Linguistic Purism in the Germanic Languages

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Nils Langer, Winifred V. Davies
Walter de Gruyter, 2005 - Foreign Language Study - 374 pages

Purism is an aspect of linguistic study which appeals not only to the scholar but also to the layperson. Somehow, ordinary speakers with many different mother tongues and with no formal training in linguistics share certain beliefs about what language is, how it develops or should develop, whether it has good or bad qualities, etc. The topic of linguistic purism in its many realisations is the subject of this volume of 19 articles selected from the contributions presented at a conference at the University of Bristol in 2003.

In particular, the articles deal with the relationship of purism to historical prescriptivism, e.g. the influence of grammarians in the 17th and 18th centuries, to nationhood, e.g. the instrumentalising of purism in the standardisation of Afrikaans or Luxembourgish, to modern society, e.g. the existence of puristic tendencies in computer chatrooms, to folk linguistics, e.g. lay perceptions of different varieties of English, and to academic linguistics, e.g. the presence of puristic notions in the historiography of German or English.

 

Contents

Nils Langer Bristol Winifred V Davies Aberystwyth
1
Modern Society and Purism
14
Stephan Elspaß Augsburg
20
Wim Vandenbussche Roland Willemyns Jetje De Groof
46
Maria Lange Bristol
62
Joachim Scharloth Zürich
86
Felicity Rash Queen Mary London
110
Evelyn Ziegler Marburg
124
Dieter Stein Düsseldorf
188
Peter Hohenhaus Nottingham
204
Patrick Stevenson Southampton
221
Betsy Evans Cardiff
240
Klaus J Mattheier Heidelberg
263
Zoë Boughton Exeter
282
Katja Leyhausen Heidelberg
302
James Milroy Ann Arbor Michigan
324

Ria van den Berg Potchefstroom
144
Kristine Horner Luxembourg
166
Oskar Reichmann Heidelberg
343
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