Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Languages and Culture in History: A New Series
- Part I Approaches to Multilingualism in the Past
- 1 Codes, Routines and Communication: Forms and Meaning of Linguistic Plurality in Western European Societies in Former Times
- 2 Capitalizing Multilingual Competence: Language Learning and Teaching in the Early Modern Period
- Part II Multilingualism in Early Modern Times: Three Examples
- 3 Plurilingualism in Augsburg and Nuremberg in Early Modern Times
- 4 Multilingualism in the Dutch Golden Age: An Exploration
- 5 Literacy, Usage and National Prestige: The Changing Fortunes of Gaelic in Ireland
- Index
1 - Codes, Routines and Communication: Forms and Meaning of Linguistic Plurality in Western European Societies in Former Times
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 December 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Languages and Culture in History: A New Series
- Part I Approaches to Multilingualism in the Past
- 1 Codes, Routines and Communication: Forms and Meaning of Linguistic Plurality in Western European Societies in Former Times
- 2 Capitalizing Multilingual Competence: Language Learning and Teaching in the Early Modern Period
- Part II Multilingualism in Early Modern Times: Three Examples
- 3 Plurilingualism in Augsburg and Nuremberg in Early Modern Times
- 4 Multilingualism in the Dutch Golden Age: An Exploration
- 5 Literacy, Usage and National Prestige: The Changing Fortunes of Gaelic in Ireland
- Index
Summary
Abstract
The rise of the nation states has been accompanied by the elaboration and the gradual imposition of unique and distinctive national languages. However, former societies of the West were much less marked by linguistic exclusiveness. A given political unity could encompass several colloquial or even literary languages, linguistic standards were still in the making, and for different domains of social and cultural life, including such diverse fields as economy and religion, various lingua francas could be in use. This introductory essay intends to explore briefly the broad issue of multilingualism in former times, by identifying the main fields, forms, practices and uses of linguistic plurality in western Europe, and focusing on some specific cases and cities.
Keywords: Lingua franca, communication, linguistic performance, cultural diversity, Amsterdam, Leiden, Rome, Latin, Pentecost
Linguistic unity or plurality?
Historians mislead us. Massively. Just as film-makers and many novelists do. Take any history book, textbook, monograph or collection of articles, look at any historical film or swashbuckling TV programme, whether it concerns the accession of Louis XIV, the pleasures and problems of Sissi of Austria or the exploits of the pirates of the Caribbean, you will be confronted with a narrative which automatically presents societies in the past as stable, fundamentally united within a dominant culture and, most of all, perfectly monolingual. Each and every inhabitant speaks the same language, uses the same idioms and everyone understands each other. People from Marseilles and from the Basque country are understood in Paris with no problem, Swedes talk directly with Germans, Estonians, Serbs and other peoples they meet during their wars, the Castilians and the Catalans are always on the same wavelength, and the Sicilians seem to have assimilated the language of Dante even before he was born. No dialects or sociolects, except to introduce some local colour by getting a member of the so-called lower classes to speak patois.
This does not concern the effective removal of the linguistic minorities that made up the Austrian, Russian or even German empires, and the British Commonwealth, or the many dialectal variations which in any European country undermined mutual understanding under the ancien régime right up until well into the nineteenth and even the twentieth century.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Multilingualism, Nationhood, and Cultural IdentityNorthern Europe, 16th–19th Centuries, pp. 17 - 48Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2016