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There is little enthusiasm among the respondents for the sense of crisis that is central to the main article. Neither the declining autonomy of linguistics nor the diminishing primacy of the ‘Renaissance vision’ of the world are seen as negative. On the contrary, the increasing interweaving of linguistics and neighbouring sciences is widely supported and embraced as a source of opportunities and dynamism. The permanent renewal of the linguistic approach does not inspire any existential doubts, either. This optimism is accompanied, however, by a concern for safeguarding the quality of linguistic education.

This chapter plays tribute to John R. Rickford’s language contact work in the Caribbean and United States and highlights his international influence. The main part of the chapter examines connections between the creolist and variationist strands in Rickford’s work with sociolinguistic studies in South Africa. I will highlight aspects of my own work that have operated in parallel with that of Rickford in relation to (1) plantation and post-plantation sociolinguistics of the country’s large population of Indian origin, (2) pidgin linguistics pertaining to the contact language, Fanakalo, (3) studies of youth languages in relation to urban vernaculars and ‘styling,’ and (4) the role of Black English varieties in post-apartheid South Africa.

Deze lezing biedt een overzicht van recent onderzoek naar de Nederlandse taalgeschiedenis en taalpolitiek in de Lage Landen.

Deze lezing biedt een overzicht van recent onderzoek naar de Nederlandse taalgeschiedenis, met nadruk op de achttiende en negentiende eeuw. De 'mythe van het Vlaamse taalverval' wordt doorbij doorgelicht en ontkracht.

This chapter combines historical demographic and linguistic research to come to an understanding of language shift in seventeenth-century Northern France. The article details the Francophone immigration to the town of Dunkirk around and after its annexation to France in 1662, focusing in particular on the integration of migrants into the local community through intermarriage. The author then reports on a quantitative dialectological study of the French of Dunkirk in comparison to other French varieties. This study shows similarities in particular with varieties from the migrants' places of origin, lending credence to the suggestion that Francophone migration played an important role in the language shift. Moreover, this research signals the importance of an integrated social and linguistic perspective in the writ­ ing of language histories.

The sociolinguistic history of the Dutch language community in Belgium has been at the heart of our sociohistorical-linguistic research at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel ever since the early 1990s. While this language community was always the bigger one in trilingual Belgium (currently approximately 6 million speakers of Dutch, 3.5 million of French and 75000 of German), French served as the prestige language in the whole of Belgium up until the second half of the 20th century. In the Dutch-speaking area of Flanders this resulted in a century-long situation of diglossia with an extreme pattern of social inequality between a prestigious (but numerically small) group of H-French speakers and the L-Dutch-speaking 'masses'. This bilingual prestige conflict between H and L-varieties was complemented with a selection conflict within the Belgian Dutch-speaking community: as the standardisation of Southern Dutch gained momentum from the 19th century onwards (contrary to the Netherlands where the process initiated in the early 17th century) the adoption of the existing Northern standard (incidentally, without double negation) versus a newly-forged 'Flemish' standard (based on local Southern dialects with the double negation) was heavily debated. This tension between the need of a prestigious supra-regional variety and the attachment to wide array of (dialectal) regional varieties of Dutch builds a token case study for the present thematic panel.

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