In this volume Pavlenko aims to combat the ‘historical amnesia’ that has led to the false notion that contemporary society is uniquely multilingual, and hopes to bring historians and linguists into closer dialogue. Pavlenko’s introductory chapter sets the scene for the chapters that follow, outlining the modern misconceptions about historical multilingualism and contextualising the challenges and opportunities of studying multilingualism in past societies. Pavlenko goes far beyond the usual fare offered by introductions to edited volumes, with a tour-de-force of the places we come across multilingualism in historical sources, focusing on the domains of administration, law, religion, the army, education, and public signage.
The volume demonstrates beyond a doubt that multilingualism was present in earlier periods and indeed was often so commonplace as to be unremarkable. But I think the volume’s more significant contribution is how it demonstrates so positively that it is very possible to study historical multilingualism, despite the challenges that historic textual sources pose. Lack of oral testimony or opportunities for direct observation are not necessarily the stumbling blocks that they might appear. As Pavlenko in her introduction and the authors across the volume demonstrate so convincingly, modern sociolinguistic approaches can be productively applied to historic written sources, and engaging with sociolinguistic methods can offer historians unique insights into past language communities.
Many of the authors reflect on the practical ways that we can study historical multilingualism and offer roadmaps for navigating the methodological challenges posed by using exclusively written sources. For example, Anastasia Maravela (chapter 2) analyses a corpus of bilingual papyrus texts from Hellenistic and Roman Egypt, focusing especially on religious settings. By using sociohistorical, sociolinguistic, and material approaches, she shows how we can get a glimpse of the oral communication that surrounded these texts.
Something that is striking across the volume is the sheer variety of historical sources that the authors use, from papyri documents detailing bilingual dreams in ancient Egypt (chapter 2), the mixed-language writing on spindle whorls from Roman Gaul (chapter 3), ancient epitaphs and modern British military records (chapter 4), memoires and personal letters (chapter 8), early medieval British business records (chapter 5), and ‘ghost signs’ that once advertised businesses (chapter 15). Jan Fellerer (chapter 10) addresses the need to use such a varied set of historical evidence when reconstructing past language communities. Focusing on the Habsburg monarchy of the nineteenth century, he couples ‘top-down’ sources such as governmental census data, ethnographic maps, and language laws with less obvious evidence such as satirical publications and criminal court records, championing the need for ‘eclecticism of sources and data’ when studying historic multilingualism (210).
Another methodological challenge when studying historic multilingualism is raised by Gesine Argent (chapter 8). In some past societies, such as the elite of Russia before the twentieth century, multilingualism was so common that it was not remarked upon, and therefore explicit discourse about multilingualism is often absent from our sources. The multilingual elite of Russia, for example, ‘seem not to have given much thought to their multilingualism, and we hear only the loudest, and most opinionated voices in the language debates’ (155). This also raises the related issue of using historical anecdotes about language knowledge when trying to construct broader historical narratives, as such anecdotes sometimes reflect cultural or political anxieties, rather than describing the reality of language use (157; cf. Ross Reference Ross2025 on the rhetoric behind anecdotes about language knowledge in the Roman world). Silence and erasure in historic sources is also discussed by Rachel Mairs in her chapter on military interpreters in the ancient and modern worlds, who are often absent from the archive since they rarely held specific or official ranks, and were often looked upon with suspicion because of their multilingualism (chapter 4).
The authors also highlight ways that linguists and sociolinguistic categories, both past and present, have sometimes been insufficient in describing and understanding historic multilingualism. Laura Wright (chapter 5) debunks the traditional origin story of English evolving from a monolingual environment, tracing this false narrative back to the tendency in the European linguistic tradition of ‘seeing languages as discrete entities but ignoring code-switched varieties’ (107), and scholars failing to notice mixed-language usage in Medieval business records, instead assuming they are reading ‘bad Latin’. Similarly, Susan Gal (chapter 9) examines the language ideologies of nineteenth-century European linguists studying northern Siberia, and their failures to understand and appreciate the multilingualism and linguistic diversity of the region. Alex Mullen (chapter 3) shows how standard terminology from bilingualism studies that separate languages into neat and bounded codes is insufficient in describing the linguistic phenomena we see on spindle whorls from Roman Gaul. The ‘flexible linguistic repertoires’ (76–77) of these artefacts are emblematic of the lack of a coherent language policy under the Roman empire: Latin and Greek were used in the running of the state, but there was a general disinterest in either promoting or discouraging the use of other local languages.
Central administrations’ language management and language policies are also explored by Roland Willemyns (chapter 7) and Benjamin C. Fortna (chapter 11). The Dutch East India Company and later the Dutch government adopted a language policy of ‘pragmatism’ in regard to the use and spread of Dutch in Indonesia. Unlike their French and British colonial counterparts, the Dutch were not interested in instilling their language in their colonies, opting for a ‘divide and conquer’ approach that also kept costs down. While the Dutch government feared that Dutch could unify those they colonised and thus make the government vulnerable, linguistic diversity was seen as a weakness and threat in the late- and post-Ottoman eras (chapter 11). Fortna discusses the trend that saw the multilingualism of the Ottoman Empire evolve into the monolingualism of the modern Turkish state, ushered in by technological change, rises in literacy, and policies of nationalism and centralization.
While Dutch never became the lingua franca in Indonesia, French was able to thrive in the Kingdom of Jerusalem in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Jonathan Rubin (chapter 6) examines how a vernacular language, ‘French of Outremer’, could take on new functions when developing away from the cultural and political ‘centres’ of western Europe, where Latin was still dominant in intellectual and administrative settings.
The final four chapters consider the contemporary uses of historic multilingualism. Zorana Sokolovska (chapter 12) analyses the language discourses used in the debates about multilingualism at the Council of Europe during the ‘European Year of Languages’ (2001). Sokolovska’s attention to minority or endangered languages is central to Pia Lane’s examination (chapter 13) of the challenges of ‘language revitalization’ and ‘language reclamation’ of indigenous or minority languages, with a focus on Kven in Northern Norway. Yasmine Beale-Rivaya (chapter 14) considers how the historical multilingualism of Spain is distorted and weaponized in the ‘Festivals of the Moors and Christians’, fuelling current anxieties and debates about immigration from Arab countries. Aneta Pavlenko (chapter 15) also examines the utilization of past multilingualism in contemporary society, focusing on ‘ghost signs’ in the linguistic landscapes of Toledo, St Petersburg, Lviv, and Palermo. Driven by current ‘celebrations of diversity’ and desires for multilingualism in Europe (cf. chapter 12), Pavlenko points out how some of the efforts to revitalize and promote these multilingual ghost signs fail to engage critically with history: while promoting their multilingual heritage, cities do not always reckon with the reasons why these signs and languages were erased from their historic landscapes, thus eliding instances of historic violence, suppression of minorities’ languages, and forced migration.
In addition to the intellectual strengths of the individual chapters, something that stands out is the book’s excellent editorial oversight. Much thought went into the introduction and framing of the volume as a whole, and the book is readable and accessible. There are consistent translations of primary sources into English, and the authors use clear language with little recourse to jargon, explaining and contextualising any technical terms.
While the western/European focus of the volume might be a source of criticism (all the chapters engage with multilingualism involving at least one European language, and the majority deal with regions of Europe or European interest broadly conceived), it does mean that there is an internal coherence to the volume, despite the fact that the chapters cover a time span of over 2,000 years.
In sum, Pavlenko has more than achieved the goals set out in her introduction. The book decisively puts to rest any idea that the present is more multilingual than the past, while encouraging historians and linguists to reckon with the methodologies, challenges, and tools of each other’s disciplines. Pavlenko has produced a volume that is instructive for historians, demonstrating how sociolinguistic approaches to historic sources can offer new insights into past societies, especially in accessing the lived realities of non-elite communities (chapters 1, 3, 10). At the same time, the book will surely be of interest to linguists, as the collected chapters definitively prove how rewarding the study of written sources can be in sociolinguistic analysis.
