Vernacular

The examples and perspective in this article may not represent a worldwide view of the subject. You may improve this article, discuss the issue on the talk page, or create a new article, as appropriate. (September 2019) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Vernacular is the ordinary, informal,

, body of vocabulary, etc.

Overview

Like any native language variety, a vernacular has an internally coherent system of

Again, however, linguistics regards all varieties of a language as coherent, complex, and complete systems—even nonstandard varieties.

A dialect or language variety that is a vernacular may not have historically benefited from the institutional support or sanction that a standard dialect has. According to another definition, a vernacular is a language that has not developed a standard variety, undergone codification, or established a literary tradition.^[9][10]

Ecclesiastical Law

.

Trinci Palace, Foligno, Italy, by Gentile da Fabriano

, who lived in the era of Italian language standardization

Vernacular may vary from overtly

among their native speakers, in showcasing group identity or sub-culture affiliation.

As a border case, a nonstandard dialect may even have its own written form, though it could then be assumed that the orthography is unstable, inconsistent, or unsanctioned by powerful institutions, like that of government or education. The most salient instance of nonstandard dialects in writing would likely be nonstandard phonemic spelling of reported speech in literature or poetry (e.g., the publications of Jamaican poet Linton Kwesi Johnson) where it is sometimes described as eye dialect.

Nonstandard dialects have been used in classic literature throughout history. One famous example of this is Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.^[11] This classic piece of literature, commonly taught in schools in the U.S., includes dialogue from various characters in their own native vernaculars (including representations of Older Southern American English and African-American English), which are not written in standard English.

In the case of the English language, while it has become common thought to assume that nonstandard varieties should not be taught, there has been evidence to prove that teaching nonstandard dialects in the classroom can encourage some children to learn English.

The first known usage of the word "vernacular" in English is not recent. In 1688, James Howell wrote:

Concerning Italy, doubtless there were divers before the Latin did spread all over that Country; the

Sabin

and Tusculan, are thought to be but Dialects to these.

Here, vernacular, mother language and dialect are in use in a modern sense.^[12] According to Merriam-Webster,^[13] "vernacular" was brought into the English language as early as 1601 from the Latin vernaculus ("native") which had been in figurative use in Classical Latin as "national" and "domestic", having originally been derived from verna, a slave 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.^[14]

In

are examples of early vernacular literature in Italian, Spanish, and French, respectively.

In Europe, Latin was used widely instead of vernacular languages in varying forms until c. 1701, in its latter stage as Neo-Latin.

In religion,

.

In India, the 12th century Bhakti movement led to the translation of Sanskrit texts to the vernacular.

In science, an early user of the vernacular was

for details.

In diplomacy, French displaced Latin in Europe in the 1710s, due to the military power of

.

Certain languages have both a classical form and various vernacular forms, with two widely used examples being Arabic and Chinese: see Varieties of Arabic and Chinese language. In the 1920s, due to the May Fourth Movement, Classical Chinese was replaced by written vernacular Chinese.

The vernacular is also often contrasted with a

.

Similarly, in

.

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^[17]). In it, the language is bifurcated: the speaker learns two forms of the language and ordinarily uses one but under special circumstances uses 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. It 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 Ferguson 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 multiple 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.^[18]

Within sociolinguistics, the term "vernacular" has been applied to several concepts. Context, therefore, is crucial to determining its intended sense.

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 they can use without this effort is the first form of speech acquired.^[19]

In another theory, the vernacular language is opposed to the

As an idealisation

A vernacular is not a real language but is "an abstract set of norms".[20]

Vernaculars acquired the status of official languages through metalinguistic publications. Between 1437 and 1586, the first reference grammars of Italian, Spanish, French, Dutch, German and English were written, though not always immediately published. It is to be understood that the first precursors of those languages preceded their standardization by up to several hundred years.

In the 16th century, the "

was a major contributor, with others contributing as well.

is much more difficult.

Middle English is known for its alternative spellings and pronunciations. The British Isles, although geographically limited, have always supported populations of widely-varied dialects, as well as a few different languages; some examples of languages and regional accents (and/or dialects) within Great Britain include Scotland (Scottish Gaelic), Northumbria, Yorkshire, Wales (Welsh), the Isle of Man (Manx), Devon, and Cornwall (Cornish).

Being the language of a maritime power, English was (of necessity) formed from elements of many different languages. Standardisation has been an ongoing issue. Even in the age of modern communications and mass media, according to one study,^[22] "… although the Received Pronunciation of Standard English has been heard constantly on radio and then television for over 60 years, only 3 to 5% of the population of Britain actually speaks RP … new brands of English have been springing up even in recent times ...." What the vernacular would be in this case is a moot point: "… the standardisation of English has been in progress for many centuries."

Modern English came into being as the standard Middle English (i.e., as the preferred dialect of the monarch, court and administration). That dialect was of the East Midland, which had spread to

, published by Caxton in 1476.

The first English grammars were written in

.

French

French (as

and the Anglo-Norman domains in both northwestern France and Britain, English scholars retained an interest in the fate of French as well as of English. Some of the numerous 16th-century surviving grammars are:

• John Palsgrave, L'esclarcissement de la langue francoyse (1530; in English).
• Louis Meigret, Tretté de la grammaire françoeze (1550).
• Robert Stephanus: Traicté de la grammaire françoise (1557).

The development of a standard German was impeded by political disunity and strong local traditions until the invention of printing made possible a "

. Various administrations wished to create a civil service, or chancery, language that would be useful in more than one locality. And finally, nationalists wished to counter the spread of the French national language into German-speaking territories assisted by the efforts of the French Academy.

With so many linguists moving in the same direction, a standard German (hochdeutsche Schriftsprache) did evolve without the assistance of a language academy. Its precise origin, the major constituents of its features, remains uncertainly known and debatable. Latin prevailed as a lingua franca until the 17th century, when grammarians began to debate the creation of an ideal language. Before 1550 as a conventional date, "supraregional compromises" were used in printed works, such as the one published by Valentin Ickelsamer (Ein Teutsche Grammatica) 1534. Books published in one of these artificial variants began to increase in frequency, replacing the Latin then in use. After 1550 the supraregional ideal broadened to a universal intent to create a national language from Early New High German by deliberately ignoring regional forms of speech,^[29] which practice was considered to be a form of purification parallel to the ideal of purifying religion in Protestantism.

In 1617, the Fruitbearing Society, a language club, was formed in Weimar in imitation of the Accademia della Crusca in Italy. It was one of many such clubs; however, none became a national academy. In 1618–1619 Johannes Kromayer wrote the first all-German grammar.^[30] In 1641 Justin Georg Schottel in teutsche Sprachkunst presented the standard language as an artificial one. By the time of his work of 1663, ausführliche Arbeit von der teutschen Haubt-Sprache, the standard language was well established.

Auraicept na n-Éces is a grammar of the Irish language which is thought to date back as far as the 7th century: the earliest surviving manuscripts are 12th-century.

Italian appears before standardization as the lingua Italica of Isidore and the lingua vulgaris of subsequent medieval writers. Documents of mixed Latin and Italian are known from the 12th century, which appears to be the start of writing in Italian.^[31]

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, "Grammar of the Tuscan Language". In it Alberti sought to demonstrate that the vernacular – here Tuscan, known today as modern Italian – was every bit as structured as Latin. 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

More influential perhaps were the 1516 Regole grammaticali della volgar 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.^[33]

The first grammar in a vernacular language in western Europe was published in

in both grammar and rhetorical ways.

Chronologically, Spanish (more accurately, lengua castellana) has a development similar to that of Italian. There was some vocabulary in Isidore of Seville, with traces afterward, writing from about the 12th century; standardisation began in the 15th century, concurrent with the rise of Castile as an international power.^[34] The first Spanish grammar by Antonio de Nebrija (Tratado de gramática sobre la lengua 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.

The Grammar Books of the Master-poets (

First vernacular dictionaries

A

dictionaries

emerged together with vernacular grammars.

Dutch

Glossaries in Dutch began about 1470 AD leading eventually to two

• Christophe Plantin: Thesaurus Theutonicae Linguae, 1573
• Cornelis Kiliaan: Dictionarium Teutonico-Latinum, 1574 (becoming Etymologicum with the 1599 3rd edition)

Shortly after (1579) the

founded in 1909.

] but usages do exist, which must be learnt by the speakers, and do not conform to prescriptive rules.

Usages have been documented not by prescriptive grammars, which on the whole are less comprehensible to the general public, but by comprehensive dictionaries, often termed unabridged, which attempt to list all usages of words and the phrases in which they occur as well as the date of first use and the etymology where possible. These typically require many volumes, and yet not more so than the unabridged dictionaries of many languages.

Bilingual dictionaries and glossaries precede modern English and were in use in the earliest written English. The first monolingual dictionary was

(1755).

By 1858, the need for an update resulted in the first planning for a new comprehensive dictionary to document standard English, a term coined at that time by the planning committee.[39] The dictionary, known as the Oxford English Dictionary, published its first fascicle in 1884. It attracted significant contributions from some singular minds, such as William Chester Minor, a former army surgeon who had become criminally insane and made most of his contributions while incarcerated. Whether the OED is the long-desired standard English Dictionary is debatable, but its authority is taken seriously by the entire English-speaking world. Its staff is currently working on a third edition.

Surviving dictionaries are a century earlier than their grammars. The

founded in 1635 was given the obligation of producing a standard dictionary. Some early dictionaries are:

• Louis Cruse, alias Garbin: Dictionaire latin-françois, 1487
• Robert Estienne, alias Robertus Stephanus: Dictionnaire françois–latin, 1539
• 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
• Dictionnaire de l’Académie française
  , 1694 annis.

Joshua Maaler's Die Teutsche Spraach: Dictionarium Germanico-latinum novum (1561).

It was followed along similar lines by Georg Heinisch: Teütsche Sprache und Weißheit (1616). After numerous dictionaries and glossaries of a less-than-comprehensive nature came a thesaurus that attempted to include all German, Kaspar Stieler's Der Teutschen Sprache Stammbaum und Fortwachs oder Teutschen Sprachschatz (1691), and finally the first codification of written German,^[41] Johann Christoph Adelung's Versuch eines vollständigen grammatisch-kritischen Wörterbuches Der Hochdeutschen Mundart (1774–1786). Schiller called Adelung an Orakel and Wieland is said to have nailed a copy to his desk.

In the early 15th century a number of glossaries appeared, such as that of Lucillo Minerbi on

Monolingual

• Alberto Accarisio: Vocabolario et grammatica con l'orthographia della lingua volgare, 1543
• 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

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 françois 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 español e italiano, Roma, 1620.

• The first vernacular Serbian dictionary was Srpski rječnik (Serbian dictionary) written by Vuk Karadžić and published in 1818.
• Dictionary of Serbo-Croatian Literary and Vernacular Language was initiated in 1888 by Stojan Novaković, still in the making

The first Spanish dictionaries in the 15th century were Latin-Spanish/Spanish-Latin, followed by monolingual Spanish. In 1713 the

, "Royal Spanish Academy", was founded to set standards. It published an official dictionary, 1726–1739.

• Alonzo de Palencia: El universal vocabulario en latin y romance, 1490
• Antonio de Nebrija: Lexicon latino-hispanicum et hispanico-latinum, 1492
• Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco: Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española
  , 1611
• Real Academia Española
  : Diccionario de la lengua castellana, 1726–1739

Metaphorical usage

The term "vernacular" may also be applied metaphorically to any cultural product of the lower, common orders of society that is relatively uninfluenced by the ideas and ideals of the educated élite. Hence, vernacular has had connotations of a coarseness and crudeness. "Vernacular architecture", for example, is a term applied to buildings designed in any style based on practical considerations and local traditions, in contrast to the "polite architecture" produced by professionally trained architects to nationally or internationally agreed aesthetic standards. The historian Guy Beiner has developed the study of "vernacular historiography" as a more sophisticated conceptualization of folk history.^[43]

Sources

• Bex, Tony (1999). "Representations of English in twentieth-century Britain: Fowler, Gowers, Partridge". In Bex, Tony; Watts, Richard J. (eds.). Standard English: the widening debate. New York: Routledge. pp. 89–112. 0-415-19162-9.
• Brachin, Pierre (1985). The Dutch language: a survey. Leiden: E.J. Brill.
• Champneys, Arthur Charles (1893). History of English: a sketch of the origin and development of the English with Examples, Down to the Present Day. New York: Macmillan and Co.
• DeGrauwe, Luc (2002). "Emerging Mother-Tongue Awareness: The Special Case of Dutch and German in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period". In Linn, Andrew Robert; McLelland, Nicola (eds.). Standardization: studies from the Germanic languages. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co. pp. 99–116.
• Diez, Friedrich (1863). Introduction to the grammar of the Romance languages. London, Edinburgh: Williams and Norgate.
• Dons, Ute (2004). Descriptive adequacy of early modern English grammars. Topics in English Linguistics. Vol. 47. Berlin; New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
• Fasold, Ralph W. (1984). The sociolinguistics of society. Vol. 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.
  JSTOR 851432
  .
• 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.
• Noordegraaf, Jan (2000). "The Normative Study of the National Languages from the 17th Century Onwards". In Auroux, Sylvain (ed.). History of the language sciences: an international handbook on the evolution of the study of language from the beginnings to the present. Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft, Bd. 18. Vol. 2. Berlin; New York: Walter de Gruyter. pp. 893–900.
• Wells, C. J. (1985). German, a linguistic history to 1945. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
• Suhardi, B.; Sembiring, B. Cornelius (2007). "Aspek sosial bahasa". In Kushartanti; Yuwono, Untung; Lauder, Multamia R. M. T. (eds.). Pesona bahasa: langkah awal memahami linguistik (in Indonesian). Jakarta: Gramedia Pustaka Utama.
  OCLC 156874430
  .

Bibliography

• Wolfram, Walt; Schilling-Estes, Natalie (1998). American English: dialects and variation. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell.
• McWhorter, John H. (2001). Word on the Street: Debunking the Myth of a "Pure" Standard English. Basic Books.
• Fodde Melis, Luisanna (2002). Race, Ethnicity and Dialects: Language Policy and Ethnic Minorities in the United States. FrancoAngeli.
  ISBN 9788846439123
  .
• Mesthrie, Rajend (1994). Standardisation and variation in South African English. pp. 181–201. Retrieved 16 May 2019.
• Fasold, Ralph (2006) "The politics of language." In R.W. Fasold and J. Connor-Linton (eds) An Introduction to Language and Linguistics. pp. 383-412. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Nordquist, R., 2019. What Is Nonstandard English?. [online] ThoughtCo. Available at: https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-nonstandard-english-1691438 [Accessed 5 May 2022].

External links

Look up vernacular in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Illich, Ivan. "Vernacular Values". The Preservation Institute. Archived from the original on 20 July 2016. Retrieved 7 November 2009.