In this chapter, Gijsbert Rutten, Iris Van de Voorde and Rik Vosters, refine the Labovian distinction based primarily on the type of language learning involved by bringing in the contact-based insights of Milroy (2007) on this issue. Exploring the extent to which the transmission-diffusion distinction can also apply to orthographic, rather than phonological or morphosyntactic, changes, the authors discuss a range of different examples of both transmission and – various subtypes of – diffusion, mostly from Dutch, German and English. Their central argument is that diffusion must be seen as the dominant driver of orthographic change, but transmission-type changes are also possible in specific historical contexts, for instance in relation to explicit instruction in schools or in closely-knit social networks. Building on different examples and cases, the chapter also explains the link between diffusion and supralocalization, as local and regional spelling practices in medieval times give way to more supraregional writing traditions in postmedieval times. As such, these processes of geographical diffusion of innovations across communities often lay the ground work for later standardization efforts. However, by discussing a slightly more elaborate case study on spelling change and pluricentricity in Dutch language history, the authors show how the development of such supraregional writing traditions often leads not only to linguistic standardization, but also results in a linguistic landscape which can best be described as pluricentric, consisting of different national and regional normative centers from which innovations spread.

This chapter gives a presentation of writing and literacy in Norway from the first runic inscriptions until the present day, choosing certain phenomena and certain texts to exemplify the development. Where possible, the author has taken the viewpoint of the writers. The aspects discussed include the relationship between orthography and alphabets, the understanding of orthographic use in the light of reading preferences, and the importance of political ideas of nationality and democracy for the codification of the two written standards that are used today. Language-external factors had a major impact on the changes concerning writing in Norway. For example, the introduction of the Latin alphabet led to great changes in the runic literacy, and the Black Death caused a general decline in the learned literacy. Later, the political union between Denmark and Norway led to a common, Dano-Norwegian written language. Between 1750 and 1850 this common language was standardized, and variation was less noticeable in the sources. After 1850 a Norwegian Ausbau process started, and variation, with two standards and several dialects, became a trade mark of Norwegian writing, which it still is.

This chapter sketches the history of philology and charts its use as a method for analyzing and understanding orthographic variation. Its chronological arrangement spans the discipline’s development, from the roots of philology in the Classical period to present-day incarnations of the approach. Such incarnations have seen philology move from its use as a tool which sought to make sense of orthographic variation in order to facilitate textual editing, to one which, combined with newer theoretical linguistic approaches, gave rise to disciplines such as historical sociolinguistics or pragmaphilology, where extralinguistic contexts are brought to bear on linguistic data. The authors present two case studies exemplifying contemporary philological approaches to historical orthography. The first one uses a manuscript-centered methodology to illustrate the contrasting copying-practices of two scribes working on the Tanner version of the Old English translation of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica. The second one focuses on the scripting of /w/ in Old English and Old High German and demonstrates how an etymological sound reference system can be employed for graphemic analysis.

The authors define the basic elements of writing and writing systems: graphemic units (graphemes and allographs), graphetic units (letters and graphs) and typographical units (glyphs and characters). Starting with graphemes, they introduce and discuss different definitions of graphemes proposed in the pertinent literature and then tackle the question of the distribution of graphemes in a given writing system and elaborate on the concept of allography. Regarding graphetic units, the authors focus on the internal structure of letters and other graphs and introduce the concept of the ‘length hierarchy’ of letters, which leads to a discussion of larger graphemic categories, especially the graphemic syllable. Looking more deeply at the functional distribution of letters, they address the question of graphemic inventories and their development. Their discussion also includes the typographical key concepts of glyphs and characters. The chapter then focuses on the graphemic subinventory of punctuation, the form of punctuation marks, as well as their decoding and encoding functions. The final issue discussed is capitalization as the functional differentiation between uppercase and lowercase, including the development of different functions of uppercase letters in the history of the European writing systems.

This chapter explores the connections of orthography to paleography and codicology, and the dependence of historical orthography on the materiality of writing and printing environments. It explains that orthography is one of the tools of paleographers, and a key to understanding (deciphering) the written language of ancient and medieval texts, whereas codicologists investigate nonlinguistic (and nonorthographic) peculiarities of early manuscript books (codices). Orthographic research, however, in some cases helps estimate more precisely the origins of codices (time and location). The chapter also presents some of the ways in which the materiality of writing and printing historically has directed the development of orthographic features (e.g. symmetricity of upper and lower cases, dependence on the limitations of printers’ type sets). The author introduces the dichotomy between the perceived durability and perishability of a text at its creation phase, and reveals its impact on the differentiation of orthographic approaches such as the historical simultaneous double orthographies of various European languages (i.e. printed versus handwritten manuscripts, books versus newspapers).

This chapter offers an overview of selected linguistic approaches to writing and writing systems, mainly to alphabetic orthographies, with special emphasis on the English language. The survey starts with the ancient views on the relationship between speech and writing, as they constitute the foundation of premodern and modern perspectives. Since the debate between the relational and autonomistic approaches took several decades in the twentieth century, an important part of the chapter covers their main tenets and representatives. The author argues that, over time, one can observe growing convergence between the previously opposite perspectives, which testifies to the increase in the awareness of the complexity of interrelations between alphabetic writing systems and the other language subsystems. Eventually, scholars, especially those focusing on English in their research, have widened their interest in writing systems to a variety of extralinguistic aspects interrelated with the patterns of orthographic variation. These interrelations are presented and illustrated in the last part of the chapter, which is devoted to the historical sociolinguistic approach.

This chapter addresses the study of orthography from a sociopolitical historical perspective, including a literature review and a case study focused on the politics of spelling in mid-nineteenth-century Spain. Scholars working with a sociopolitical historical approach to orthography realize that language and power are intertwined. Thus, orthographic processes (such as the selection of a script, the codification of a writing system, or the reform of specific spelling norms) are no longer understood as ideologically neutral scientific endeavors but rather as historically situated political activities. Examples offered in the chapter show that orthographies are powerful instruments of inclusion and exclusion, gatekeeping devices that exacerbate and naturalize social inequalities, and ideological mechanisms that reinforce (or challenge) a given political entity. The case study exemplifies the political nature of orthography by examining the spelling system that was made official in Spain in 1844 (and that, with minor changes, remains as today’s standard) as the result of a historical struggle between social actors with different political agendas and different amounts of power to influence the outcomes of the debate. In short, this chapter explains that orthographies are practical and symbolic tools strategically used to impose, maintain or resist particular social identities or politico-economic orders.

This chapter clarifies that the treatment and reliability of orthographic variables as linguistic variables has already been tested with the application of both macroscopic and microscopic approaches to digitalized historical materials. Patterns of variation and change in past periods of a given language have been evidenced through the observation of its users’ sociolinguistic behavior in social interaction. The recent prolific research output in historical sociolinguistics reflects the growth of interest in style and register within the field. The role of new genres and text types (e.g. travel accounts, court records, recipes, diaries, and letters) is thus also being highlighted as materials worth studying for both interspeaker and intraspeaker variation. The chapter explores the indexical potential of orthographic variation in style, register, genre and text types. The extralinguistic factors conditioning the use of different spelling forms in cases of variability are usually based on production, geographical location, sociodemographics (sex, age, rank), social networks, text type (and genre), style, register and medium (handwritten vs. printed). In earlier periods, when correspondence and other ego-documents were probably the most frequent means of written communication and without the existence of a well-established and fixed standard variety, orthographic variation constituted a source of social meaning.

This chapter contends that if we want to make sense of the politics of Europe’s monetary union, we need to focus on the democratic legitimacy of the European Central Bank as a strategic political actor. The chapter departs from common distinctions in the literature between input, output, and throughput legitimacy and instead seeks to analyse how the ECB has navigated these dimensions strategically. To do so, it develops a theory of legitimation strategies based on distinctions between normal and crisis times and between a central bank’s organizational and systemic interests. The theory is assessed through a discussion of the first two decades of ECB monetary policy-making – from the inception of Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union until the outbreak of the COVID-19 crisis – and through a comparison of the ECB’s democratic legitimacy with that of other major central banks.

This chapter argues that EMU is characterized by a misalignment of legal, economic, and political integration that is mainly rooted in the asymmetric incorporation of monetary and economic policy in the euro area. The legalization of monetary policy and economic policy coordination has produced a governance framework that cannot achieve monetary dominance as envisaged by the drafters of the Maastricht Treaty. At the same time, this framework also stands for a juridification of politics and the politization of law that has planted the seed for constitutional conflicts between the EU and its Member States regarding the legality and legitimacy of supranational meddling with these policy fields. It is argued that the key to addressing the root cause of the problems lies in a substantive reorientation of EMU that entails a substantive realignment of economic policy with monetary policy in the euro area and the reinforcement of the democratic legitimacy of supranational policy-making in both policy fields.

The future direction of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) has been the subject of heated debate. Among those features pertaining to the reform of EMU, this chapter focuses on the EU fiscal rules. The discussion begins with an overview of the existing EU framework for fiscal and economic governance, its economic rationale, and the reforms adopted in response to the eurozone crisis. This is followed by analysis of the preventive and corrective arms of the Stability and Growth Pact, on which this contribution principally focuses. We then turn to consider the criticism to which the existing EU framework for fiscal coordination and surveillance has been subjected. The focus then shifts to the various proposals on the future evolution of the EU’s fiscal and economic governance framework. The penultimate section provides a legal assessment of the proposed reforms, thereby setting out what would be required, from a legal perspective, in order to amend, replace, or repeal the various aspects of the existing framework. The final section argues that the (potential) reform of the EU fiscal rules is but a key piece of the broader puzzle of EMU reform, and that therefore we should not neglect its other aspects.

This chapter explains that linguistic uniformity is rarely characteristic of nation-states. In Europe, official national languages brought powerful and ongoing consequences for ‘minority’ languages and their speakers. Nineteenth-century nation- and empire-building affected regional speakers of national languages, such as Flemish or Austrian German, or Afrikaans among other postcolonial varieties of European languages. Imposing European languages in settler nations has irrevocably endangered or eliminated Indigenous languages and cultures. The debates about European orthographic authorities surveyed in this chapter expose conflicting cultural allegiances and pedagogical needs. Vernaculars inherited diverse writing practices from different scholarly discourse communities, whether government chanceries or literary scriptoria or national language academies. Representative conflicts include tensions between scholarly traditions and simplified spellings for mass state education. Existing traditions can be difficult to displace, especially in democracies. Educators’ engagement with the state reminds us that pedagogy is often a matter of politics. Journalists can support or undermine proposed norms, whether using or reporting them. Successful reforms sometimes reflect intersections of low literacy and/or authoritarian states. Many debates that raged in the nineteenth century have continued into modern times. With the rise of social media, individuals can not only internalize but also influence and drive discourses of group identity.

This chapter explores the evolution of banking regulation in Europe, underlining the shift in regulatory trends, from a reactive approach to a more forward-looking one. Originally, banking law reforms constituted immediate reactions to regulatory flaws and omissions revealed by each respective financial downturn. The Great Depression exposed the need to introduce deposit insurance, along with the first capital requirements. The Global Financial Crisis drew regulatory attention to systemic risk, and so an array of legal solutions was adopted with the aim of mitigating it. Recently, this tendency has been changing. Regulators take more proactive steps. This became apparent in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, when many of their actions were tailored to prevent a banking crisis from materializing. Similarly, with regard to climate risk, both adopted and proposed solutions are highly future-oriented. In the light of digital innovation in banking, regulators choose to act pre-emptively. This is especially visible in their quest to regulate relations between cloud providers and banks.