vernacular

A linguistic map of Europe. Although countries are generally recognizable, the vernaculars do not necessarily conform to them. Behind every non-conformance is a chapter of European history.

A Vernacular, mother tongue or mother language is the native language of a population located in a country or in a region defined on some other basis, such as a locality. For example, Navaho is a local language in the southwest of the United States, English is the state language of a number of countries and Kurdish has a continuous range, but that range is divided among a number of countries in which Kurdish is a minority language.

Vernacular languages are not typically defined by political borders, although such a definition is often an ideal held by the speakers. For example, the Young Turk movement of the early 20th century envisioned a Turkish nation with only Turkish language speakers in it. After a failed military attempt to remove all the Armenians from the Ottoman Empire and its defeat in World War I, the founder of the Republic of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal, and President Woodrow Wilson worked to draw a border between Armenia and Turkey that would place Turkish-speaking villages on one side and Armenian-speaking villages on the other, and a similar treaty drawing a border between Greece and Turkey displaced Turks from Greece and Greeks from Turkey, where they had been residing since ancient times. Despite this ideal, Turkish-speaking minorities remain in the Balkans.

The oldest known vernacular manuscript (c. 1250) in Scanian/Danish with the Scanian Law and the Scanian Ecclesiastical Law.

Look up vernacular in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Etymology

The term is not a recent one. In 1688 James Howell wrote:

Concerning Italy, doubtless there were divers before the Latin did spread all over that Country; the Calabrian, and Apulian spoke Greek, whereof some Relicks are to be found to this day; but it was an adventitious, no Mother-Language to them: 'tis confess'd that Latium it self, and all the Territories about Rome, had the Latin for its maternal and common first vernacular Tongue; but Tuscany and Liguria had others quite discrepant,viz. the Hetruscane and Mesapian, whereof though there be some Records yet extant; yet there are none alive that can understand them: The Oscan, the Sabin and Tusculan, are thought to be but Dialects to these.

Here vernacular, mother language and dialect are already in use in a modern sense.^[1] According to Merriam-Webster's,^[2] "vernacular" was brought into the English language as early as 1601 from Latin vernaculus, "native", which had been in figurative use in Classical Latin as "national" and "domestic", having originally been derived from vernus and verna, a male or female slave respectively born in the house rather than abroad. The figurative meaning was broadened from the diminutive extended words vernaculus, vernacula. Varro, the classical Latin grammarian, used the term vocabula vernacula, "termes de la langue nationale" or "vocabulary of the national language" as opposed to foreign words.^[3]

Concepts of the vernacular

General linguistic

Allegory of Dante Alighieri, champion of the use of vernacular Italian for literature rather than the lingua franca, Latin. Fresco by Luca Signorelli in the cappella di San Brizio dome, Orvieto.

Opposed to lingua franca

In general linguistics, a vernacular is opposed to a lingua franca, a third-party language in which persons speaking different vernaculars not understood by each other may communicate.^[4] For instance, in Western Europe until the 17th century, most scholarly works had been written in Latin, which was serving as a lingua franca. Works written in Romance languages are said to be in the vernacular. The Divine Comedy, the Cantar de mio Cid, and The Song of Roland are examples of early vernacular literature in Italian, Spanish, and French, respectively.

A low variant in diglossia

The vernacular is also often contrasted with a liturgical language, a specialized use of a former lingua franca. For example, until the 1960s, Latin Rite Roman Catholics held Masses in Latin rather than in vernaculars; to this day the Coptic Church holds liturgies in Coptic not Arabic; the Ethiopian Orthodox Church holds liturgies in Ge'ez though parts of Mass are read in Amharic.

Similarly, in Hindu culture, traditionally religious or scholarly works were written in Sanskrit (long after its use as a spoken language) or in Tamil in Tamil country. Sanskrit, a former national language, was a lingua franca among the non-Indo-European languages of the Central Asian subcontinent and became more of one as the spoken language, or prakrits, began to diverge from it in different regions. With the rise of the bhakti movement from the 1100s onwards, religious works were created in the other languages: Hindi, Kannada, Telugu and many others. For example, the Ramayana, one of Hinduism's sacred epics in Sanskrit, had vernacular versions such as Ranganadha Ramayanam composed in telugu by Gona Buddha Reddy in the 15th century; and Ramacharitamanasa, a Hindi version of the Ramayana by the 16th century poet Tulsidas.

These circumstances are a contrast between a vernacular and language variant used by the same speakers. According to one school of linguistic thought, all such variants are examples of a linguistic phenomenon termed diglossia ("split tongue", on the model of the genetic anomaly^[5]). In it the language is bifurcated; i.e., the speaker learns two forms of the language and ordinarily uses one but under special circumstances the other. The one most frequently used is the low (L) variant, equivalent to the vernacular, while the special variant is the high (H). The concept was introduced to linguistics by Charles A. Ferguson (1959), but Ferguson explicitly excluded variants as divergent as dialects or different languages or as similar as styles or registers. H must not be a conversational form; Ferguson had in mind a literary language. For example, a lecture is delivered in a different variety than ordinary conversation. Ferguson's own example was classical and spoken Arabic, but the analogy between Vulgar Latin and Classical Latin is of the same type. Excluding the upper-class and lower-class register aspects of the two variants, Classical Latin was a literary language; the people spoke Vulgar Latin as a vernacular.

Joshua Fishman redefined the concept in 1964 to include everything Fergusen had excluded. Fishman allowed both different languages and dialects and also different styles and registers as the H variants. The essential contrast between them was that they be "functionally differentiated;" that is, H must be used for special purposes, such as a liturgical or sacred language. Fasold expanded the concept still further by proposing that mulitple H exist in society from which the users can select for various purposes. The definition of an H is intermediate between Ferguson's and Fishman's. Realizing the inappropriateness of the term diglossia (only two) to his concept, he proposes the term broad diglossia.^[6]

Sociolinguistic

Within the subcategory of sociolinguistics, the term vernacular has been applied to several concepts; unfortunately, it is only possible to identify which is meant in an authored work by context.

An informal register

In variation theory, pioneered by William Labov, language is a large set of styles or registers from which the speaker selects according to the social setting of the moment. The vernacular is "the least self-conscious style of people in a relaxed conversation", or "the most basic style"; that is, casual varieties used spontaneously rather than self-consciously, informal talk used in intimate situations. In other contexts the speaker does conscious work to select the appropriate variations. The one he can use without this effort is the first form of speech acquired.^[7]

A non-standard dialect

In another theory, the vernacular is opposed to the standard. The non-standard varieties thus defined are dialects, which are to be identified as complexes of factors: "social class, region, ethnicity, situation, and so forth." Both the standard and the non-standard language have have dialects, but in contrast to the standard, the non-standard have "socially disfavored" structures. The standard are primarily written, but the non-standard are spoken. An example of a vernacular dialect is African American Vernacular English.^[8]

An idealisation

A vernacular is not a real language but is "an abstract set of norms."^[9]

First vernacular grammars

Through metalinguistic publications vernaculars acquired the status of official languages. Between 1437 and 1586 the first grammars of Italian, Spanish, French, Dutch, German and English were written, though not always immediately published.

Italian grammar

The first known grammar of a Romance language was a book written in manuscript form by Leon Battista Alberti between 1437 and 1441 and entitled Grammatica della lingua toscana, "Tuscan Grammar." In it Alberti sought to demonstrate that the vernacular — here Tuscan, known today as modern Italian — was every bit as structured as Latin and could be correct or corrupted. He did so by mapping vernacular structures onto Latin.

The book was never printed until 1908. It was not generally known, but it was known, as an inventory of the library of Lorenzo de'Medici lists it under the title Regule lingue florentine ("Rules of the Florentine language"). The only known manuscript copy, however, is included in the codex, Reginense Latino 1370, located at Rome in the Vatican library. It is therefore called the Grammatichetta vaticana.^[10]

More influential perhaps was the 1516 Regole grammaticali della vulgar lingua of Giovanni Francesco Fortunio and the 1525 Prose della vulgar lingua of Pietro Bembo. In those works the authors strove to establish a 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 different purpose in each: Books 1-4 describe the Spanish language grammatically in order to facilitate the study of Latin for its Spanish speaking readers. Book 5 contains a phonetical and morphological overview of Spanish for nonnative speakers.

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 Teutsche Grammatica, 1534) stresses the importance of understanding the structure of the national language in order to learn other languages, above all Latin.

Dutch grammar

In the Netherlands, the first grammars in the vernacular included Jan van den Werve's Den schat der Duytsscher Talen (1559), Dirck Volckertszoon Coornhert's Eenen nieuwen ABC of Materi-boeck (1564) and Hendrick Laurenszoon Spiegel's Twe-spraack vande Nederduitsche letterkunst/ ófte Vant spellen ende eyghenscap des Nederduitschen taals (1584).

English grammar

William Bullokar (Pamphlet for Grammar, 1586) was the first to learn 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.

First vernacular dictionaries

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. Although 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

• Cristóbal 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 fabbrica del mondo, 1548
• Giacomo Pergamini: Il memoriale della lingua italiana, 1602
• Accademia della Crusca: Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca, 1612

Spanish

• Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco: Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, 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.

Notes

Bibliography

• Fasold, Ralph W. (1984). The sociolinguistics of society. v. 1. Oxford, England; New York, NY, USA: B. Blackwell. 
• Keller, Marcello Sorce (1984). "Folk Music in Trentino: Oral Transmission and the Use of Vernacular Languages". Ethnomusicology XXVIII (1): 75-89. 
• Lodge, R. Anthony (2005). A sociolinguistic history of Parisian French. Cambridge [u.a.]: Cambridge University Press. 
• Mesthrie, Rajend (1999). Introducing sociolinguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 

See also

• Dialect
• First language
• Literary language
• Register (linguistics)
• Slang
• Sociolect
• Standard language

External links

• Illich, Ivan. "Vernacular Values" (html). The Presevation Institute. http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich/Vernacular.html. Retrieved 7 November 2009.