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Due to the long history of mutual language contact, Slavic languages have had a considerable influence on German and attitudes towards multilingualism in Austria. With regard to the multilingual setting in the Habsburg state and its repercussions to this day, this article outlines the basic assumptions, the methodological toolkit as well as the main general findings of the special research programme “German in Austria. Variation – Contact – Perception”, especially its task cluster on language contact. The opinion paper concludes with an overview of the methodological lessons learnt and the possible implications for further sociolinguistic research in historical contexts.

Within the context of the internationalisation of higher education, language matters have become increasingly prominent for universities across a wide variety of contexts. This has made the higher education domain an attractive site for applied linguists and sociolinguists to investigate in close detail. One relatively consolidated idea is that contexts in which English has made further incursions in universities are more internationalised than those settings where English has penetrated to a lesser extent. In line with that, a supposed north-south divide in European higher education has been conceived of, with universities in the north leading in terms of internationalisation efforts, while those in the south lag behind. In this article, I problematise this idea and suggest instead that a narrower and more focused contrastive analysis between language ecologies across different countries and contexts might be more useful. In doing that, we can thus avoid the dangers of binarism and lumping that can come associated to holding preconceived geographical borders. In particular, the comparative analysis proposed here allows us to highlight two key issues that seem to be highly pressing in present-day higher education domains: the language-ideological and the socio-economic. I build the argument in the paper by utilising empirical material from Estonia and Catalonia, two contexts that have been at the centre of my own work in recent years.

The study of language contact in the ancient world has been an area of huge growth over the past ten years. However, in areas of the ancient world where sources are more limited, scholars have been more hesitant to make sweeping claims about the nature of language contact, even in communities where societal bilingualism is likely to have existed for many centuries. Languages only attested in fragmentary epigraphic corpora are considered the ultimate “bad data” and have not always received a great deal of attention in historical sociolinguistics, despite these texts representing our best evidence of many of the communities across the ancient Mediterranean. In response to this problem, this article asks how we should go about interpreting the evidence of ancient language contact in small or fragmentary corpora of texts. This article uses the Oscan corpus from Southern Italy (Lucania, Bruttium and Messina) c. 400-50 BCE as a case study for examining bilingualism in a fragmentary corpus. It outlines the data gathered from a range of different text-types from Southern Italy, the different kinds of contact phenomena which have been found in these texts, and whether there are any discernible patterns in the data. It argues, because of the fragmentary state of the Oscan corpus, that there is little clear evidence of chronological or geographic differentiation in levels of bilingualism. Rather, the evidence shows that in this corpus some text-types are more likely than others to contain contact phenomena. With this in mind, this paper proposes a new model which includes consideration of text-type for the interpretation of language contact and bilingualism in fragmentary corpora.