Introduction: Sociolinguistic perspectives on historical multilingualism in Europe

The multilingual turn in historical socio-linguistics1Historical multilingualism and language contact effects have by no means been absent from historical-sociolinguistic research since its emergence in the 1980s.Early publications include Schendl and Wright (2011), who addressed code-switching in historical English, and who already observed and described what have come to be called multilingual practices in more recent publications (Pahta et al. 2017).Wright (2000) drew attention to the multiple origins of standard English, thus challenging the monolingual assumptions of earlier language histories.This approach eventually resulted in Wright (2020).Recent years have seen an increased interest in multilingualism and language contact (Hning et al.