An Introduction to linguistic purism -- I. Historical Prescriptivism and Purism -- Language norm and language reality. Effectiveness and limits of prescriptivism in New High German -- Taming thistles and weeds amidst the wheat: language gardening in nineteenth-century Flanders -- Bad language in Germany's past - The birth of linguistic norms in the seventeenth century? -- The Revolutionary Argumentative Pattern in Puristic Discourse: The Swabian dialect in the debate about the standardization of German in the eighteenth century -- A comparative study of linguistic purism in the history of England and Germany -- II. Nationhood and Purism -- Linguistic purism in German-speaking Switzerland and the Deutschschweizerischer Sprachverein 1904-1942 -- Language nationalism in the Schiller commemoration addresses of 1859 -- Standard Afrikaans and the different faces of 'Pure' Afrikaans in the twentieth century -- Reimagining the Nation: Discourses of language purism in Luxembourg -- III. Modern Society and Purism -- On the role of language ideologies in linguistic theory and practice: purism and beyond -- Elements of traditional and 'reverse' purism in relation to computer-mediated communication -- Once an Ossi, always an Ossi: Language ideologies and social division in contemporary Germany -- IV. Folk Linguistics and Purism -- 'The Grand Daddy of English': US, UK, New Zealand and Australian students' attitudes towards varieties of English -- Linguistic purism from several perspectives: views from the 'secure' and the 'insecure' -- Dialect and written language: Change in dialect norms in the history of the German language -- Investigating puristic attitudes in France: Folk perceptions of variation in standard French -- V. Linguists and Purism -- "Caution is not always the better part of valour" - Purism in the historiography of the German language.

Some effects of purist ideologies on historical descriptions of English -- Usefulness and uselessness of the term Fremdwort -- Index.