Assessing language contact: Linguistic purism and North Frisian

A common distinction between academic and lay linguistics as regards the perception of languages is that the former remains descriptive and unevaluative in its approach to the study of language variation and change. The latter, however, sometimes views systemic differences between languages as differences of quality: some languages are seen to be more logical or effective at expressing complex thought; similarly language change is frequently viewed as language decay, with the older stages of a language seen as superior. The clear separation between academic linguistics as essentially descriptive in orientation versus lay linguistics as evaluative toward change does not always hold in such a clear-cut way when it comes to attitudes toward change in smaller languages. In this chapter, we present evidence from metalinguistic comments on North Frisian to discuss to what extent such a clear separation between description and evaluation is indeed maintained by academic linguists studying this language. We aim to show that there is a remarkable similarity in the evaluation of language contact across different types of scholarly and public discourse.