Speech communities are communication communities and reflect current or historical ties within societies. Language contact is thus an expression of cultural contact. Often, when these contacts took place in the past, little is known about the sociological context, and a linguistic analysis is one of the few sources that provide us access to historical situations. Historical linguistics aims to decipher the origin and sources of the linguistic ‘code’: the presence or absence of borrowings in various linguistic domains have been linked to different cultural and political conditions under which the language contact took place.
Two aspects are crucial to a successful interpretation of past events: (1) that the linguistic phenomena are correctly interpreted in terms of their linguistic origin, something that turns out to not always be as evident as it may seem at first glance, and (2) that the available data are a reliable reflection of the linguistic composition of the language at the time of language contact. Given the lack of accurate and detailed historical attestations, many such analyses are based on much younger stages of the languages, assuming a relatively high stability of linguistic markers.
The interpretation of ‘Town Frisian’, a Dutch variety spoken in a few historical cities in the Dutch province of Fryslân since the 16th century, is a case where both these problematic aspects have insufficiently been addressed, leading to conclusions untenable after closer scrutiny. It is illustrated that the linguistic composition of the varieties was fairly dynamic, and that, on top of it, its perception by linguists and speakers was equally volatile, so that the concepts of Dutch, Frisian and Town Frisian equal ‘moving targets’ in terms of content and assigned identities. This article focusses on the linguistic aspects of these shifting identities.
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