Pardon my French?

This book offers the first comprehensive analysis of the Dutch–French contact situation in the Early and Late Modern period, when the Dutch language and culture supposedly underwent frenchification in various spheres of life. Bringing together empirical approaches based on a wide range of datasets, this volume not only delves deeply into an intriguing case study in historical multilingualism and language contact but also offers detailed theoretical and methodological background information on how to analyse such an enduring contact situation from a historical-sociolinguistic perspective. The Dutch–French case is approached from three interrelated angles, focusing on the Netherlands between 1500 and 1900: contact-induced change in historical Dutch, language choice and language shift in the private and the public domain, and language-ideological change.