Lecture for the General Linguistics Seminar in HT26 Week 4, 9 February 2026
5:15pm – Linguistics Large Seminar Room, Faculty of Linguistics, Humanities Centre (Woodstock Road) 30.445
6:30pm – Reception in Linguistics Faculty Hub, Humanities Centre 30.400
Followed by dinner at Mamma Mia. Sign-up sheet and further information
What happens when a community conducts all their business via correspondence? The 1,800 incoming and outgoing letters from the Northern German nuns of Lüne Abbey, exchanged between mid-15th and mid-16th century, give a rare insight into a shared language / lingo / sociolect (suggestions as to the best term welcome after the lecture!), code-mixing between Latin (the language of the convent education) and Low German (the mothertongue of the nuns). This is a work-in-progress report from the ongoing edition. The volume with the first 415 letters is available as Open access pdf: Netzwerke der Nonnen. Kritische Edition der Briefsammlung der Lüner Benediktinerinnen (Hs. 15, ca. 1460-1555), ed. by Eva Schlotheuber und Henrike Lähnemann, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2025. Diplomatic text and English summaries in theDigital Library of the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel. Further reading: Chapter 3 (Education) and 4 (Love & Friendship) in: Henrike Lähnemann & Eva Schlotheuber:The Life of Nuns. Love, Politics, and Religion in Medieval German Convents, transl. by Anne Simon, Cambridge: Open Book Publishers 2024, Open access html, pdf, and audiobook versionshttps://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0397.
Linguistic background Timo Bülters / Simone Schultz-Balluff, Codemixing in den Lüneburger Frauenklöstern, in: Historisches Codeswitching mit Deutsch: Multilinguale Praktiken in der Sprachgeschichte, ed.by Elvira Glaser, Michael Prinz u. Stefaniya Ptashnyk, Berlin / Boston: de Gruyter 2021, pp. 175–210.