Vernacular
Vernacular refers to the
native language of a country or locality. In general
linguistics, it is used to describe local languages as opposed to
linguae francae, official standards or global languages. It is sometimes applied to nonstandard
dialects of a global language.
In previous centuries scholarly work in
Western Europe was typically written in
Latin, so the works written in a native language (such as
Italian or
German) were said to be
in the vernacular.
The vernacular is also often contrasted with a
liturgical language (in
Linguistics, the relationship between these "High" and "Low" languages or varieties of a language is referred to as
diglossia). For example, until the 1960s,
Latin Rite Roman Catholics held
masses in
Latin rather than in local vernacular language, to this day the
Coptic Church holds
liturgies in
Coptic; though parts of mass are read in Amharic, the
Ethiopian Orthodox Church holds liturgies in
Ge'ez, etc. The
Reformation was spread by the publication of
Bibles and other religious writings in the vernacular, and the reforms of the
Second Vatican Council permitted the use of vernacular liturgies in Roman Catholicism.
Similarly, in
Hindu culture, traditionally religious or scholarly works were written in
Sanskrit long after its use as a spoken language. With the rise of the
bhakti movement from the 1100s onwards, religious works started being created in
Tamil,
Hindi,
Kannada,
Telugu and many other Indian languages throughout the different regions of India. For example, the
Ramayana, one of Hinduism's sacred epics in Sanskrit had vernacular versions such as
Ramacharitamanasa, a
Hindi version of the Ramayana by the 16th century poet
Tulsidas and
Kambaramayanam by the poet,
Kamban in
Tamil.
Within the subcategory of
sociolinguistics, the term
vernacular has been applied to several concepts, leading to confusion among scholars regarding what is actually being referred to. One use of the term, as exemplified by
Poplack (1993) and
Labov (1972), defines vernacular varieties as casual varieties used spontaneously rather than self-consciously. It could also be described as informal talk used in intimate situations. Linguists consider the vernacular to be the first form of speech acquired by a person.
Wolfram and
Schilling-Estes (1998) on the other hand define vernacular varieties as nonstandard, local
dialects, particularly because of the nonstandard
grammatical features that they contain. They also state that there is a continuum between the vernacular and the standard.
Similar approaches have been made to define vernacular culture:
Cheshire (1982) sees vernacular culture as a non-standard or counter culture that is expressed through participation in particular activities or clothing styles, whereas
Edwards (1992) defines it as a local culture determined by the connectedness to a certain neighbourhood.
The earliest documents that are subject to vernacular studies date back as far as 1450 and mainly consist of grammars of various national languages as well as teaching materials for spoken languages. They show that in the
Middle Ages venaculars grew more important and were looked at from a new perspective, because previously
Latin was the only language considered worth documenting and teaching.
Throughout Europe, Latin was the language that intellectuals, clergy and leading members of society spoke. It distinguished them from plain people to whom it was largely unintelligible. It was in every case a second language that served as a register for special purposes and marked members of its speech community as educated, not only because it was a language acquired through teaching in formal settings, but also because it was the only medium for academic and theological studies that were thus open to its speakers.
When vernaculars started to be investigated in the mid-fifteenth century and their significance grew as opposed to that of Latin, the challenge was not only a linguistic but also a cultural one. Latin had dominated European tradition for over 8 centuries, it had been the language of the institutions that dictated structures of thinking. National languages threatened to overthrow these.In the course of what is now called the
Renaissance, many European states underwent an individual development that shared yet common motivation and effects. These can be summarised as follows:
*the struggle for independence from the
Roman Church*the increasing manifestation of national political entities, in which language played a particular role
*early
mass production of books and the establishment of a new intellectual culture
*the crossing of continental and linguistic barriers through
sea trade.
Part of these innovations was the early study of vernaculars that were now structured and analysed like Latin had been.
Through
metalinguistic publications vernaculars acquired the status of
official languages. Between 1437 and 1586 the first
grammars of
Italian,
Spanish,
French,
German and
English were written, though not always immediately published.
Italian grammar
Leon Battista Alberti's
Grammatichetta vaticana was written between 1437 and 1441, but not printed until 1908, which is why its influence is debated.
Alberti was concerned with showing that dialects also had structures by mapping them onto Latin, whereas his fellow grammarians
Giovanni Francesco Fortunio (
Regole grammaticali della vulgar lingua, 1516) and
Pietro Bembo (
Prose della vulgar lingua, 1525) strived to establish a norm dialect that would qualify for becoming the Italian national language.
Spanish grammar
The first (
contrastive) Spanish grammar by
Antonio de Nebrija (
Gramática Castellana, 1492) was divided into parts for native and nonnative speakers, pursuing a differenct purpose in each: Books 1-4 describe the
Castilian language grammatically in order to facilitate the study of Latin for its Spanish speaking readers. Book 5 contains a phonetical and morphological overview of Castilian for nonnative speakers.
French grammar
The first (
methodical) grammar of French was not written in France but in England and aimed at foreign speakers intending to learn the language. An interest in learning French had already been expressed before
John Palsgrave wrote
Lesclarcissement de la langue francoyse in 1530 by his contemporaries
Alexander Barclay (
Here begynneth the introductory to wryte and to pronounce frenche, 1521),
Pierre Valence (
Introductions in frensshe, 1528) and
Giles du Wes (
An introducterie for to lerne to rede to prononce and to speke Frenche trewly, 1532-1533).
Palgrave's instructive work was based on literary examples, following the model of
Theodorus Gaza's grammar of Greek (1495).
German grammar
In Germany, the first grammar evolved from pedagogical works that also tried to create a uniform standard from the many regional dialects. Like
Nebrija,
Valentin Ickelsamer (
Ein Teütsche Grammatica , 1534) stresses the importance of understanding the structure of the national language in order to learn other languages, above all Latin.
English grammar
William Bullokar (
Pamphlet for Grammar, 1586) was the first to write a proper English grammar, preceded only by
Richard Mulcaster's general plea for mother tongue education in England,
The first part of the elementary, 1582.
Bullokar followed leading Latin grammarians in England to prove that English was, like Latin, governed by rules.
The first vernacular
dictionaries emerged together with vernacular grammars. As can be seen from the section above, many of the new grammars were based on traditional Latin ones, comparing the structure of both languages. This preservation of traditional form does not apply for the new type of dictionaries. Though they kept the
macrostructure and elements of the
microstructure of old dictionaries, there was more drastic change than in the case of grammars.
Up to the mid-fifteenth century,
glosses and dictionaries were mostly
bilingual and served the teaching of Latin. For reading and
translation of Latin texts, dictionaries would usually display the sequence Latin
lemma (unknown) followed by explanatory vernacular expression (known). Dictionaries with reversed order would serve the more active tasks of speaking and writing. Both types were solely concerned with the study of Latin, but at the same time they unintentionally documented the development of vernaculars at a time that these were not considered worth writing about.
With the emergence of monolingual dictionaries vernaculars arrived at their breakthrough. The gradual formation of nation states and the growing importance of national languages (that are briefly explained in the section
Early Vernacular Studies) led to the publication of
multilingual vernacular dictionaries in various combinations.
Some early bilingual vernacular dictionaries include:
Italian/French-
Nathanael Duez :
Dittionario italiano e francese/Dictionnaire italien et François, Leiden, 1559-1560
-
Gabriel Pannonius:
Petit vocabulaire en langue françoise et italienne, Lyon, 1578
-
Jean Antoine Fenice :
Dictionnaire fraçois et italien, Paris, 1584
Italian/English-
John Florio :
A Worlde of Words, London, 1598
-
John Florio:
Queen Anna's New World of Words, London, 1611
Italian/Spanish-
Cristobal de las Casas:
Vocabulario de las dos lenguas toscana y castellana, Sevilla, 1570
-
Lorenzo Franciosini:
Vocabulario italiano e spagnolo/ Vocabulario espanol e italiano, Roma, 1620.
Some early
monolingual vernacular dictionaries:
Italian-
Francesco Alunno:
Le richezze della lingua volgare, 1543
-
Francesco Alunno:
La fabrica del mondo, 1548
-
Giacomo Pergamini:
Il memoriale della lingua italiana, 1602
- Academia della Crusca:
Vocabulario degli Academici della Crusca, 1612
Spanish-
Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco:
Tresoro de la lengua castellana o espanola, 1611
French-
Maurice de la Porte:
Epitheta, 1571
-
Jean Nicot:
Thresor de la langue fracoyse, tant ancienne que moderne, 1606
-
Pierre Richelet :
Dictionnaire françois contenant les mots et les choses, 1680
-
Académie française :
Dictionnaire de l'Académie française, 1694
German-
Georg Heinisch:
Teütsche Sprache und Weißheit, 1616
-
Johann Christoph Adelung :
Versuch eines vollständigen grammatisch-kritischen Wörterbuches Der Hochdeutschen Mundart, 1774-1786
Language can blur into
vernacular architecture, where the local vernacular is sometimes reflected in the form of the styles of naive/vernacular
typography & hand
lettering seen on signs and shopfronts. Similarly the word may be used to describe local craft - e.g. "vernacular ceramic wares".
In
literature, it may apply to works that have been written to emulate the everyday speech of the
middle class or the
working class. Sometimes, this means that
slang and
colloquial speech is included.
Such material may also use different rules of
grammar and
punctuation than other writings, both academic and literary.
*
Vernacular literature*
Vernacular architecture
