Migration and linguistic change in early modern Holland: The case of Leiden

The province of Holland is the site of two major developments from the Late Medieval and Early Modern periods. Demographically, it rapidly evolved from an essentially agrarian area in the thirteenth century to one of the most urbanised regions in Europe by the end of the sixteenth century. During the same period the vernaculars of Holland underwent dramatic restructuring of their morphological systems resulting, we contend, from the influx of immigrants to nascent urban centers such as Leiden, Haarlem and Amsterdam and the outcome of centuries of ongoing dialect contact. In this paper, we focu... Mehr ...