Multilingual writing practices as code choices: Dutch alongside French in private family letters

This paper examines multilingual practices in private letter writing, focusing on the case of Dutch-French multilingualism in the Early and Late Modern history of the Low Countries. In line with recent developments in historical sociolinguistics, which have foregrounded the multilingual repertoires of individuals and social groups, we argue that the two contact phenomena traditionally labelled as ‘language choice’ and ‘code-switching’ are closely intertwined rather than discrete objects of research. Based on an extensive dataset of family correspondence from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, the paper first provides quantitative evidence of monolingual and multilingual writing practices. Taking into account diachronic and sociolinguistic factors, we show who used Dutch alongside French (or vice versa) with whom and when, and under which circumstances. Against the background of solid empirical data, the complementary qualitative analysis then zooms in on a low-frequent yet widespread phenomenon, viz. multilingual (Dutch-French) letters without a clearly dominant main language, which may constitute a code choice in its own right. More generally, we emphasise that monolingual and multilingual types of family correspondence represent a continuum of practices rather than categorical language choices, also in historical, written text sources.