Medieval English (ca600-1500) in a multilingual context

自从这个岛在古典时代得名以来，多元文化和多语言一直是英国文化的一部分，并继续成为英国身份认知的关键组成部分。在中世纪时期，这里理解为从公元600年到公元1500年，英国见证了属于印欧语系不同分支的民族之间的互动，对于英语历史来说，除了英语本身之外，最重要的是各种凯尔特语、拉丁语、法语、古挪威语（斯堪的纳维亚掠夺者和定居者的各种群体的语言）和其他大陆日耳曼语言。该网络的主要目标是重新评估中世纪时期语言接触对英语词汇和形式结构演变的影响，并探索中世纪文本可以告诉我们中世纪祖先在日常生活中如何理解和处理多种语言。历史语言学和文学批评各个领域的方法论进步，以及最近对非文学文献的历史多语言研究的重要性的认识，以及在多语言背景下发展的当今遗产语言和城市方言，使得这种重新评估特别及时。该网络将促进从事与中世纪英语语言特征和文本文化研究有关的各个领域的学者之间的互动；我们还将与研究现代多语制语言效应的学者进行对话。这将允许我们：1。2.分享方法论进步的成果，因为该网络将包括从事过去和现在的项目的学者，这些项目本身已经彻底改变了我们对英语和其他语言之间语言接触的理解（例如，Gersum项目：斯堪的纳维亚对英语词汇的影响，www.gersum.org；以及中世纪英格兰日常生活的双语辞典，即将在网上公开；牛津英语词典，www.oed.com）。重新评估复杂的语言变化，这些变化只能通过详细了解英语及其接触的各种语言的语言特征来解释，并分析这种接触的语言和社会语言学影响。词汇是语言分析的一个层面，在这个层面上，语言接触的影响往往更为明显，但英语的形式结构也因语言接触而发生了戏剧性的变化。说14世纪英语的人可能无法理解10世纪的文本，而21世纪的读者可以相对轻松地理解莎士比亚甚至乔叟的文本。3. 从中世纪多语制对英语语言结构的影响程度、说话者对英语中外来语材料的感知和策略使用以及各种语言的社会语言学地位等方面，挑战语言接触对中世纪英语的性质和影响的“教科书式描述”。虽然在过去的三十年里，语言学的其他领域（如第一语言和第二语言习得）的教科书有了显著的发展，但专注于英语历史的教科书却并非如此，因为该领域的原子化不利于整合新的语言学和文化信息研究产生的结果。通过汇集研究手稿、拼写和写作实践、法律和行政语言、文学风格和社会文化网络等广泛领域的学者，进一步详细探讨多种语言的影响如何在文学和非文学文本（如法律文本和行政记录）中表现出来的多面性。

Multiculturalism and multilingualism have been part of British culture since the island received its name in classical times and continue to be key components in perceptions of British identity. During medieval times, understood here as the period from ca600 to ca1500, Britain saw the interaction of peoples speaking languages belonging to different branches of Indo-European, the most important for the purposes of the history of English being, besides English itself, various Celtic languages, Latin, French, Old Norse (the language of various groups of Scandinavian marauders and settlers) and other continental Germanic languages. The main objective of this network is to reassess the impact that language contact during the medieval period had on the evolution of the English language in terms of both its vocabulary and its formal structure, and to explore what medieval texts can tell us about how our medieval ancestors understood and dealt with multilingualism in their everyday lives. Methodological advances in the various fields of historical linguistics and literary criticism, and the recent realisation of the significance for the study of historical multilingualism of non-literary documents, as well as present-day heritage languages and urban vernaculars developed in multilingual contexts make this reassessment particularly timely. The network will facilitate the interaction between scholars working on various fields related to the study of the linguistic features and textual cultures of medieval English; we will also enable dialogue with scholars researching the linguistic effects of modern multilingualism. This will allow us to:1. Share the outcomes of methodological advances, thanks to the fact that the network will include scholars working on past and current projects which have themselves revolutionised our understanding of language contact between English and other languages (e.g. the Gersum Project: The Scandinavian Influence on English Vocabulary, www.gersum.org; and A Bilingual Thesaurus of Everyday Life in Medieval England, soon to be publicly available online; The Oxford English Dictionary, www.oed.com).2. Re-evaluate complex linguistic changes which can only be explained through the detailed understanding of the linguistic features of English and the various languages it came into contact with, and analyse the linguistic and sociolinguistic impact of such contact. Vocabulary is the level of linguistic analysis where the influence of language contact is often clearer but the formal structure of English also changed at a dramatic pace as a result of language contact. A fourteenth-century English speaker would not have been able to understand a tenth-century text, while a twenty-first-century reader can make sense of a text by Shakespeare or even Chaucer with relative ease. 3. Challenge the 'text-book account' of the nature and impact of language contact on medieval English, in terms of the extent of the impact of medieval multilingualism on the linguistic structure of English, speakers' perception and strategic use of foreign linguistic material in English, and the sociolinguistic status of the various languages. While accounts in textbooks in other areas of linguistics (e.g. first and second language acquisition) have evolved significantly in the last thirty years, that is not the case for textbooks focusing on the history of the English language because the atomisation of the field does not facilitate the integration of results arising from new linguistically and culturally informed research.4. Explore in further detail the multifaceted nature of how the effects of multilingualism were represented in both literary and non-literary texts (such as legal texts and administrative records) by bringing together scholars working on a wide-range of areas, including the study of manuscripts, spelling and writing practices, legal and administrative language, literary style and socio-cultural networks.