Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics

The collective monograph under review originates from two interconnected projects: It is essentially based on the unpublished habilitation thesis in Slavic linguistics by Daniel Bunčić (2011). This text is extended and complemented by contributions which were originally presented and discussed at the 2011 conference on “Sociolinguistic and Cultural Scenarios” of biscriptality in Heidelberg, organized by the three editors of the book, Daniel Bunčić, Sandra L. Lippert, and Achim Rabus. The effort made by the editors to produce a true collective monography and thus a single coherent text rather than conventional conference proceedings was probably the main reason for the volume not to appear until 2016. Additionally, special attention was paid to the book’s layout and typesetting. No less than 128 figures illustrate the case studies and contribute to the clarity and comprehensibility of the text, especially when it comes to historical text material. In addition, the editors sought to represent the object scripts not only through numerous illustrations, but also within the running text by typesetting it with suitable scripts and fonts. Similar attention was paid to the representation of quotations in other languages. Extensive quotes are reproduced using the original language and typeset; the English translation follows. If quoted in the running text, the original version is put in brackets. Concerning the content, Biscriptality is an essential contribution to the emerging sociolinguistics of written language (cf. Blommaert 2013; Villa and Vosters 2015). It is orientated towards the description and analysis of the relation of written language to society and focuses on writing systems and their distribution in biscriptal language communities. Thus, it highlights situations in which more than one writing system is employed to write the same language (cf. p. 54). With regard to the term “writing system”, the authors apply the definition given by Lyons et al. (2001). A writing system is thus seen as “an implementation of one or more scripts to form a complete system for writing a particular language”.