Vernacular

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Vernacular is the ordinary, informal,

native variety. Despite any such stigma, modern linguistics
regards all nonstandard dialects as grammatically full-fledged varieties of a language.

Overview

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

American South in earlier U.S. history, including older African-American Vernacular English, "the often nonstandard speech of Southern white planters, nonstandard British dialects of indentured servants, and West Indian patois, [...] were nonstandard but not substandard."[5] In other words, the adjective "nonstandard" should not be taken to mean that these various dialects were intrinsically incorrect, less logical, or otherwise inferior, only that they were not the socially perceived norm or mainstream considered prestigious or appropriate for public speech; however, nonstandard dialects are indeed often stigmatized as such, due to socially-induced post-hoc rationalization.[6]
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.[7][8]

Ecclesiastical Law
.
Trinci Palace, Foligno, Italy, by Gentile da Fabriano
, who lived in the era of Italian language standardization

Vernacular may vary from more

, used to facilitate communication across a large area.

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.[9] 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 dialects should not be taught, there has been evidence to prove that teaching nonstandard dialects in the classroom can encourage some children to learn English.

Etymology

First usage of the word "vernacular" 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 already in use in a modern sense.[10] According to Merriam-Webster,[11] "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.[12]

Concepts of the vernacular

General linguistics

In contrast with lingua franca

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
Ratio of books printed in Europe in the vernacular languages to those in Latin in the 15th century[13]

In

The Song of Roland
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,

Gospels translated to vernacular Ukrainian language in 1561 are known as Peresopnytsia Gospel
.

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

scientific nomenclature
for details.

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

Louis XIV of France
.

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.

As a low variant in diglossia

The vernacular is also often contrasted with a

Ge'ez, but parts of the Mass are read in Amharic
.

Similarly, in

Ramacharitamanasa, a Awadhi 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[15]). 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.[16]

Sociolinguistics

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

As 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 they can use without this effort is the first form of speech acquired.[17]

As a non-standard dialect

In another theory, the vernacular language is opposed to the

African American Vernacular English.[3]

As an idealisation

A vernacular is not a real language but is "an abstract set of norms".[18]

First vernacular grammars

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.

Dutch

In the 16th century, the "

Hendrick Laurenszoon Spieghel
was a major contributor, with others contributing as well.

English

Norman conquest of 1066 AD, and of Latin at the instigation of the clerical administration. While present-day English speakers may be able to read Middle English authors (such as Geoffrey Chaucer), Old English
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,[20] "… 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

Canterbury Tales
, published by Caxton in 1476.

The first English grammars were written in

Alexander Gill, Ben Jonson, Joshua Poole, John Wallis, Jeremiah Wharton, James Howell, Thomas Lye, Christopher Cooper, William Lily, John Colet and more, all leading to the massive dictionary of Samuel Johnson
.

French

French (as

Norman conquest of England
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).

German

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

Roman Catholic Church
. 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,[27] 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.[28] 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.

Irish

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

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.[29]

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

Vatican library. It is therefore called the Grammatichetta vaticana.[30]

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.[31]

Occitan

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

Gai Saber
in both grammar and rhetorical ways.

Spanish

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.[32] 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.

Welsh

The Grammar Books of the Master-poets (

Welsh Language developed from these through the Middle Ages and to the Renaissance.[33]

First vernacular dictionaries

A

dictionaries
emerged together with vernacular grammars.

Dutch

Glossaries in Dutch began about 1470 AD leading eventually to two

Shortly after (1579) the

Die Taalkommissie
founded in 1909.

English

Oxford University, which relied on the scholars whom they hired. There is a general but far from uniform consensus among the leading scholars about what should or should not be said in standard English; but for every rule, examples from famous English writers can be found that break it.[citation needed] Uniformity of spoken English never existed and does not exist now,[citation needed
] 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

Nathaniel Bailey's An Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1721). These dictionaries whetted the interest of the English-speaking public in greater and more prescriptive dictionaries until Samuel Johnson published Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language (1747), which would imitate the dictionary being produced by the French Academy. He had no problem acquiring the funding, but not as a prescriptive dictionary. This was to be a grand comprehensive dictionary of all English words at any period, A Dictionary of the English Language
(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.[37] 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.

French

Surviving dictionaries are a century earlier than their grammars. The

Académie française
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.

German

High German dictionaries began in the 16th century and were at first multi-lingual. They were preceded by glossaries of German words and phrases on various specialized topics. Finally interest in developing a vernacular German grew to the point where Maaler could publish a work called by Jacob Grimm "the first truly German dictionary",[38]
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,[39] 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.

Italian

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

Dante in 1536. In the mid-16th the dictionaries began, as listed below. In 1582 the first language academy was formed, called Accademia della Crusca, "bran academy", which sifted language like grain. Once formed, its publications were standard-setting.[40]

Monolingual

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

Italian / Spanish

Serbo-Croatian

Spanish

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

Real Academia Española
, "Royal Spanish Academy", was founded to set standards. It published an official dictionary, 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.[41]

See also

References

  1. .
  2. ^ Fodde Melis (2002), p. 36
  3. ^ a b Wolfram & Schilling-Estes (1998), p. 13–16
  4. ^ Trudgill, Peter (1999). "Standard English: what it isn't". In Bex, T.; Watts, R.J. (eds.). Standard English: The Widening Debate. London: Routledge. pp. 117–128. Archived from the original on 21 March 2009.
  5. ^ McWhorter (2001), p. 152
  6. ^ Mesthrie (1994), p. 182
  7. .
  8. ^ Suhardi & Sembiring (2007), p. 61–62
  9. ^ "What Is Nonstandard English?". ThoughtCo. Retrieved 5 May 2022.
  10. ^ Howell, James (1688). Epistolæ Ho-Elianæ: Familiar letters, domestic and forren (6th ed.). London: Thomas Grey. p. 363.
  11. ^ "vernacular". Merriam-Webster Online. Retrieved 8 November 2009.
  12. ^ Gaffiot, Felix (1934). "vernaculus". Dictionnaire Illustré Latin Français. Paris: Librairie Hachette.
  13. ^ "Incunabula Short Title Catalogue". British Library. Retrieved 2 March 2011.
  14. . In 1953, UNESCO defined a lingua franca as 'a language which is used habitually by people whose mother tongues are different in order to facilitate communication between them.'
  15. ^ "diglossia". Stedman's Medical Dictionary (5th ed.). 1918.
  16. ^ Fasold 1984, pp. 34–60
  17. ^ Mesthrie 1999, pp. 77–83
  18. ^ Lodge 2005, p. 13
  19. ^ Noordegraaf 2000, p. 894
  20. ^ Milroy, James; Milroy, Lesley (1985). Authority in language: investigating language prescription and standardisation. Routledge. p. 29.
  21. ^ Champneys 1893, pp. 269, 285–286, 301, 314
  22. ^ Dons 2004, p. 6
  23. ^ Dons 2004, p. 5
  24. ^ Dons 2004, pp. 7–9
  25. ^ Diez 1863, pp. 118–119
  26. ^ Wells 1985, p. 134
  27. ^ Langer, Nils (2002), "On the Importance of Foreign Language Grammars for a History of Standard German", in Linn, Andrew Robert; McLelland, Nicola (eds.), Standardization: studies from the Germanic languages, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 235, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, pp. 69–70
  28. ^ Wells 1985, p. 222
  29. ^ Diez 1863, pp. 75–77
  30. Walter de Gruyter
    , pp. 742–749
  31. ^ Diez 1863, p. 77
  32. ^ Diez 1863, p. 98
  33. ^ Gruffudd, R. Geraint (2006), "Gramadegau'r Penceirddiaid", in Koch, John (ed.), Celtic culture: a historical encyclopedia, Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, pp. 843–4
  34. ^ Brachin 1985, p. 15
  35. ^ Brachin 1985, pp. 26–27
  36. ^ Bex 1999, p. 76
  37. ^ Bex 1999, p. 71
  38. ^ Wells 1985, pp. 214–215
  39. ^ Wells 1985, p. 339
  40. ^ Yates, Frances Amelia (1983). Renaissance and reform: the Italian contribution. Vol. 2. Taylor & Francis Group. p. 18.
  41. .

Sources

Bibliography

External links