Contact Between Low German and Scandinavian in the Late Middle Ages

1 3 2 3 121 The Royal Gustavus Adolphus Academy for Swedish Folk Culture is 121 ACTA ACADEMIAE REGIAE GUSTAVI ADOLPHI CXXI a national academy based in Uppsala. According to its statutes, one of the means by which the Academy is to pursue its object of promoting CONTACT BETWEEN LOW GERMAN AND SCANDINAVIAN IN THE LATE MIDDLE AGES research into Swedish folk culture, understood in a broad sense, is by CONTACT BETWEEN LOW GERMAN AND SCANDINAVIAN IN THE LATE MIDDLE AGES publishing, in its various series, research findings in areas that it is charged with fostering. The main series is the Acta Academiae Regiae Gustavi Adolphi, the first volume of which appeared in 1933. Other series include Folklivsskildringar och bygdestudier (Studies of Folk Life and Local History), Kungl. Gustav Adolfs Akademiens småskrifter Contact between Low German and (Short Publications of the Royal Gustavus Adolphus Academy) and Svenska sagor och sägner (Swedish Folk Tales and Legends). ScandinavianScandinavian in the Late Middle AgesAges This volume contains the proceedings of a conference held at the Uni- 25 Years of Research versity of Agder in Kristiansand, Norway, in 2010 on the new methods used in and findings emerging from the last twenty-five years of re- Lennart Elmevik and Ernst Håkon Jahr (editors) search into contact between Low German and the Scandinavian languages in the late Middle Ages. The editor of the various series is the Secretary to the Academy, Associate Professor Maj Reinhammar, [email protected]. Distribution: Swedish Science Press Box 118 SE-751 04 Uppsala ISSN 0065-0897 UPPSALA 2012 E-post: [email protected] ISBN 978-91-85352-97-5 1 ACTA ACADEMIAE REGIAE GUSTAVI ADOLPHI 121 2 sid2 3 ACTA ACADEMIAE REGIAE GUSTAVI ADOLPHI CXXI Contact between Low German and Scandinavian in the Late Middle Ages 25 Years of Research Lennart Elmevik and Ernst Håkon Jahr (editors) UPPSALA 2012 Kungl. Gustav Adolfs Akademien för svensk folkkultur 4 © The authors and Kungl. Gustav Adolfs Akademien för svensk folkkultur 2012 ISSN 0065-0897 ISBN 978-91-85352-97-5 Printed in Sweden 2012 Textgruppen i Uppsala AB 5 Contents Preface . 7 Lennart Elmevik and Ernst Håkon Jahr: 25 years of research on the contact between Low German and Scandinavian . 9 Arnved Nedkvitne: A post-national perspective on the German Hansa in Scandinavia . 17 Gro-Renée Rambø: Language contact, communication and change . 39 Peter Trudgill: Gender reduction in Bergen Norwegian: a North-Sea perspective . 57 Agnete Nesse: Norwegian and German in Bergen . 75 Kurt Braunmüller: Semi-communication and beyond. Some results of the Hamburg Hanseatic Project (1990–1995) . 95 Stefan Mähl: Low German texts from Late Medieval Sweden . 113 Birgit Christensen: A survey of Low German loan words in Danish in the medieval period and the transition from Low German to High German as the written language in Tønder in the 17th century . 123 Helena Wistrand: Middle Low German loanwords in medieval charters issued in the Swedish province of Närke . 137 Kurt Braunmüller and Steffen Höder: The history of complex verbs in Scandinavian languages revisited: only influence due to contact with Low German? . 151 Ludger Zeevaert: Low German influence and typological change in Swedish: some results from a research project . 171 Erik Simensen: Low German and Nynorsk – a strained relationship? A glimpse into Norway’s most recent language history . 191 6 7 Preface This volume grew out of an international conference at the University of Agder in Kristiansand, Norway, held in November 2010 entitled “Contact between Low German and Scandinavian in the late Middle Ages – 25 years of research”. The background to the conference was the intense research activity over the past 25 years or so which has completely revived a traditional field of study: Low German–Scandinavian contact. During this period, new theories of language contact and new methods of studying it have been employed to investi- gate this field in a fundamentally different way from all previous efforts. From Lennart Elmevik’s 1977 presentation of his project using post-war theoretical ideas about language contact to Gro-Renée Rambø’s 2009 University of Agder socio-historical PhD dissertation on the contact situation throughout Scandina- via in the Hansa period, completely new perspectives and aspects about this historical language-contact period have given rise to a multitude of new in- sights and results. The study of Low German–Scandinavian contact has now, in our view, been established on a more elaborate level theoretically and meth- odologically. This field’s rapid development has also substantially helped to further and stimulate theoretical developments in the new research field of historical sociolinguistics. We, the organizers of the Kristiansand conference and this volume’s editors, are very pleased that so many of the central researchers in this field, who have made essential contributions to its development over the past 25 years, par- ticipated in the conference and gave papers in which they summarized the main results of their research. We have also included a few papers which were sub- mitted after the conference. Our main objective in this volume is to provide an overview of many of the exciting results from this period, especially for an international audience. Many of these important reports have so far only been published in a Scandinavian language. Therefore, we hope that this volume, in English, will help inform the interested international community of language contact researchers of the numerous new and compelling results from the past quarter century. We thank the University of Agder, Kristiansand, and the Royal Gustavus Adolphus’ Academy for Swedish folk culture, Uppsala, for supporting the conference financially, and the Academy for including the volume in its Acta series. Finally, we thank Jean Hannah for her thorough copy-editing of the papers and Maj Reinhammar, editor of the Acta series, who undertook a final review of the text. Uppsala and Kristiansand, September 2012 Lennart Elmevik Ernst Håkon Jahr 8 Contact between Low German and Scandinavian in the Late Middle Ages 9 Twenty-five years of research on the contact between Low German and Scandinavian Lennart Elmevik, Uppsala University and Ernst Håkon Jahr, University of Agder Language contact between the Scandinavian languages and Middle Low Ger- man in the late Middle Ages is a topic which has concerned a great number of researchers over the last century. A number of lengthy and short dissertations have been written describing the results of the immense influence to which mainland Scandinavian was exposed, particularly in the 14th and 15th centuries, when the German Hanseatic League was at the pinnacle of its power. With Lübeck as their centre, the Hansa merchants controlled a powerful northern European empire, a kind of late medieval EU. (Cf. Nedkvitne’s contribution.) But compared to today’s EU, the Hansa market had one great advantage: Low German was in use over the entire area. From Novgorod in Russia in the east to London in the west, from Bruges, Cologne and Cracow in the south to Bergen in the north, Low German served as the lingua franca of trade. This fact opens up interesting prospects and possibilities for comparative historical studies of language contact. Until about the mid-1970s, however, it was supposed that progress in linguistic research required the assumption of a linguistically homogeneous and self-contained language community. Within the theoretical paradigm of the Neogrammarians as well as within the later paradigms of structuralism and generativism, this has been considered a useful pragmatic assumption. However, in the past two generations it has been shown beyond doubt that a language community is never homogeneous, and hardly ever self-contained. Although most linguists can agree with this statement, it is still a fact that linguists working on language change at earlier times often neglected to reflect this in their work. When working on linguistic change from a diachronic perspective, linguists have often ignored extra-linguistic factors. This has been the case with research on language contact between Middle Low German and the mainland Scandinavian languages in the Late Middle Ages. Within the Neogrammarian framework, which was the dominant paradigm in Scandinavian philology and historical linguistics up until the 1970s, descriptions of the result of language contact are generally restricted to various types of loans. If an element X from language A is transferred (“borrowed”) into language B, this can easily be integrated into a Neogrammarian description. Neogrammarian 10 Lennart Elmevik and Ernst Håkon Jahr “Stammbaum” theory could only explain clear and identifiable loans, be it on the lexical, morphological or syntactic level. Results of the contact situation which could not be traced to the influencing language, in our case Low German, were simply outside of the scope of what this paradigm could incorporate into the linguistic description. Up to only a few decades ago, most students of this transition- al period have concerned themselves mainly with problems of loan word adop- tion, i.e. they have tried to map the Low German loanwords which were adopted for use in different domains. Other types of linguistic consequences that the contact situation may have had have not been given much attention. There is a long tradition in Scandinavian historical linguistics of studying and classifying Middle Low German loanwords in the Scandinavian languages. A substantial amount of sound philological work has been carried out in this field over the past hundred years or so, and a great deal of empirical evidence has been presented. Thousands of loanwords have been identified, explained and classified. (Cf. Simensen’s contribution; Skancke 2001.) During the past generation, however, it has been established that language contact can result in a multitude of different linguistic and sociolinguistic phe- nomena, and that various mechanisms of language contact may bring about language change, short-term as well as long-term.

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