Introduction -- A twofold view 'from below': New perspectives on language histories and historical grammar -- I. Language variation in letters, diaries and other text sources from below -- "As this leaves me at present" - Formulaic usage, politeness and social proximity in nineteenth-century Scottish emigrants' letters -- 'Lower-order' letters, schooling and the English language, 1795 to 1834 -- "Doch mein Mann möchte doch mal wissen ..." A discourse analysis of 19th-century emigrant men and women's private correspondence -- Remnants of Western Yiddish in East Frisia -- Eighteenth-century linguistic variation from the perspective of a Dutch diary and a collection of private letters -- II. From past to present: Change from above - change from below -- 'Time and Tyne' corpus-based study of variation and change in relativization strategies in Tyneside English -- Syntactic surprises in some English letters: the underlying progress of the language -- YOU and THOU in Early Modern English: cross-linguistic perspectives -- On the history of verbal present participle converbs in English and Norwegian and the concept of 'change from below' -- The grammaticalization of geben 'to give' in German and Luxembourgish -- A corpus-based study of colloquial 'Flemish' -- 'Tussentaal' as a source of change from below in Belgian Dutch. A case study of substandardization processes in the chat language of Flemish teenagers -- III. Language norms and standardization in a view from below -- Surinamese Dutch: The development of a unique Germanic Language variety -- "Zoo schrijve ek lievers my sort Afrikaans". Speaker agency, identity and resistance in the history of Afrikaans -- "Deutsch ist eine würde-lose Sprache". On the history of a failed prescription -- To boldly split the infinitive - or not? Prescriptive traditions and current English usage.

Norm consciousness and corpus constitution in the study of Earlier Modern Germanic languages -- Variability and professionalism as prerequisites of standardization -- Putting standard German to the test: Some notes on the linguistic competence of grammar-school students and teachers in the nineteenth century -- IV. Language choice and language planning -- The choice between the German or French language for the German nobility of the late 18th Century -- Flirting at the fringe - The status of the German varieties as perceived by language activists in Belgium's Areler Land -- Language and Luxembourgish national identity: ideologies of hybridity and purity in the past and present -- The planning of modern Norwegian as a sociolinguistic experiment - 'from below' -- The death of Standard German in 19th-century Budapest. A case study on the role of linguistic ideologies in language shift -- 1750-1850: The disappearance of German from Bergen, Norway -- Societal multilingualism and language conflicts in Galicia in the 19th century -- New data on language policy and language choice in 19th-century Flemish city administrations -- V. Reflections on alternative language histories -- Communicative genres as categories of a cultural history of communication -- Deconstructing episodes in the 'history of English' -- Index.