Domänen historischer Stadtsprache: offiziell – öffentlich – privat.

This special issue explores historical urban language research as an established field of histo-rical sociolinguistics and pragmatics, focusing on the diversity of written communication in medieval and early modern cities. Bringing together selected papers from the 37th annual conference of the Internationaler Arbeitskreis Historische Stadtsprachenforschung, held in Hamburg in October 2022, the volume examines urban literacy across a range of domains, including municipal administration, monastic writing practices, language teaching, drama, and private correspondence. The contributions address grammatical variation in Middle Low German, linguistic practices in women’s convents, early modern pronunciation teaching in foreign language teaching manuals, intertextual strategies in Counter-Reformation drama, and multilingual writing practices in seventeenth-century Friedrichstadt. Together, the papers highlight the complex interplay of language variation, multilingualism, media, and communicative practices in historical urban contexts.