Frontmatter -- Acknowledgements -- Contents -- I. Introduction -- 1. Merchants of Innovation: the languages of traders -- II. Literacy of traders and their agency as linguistic trendsetters -- 2. Like the coins when currencies are combined: contextualizing the written language of fifteenth-century English merchants -- 3. Bridges of innovation and change: the English language around the networks of the Mercery of London -- 4. The socio-linguistics of Judaeo-Arabic mercantile writing -- III. Code-switching, loanwords and multilingualism -- 5. Business writing in early sixteenth-century Norway -- 6. Kiss Me Quick: on the naming of commodities in Britain, 1650 to the First World War -- 7. The early English East India Company as a community of practice: evidence of multilingualism -- 8. Language choice in forming an identity: linguistic innovations by German traders in Bergen -- 9. From the synagogue to the market square: cardinal numbers in Older Yiddish -- IV. Mercantile linguistic communities -- 10. Early Anglo-Italian contact: new loanword evidence from two mercantile sources, 1440-1451 -- 11. Multilingual merchants: the trade network of the 14th century Tuscan merchant Francesco di Marco Datini -- 12. On a famous lacuna: Lingua Franca the Mediterranean trade pidgin? -- Index