Nineteenth-Century Educational History: The Kiesling Critique

AbstractIncreasing migration from the nineteenth century onwards has led to the production of letters and travel diaries that allowed migrants to stay in touch with their home country. Taking the perspective of ‘language history from below’, this paper focuses on a Swiss variety of written German, as used in the diary of Matthias Dürst, and its status in relation to the standardization of written German, the local dialect, and the new majority language English. The study is couched in pre-immigration socio-economic and educational history. The paper systematically analyzes orthographic and morphosyntactic variation, as well as lexical use that are compared to the findings of Elspaß’s (2005. Sprachgeschichte von unten: Untersuchungen zum geschriebenen Alltagsdeutsch im 19. Jahrhundert. Tübingen: Niemeyer) study on German migrant letters. As the results show, the text contains some influences of dialect, especially concerning diminutives and the lexicon. Moreover, the findings reveal a gradual exposure to English as the new majority language, thus settling within the focus of this special issue on Germanic languages in contact with English. The study of the diary proves once again how valuable ego-documents, and also heritage language ego-documents, are for the field of historical sociolinguistics.

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A Partial Agenda for Modern European Educational History

History of Education Quarterly ◽

10.1111/hoeq.12012 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 53 (2) ◽

pp. 139-149

Author(s):

James C. Albisetti

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Graduate Students ◽

Reading Fluency ◽

University Education ◽

Foreign Languages ◽

Research Topics ◽

Educational History ◽

Fruitful Research ◽

Do So

Attempting to establish an agenda for one's own research is often challenging; trying to do so for a broad swath of one's field is even more so. I accepted the invitation to propose one in the hope that graduate students and younger colleagues—especially those willing to put in the work to obtain at least reading fluency in foreign languages—might benefit from the suggestions of potentially fruitful research topics from someone who has been reading widely in modern European educational history for almost forty years. Such an agenda is partial in both meanings of the word: it does not come close to exhausting all possible topics, and it necessarily reflects my own areas of expertise and interest. That means a focus primarily on the nineteenth century, with more attention both to secondary than to either elementary or university education, and to girls’ schooling than to boys’. As a caveat, I may not be cognizant of all that has been published or is in the works even for the themes suggested.

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