Beschreibung:
In this article, we present some of our findings from an interdisciplinary research project which has analyzed merovingian coins dating from c. 500-750 A.D. We propose new guidelines for the linguistic analysis and show that it is necessary to recontextualize the inscriptions, that is to say to reconstruct their sociolinguistic background, their particular pragmatico-textual features and the specificity of the toponomastic and anthroponomastic data. Our recontextualization suggests that, contrary to recent proposals, the merovingian coins should not be used to date the first occurrences of loss of noun declension, vocalization of preconsonantal /l/ and loss of final unstressed vowels except /a/.