Conference
Pardon my French? Sociolinguistic perspectives on historical contact with French
- Date
- Friday 30 October 2026
- Time
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 0.01
Linguistic and cultural encounters with French permeate the history of many European languages (e.g. Rjéoutski, Argent & Offord 2014). Language contact resulted from mobility and migration in a variety of contexts. Labour migrants and ideological migrants such as Huguenots left French-dominant areas. The French language played a key role in trade, diplomacy, science and public opinion, and developed into an international prestige language. Throughout Europe, these contact settings also led to metalinguistic commentary targeting presumed Frenchification. This one-day workshop in historical sociolinguistics brings together innovative and data-driven research papers on the following topics:
- contact-induced change: elements from French entered various other languages, both lexical and morphological items as well as syntactic and pragmatic patterns. Which language users, communities, genres and domains were most strongly influenced by French? Which regional and diachronic generalisations can be made? How can we determine the origin of potentially borrowed structures? How can we distinguish between influence from French, Latin and other Romance languages?
- language choice and shift: who used French to whom, and in which domains and genres? And why? Did French-dominant migrants shift to other languages? What kind of multilingual repertoires can be found and to what extent do they challenge existing categorisations of borrowing, code-switching and language choice
- language ideologies: what kind of metalinguistic ideas were influenced by contact with French? How did multilingual repertoires influence emerging standard language ideologies? To what extent did ideologies influence language use?
The workshop marks the end of the research project Pardon my French? Dutch-French language contact in the Netherlands, 1500–1900, funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). At the end of the workshop, the concluding project monograph will be presented.
Keynote speakers
- John Gallagher (Leeds) – ‘He was to go parle with a Frenchman about the Exchange’: finding French in early modern London
- Rik Vosters (Brussels) – French-riddled Flemish and other myths of language decay in the Southern Netherlands
Programme
| 09:00 | Coffee/tea |
| 09:30 | Opening remarks |
| 09:45 | Keynote: John Gallagher (Leeds) ‘He was to go parle with a Frenchman about the Exchange’: finding French in early modern London |
| 10:30 | Coffee/tea |
| 11:00 | Laura Linzmeier (Regensburg) Navigating languages: seafaring and the dynamics of multilingualism in historical contact with French |
| 11:30 | Laura Ulrike Rimmele (Jena) French as a prestige language across exercise books from the courts of Dresden (17th century) and Weimar (18th-19th century) |
| 12:00 | Alexia Elise Kerkhof (Leiden) The Dutch intermediary between Frisian and French: Dating the transmission of French loanwords into Frisian |
| 12:30 | Lunch (at own expense) |
| 14:00 | Thomas Scharinger (Jena) The Germanization of French in 18th-century Germany |
| 14:30 | Katrin Mutz (Bremen) & Stefan Tröster-Mutz (Osnabrück/Oldenburg) The usage of French in historical menus in Germany |
| 15:00 | Madeleine Eppel (Heidelberg/Leiden) The preservation of the French language and its connection to Catholic faith in 20th-century Manitoba |
| 15:30 | Coffee/Tea |
| 16:00 | Keynote: Rik Vosters (Brussels) French-riddled Flemish and other myths of language decay in the Southern Netherlands |
| 16:45 | Gijsbert Rutten (Leiden) & Andreas Krogull (Zürich/Leiden) Pardon my French? Dutch-French language contact in the Netherlands: project overview and book presentation |
| 17:15 | Closing remarks |
Registration
To register, please send an email to andreas.krogull@ds.uzh.ch by 15 October 2026.
Contact
If you have any questions, please send an email to Gijsbert Rutten (g.j.rutten@hum.leidenuniv.nl).