (ibid.).
This talk therefore aims to explore and explain an individual’s relationship with their multilingual repertoire – developed in an asymmetrical linguistic context where English was the majority language – by considering 20th-century Canadian language policies alongside the correspondent’s age, level of schooling, writing acquisition environment (Grosse/Sowada 2020), geographic mobility, place of correspondence and metalinguistic attitudes (cf. Martineau 2018: 218).
By zooming in and out on the sociohistorical context as well as the biographical trajectory that shape an individual’s letter-writing practice, this presentation uses examples from a Franco-Manitoban family correspondence to illustrate the importance of a multilayered perspective when investigating language contact phenomena in ego-documents.
References
- Grosse, S. & Sowada, L. (2020). Socialisation écrite et rédaction épistolaire de scripteurs moins expérimentés – lettres des soldats de la Grande Guerre. Romanistisches Jahrbuch, 71(1), 82–129. https://doi.org/10.1515/roja-2020-0003.
- Klippi, C. (2017). Pour une archéologie de l’idiolecte d’un poilu peu-lettré (1915-1918). L’historicité d’une langue maternelle. In O. Roynette, G. Siouffi & A. Steuckardt (Eds.), La langue sous le feu: Mots, textes, discours de la Grande Guerre (pp. 125–141). Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes.
- Krogull, A. & Rutten, G. (2025). Introduction: Sociolinguistic perspectives on historical multilingualism in Europe. Sociolinguistica, 39(1), 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1515/soci-2025-0009.
- Martineau, F. (2018). Réseaux et maillages: aux sources de la variation linguistique. In P. Blumenthal & D. Vigier (Eds.), Études diachroniques du français et perspectives sociétales (pp. 215–329). Berlin: Peter Lang.
- Martineau, F. (2013). Written documents: What they tell us about linguistic usage. In G. Rutten & M. van der Wal (Eds.), Touching the Past: Studies in the historical sociolinguistics of ego-documents (pp. 129–147). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
- Sowada, L. (2021). Schreiben im Ersten Weltkrieg: französische Briefe und Tagebücher wenig geübter Schreiber aus der deutsch-französischen Grenzregion [Doctoral dissertation, Universität Heidelberg and Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier, 2019]. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter.
- Thomas, J. K. (2017). “Vous êtes hombre de bien”: A study of bilingual family letters to and from colonial Louisiana, 1748-1867. [Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkley].