Freiburger Arbeitspapiere zur germanistischen Linguistik 30 Longue durée and social styles: Shifting indexicalities in the Berlin vernacular from the perspective of historical sociolinguistics Peter Auer (
[email protected]) Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg 0. Preface This chapter is dedicated to the memory of Agathe Lasch (1879-1942),1 Germany's first female professor of linguistics and a specialist on Low German. Her groundbreaking work on Berlin is to this very day the single-most important contribution to the urban historical sociolinguistics of the city, on which all subsequent research (including the following remarks) is based. Agathe Lasch was born in Berlin into a Jewish merchant family. Since women were not allowed at Prussian universities at the time, she studied in Halle/Saale and in Heidelberg, where she completed her PhD with the Neogrammarian Wilhelm Braune in 1909 on the Geschichte der Schriftsprache in Berlin bis zur Mitte des 16. Jahrhunderts ('History of the written language in Berlin until the middle of the 16th century'), published in 1910. In the first 220 pages of the thesis, Lasch gives a detailed linguistic analysis of the written documents of the time, including an exact socio-biographical reconstruction of the social field in which the local scribes in the chancelleries of the city council, the legal courts, and the Hohenzollern residence produced their documents. (The second part, about 100 pages, is a systematic phonological and morphological description of the Middle Low German dialect spoken in the city, following the neogrammarian Ortsgrammatik model.) A university career was impossible for women in Germany at the time, so Lasch took up a position as Associate and later (from 1913) Associate Professor of Teutonic Philology at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania.