Trilingualism in early modern Norwich

Abstract The aim of this article is to illustrate the importance of employing archival sources in order to identify when and to what extent a language was used during a particular period in history. It takes as an example Trudgill’s claim that from about 1565, as a result of immigration by Dutch and French speakers from the Low Countries, Norwich was a trilingual city for as much as two hundred years. After a brief description of multilingualism in early modern England and an analysis of the term trilingual, it discusses how Trudgill uses secondary sources to substantiate his claim. The article then challenges this claim, by employing archival material in order to assess how long after 1565 Dutch and French continued to be used in Norwich in the most important social domains: the church, the home, education, the work domain, the law and literature. What emerges is that although certain functions within the church domain continued to be performed in these languages into the eighteenth century, as a result of language shift and attrition, Norwich ceased to be trilingual in any meaningful sense by the middle of the seventeenth century.