Deeply embedded in the history of Latin Europe,
the vernacular ("the language of slaves") still draws us towards
urgent issues of affiliation, identity, and cultural struggle. Vernacular
politics in medieval Latin Europe were richly complex and the structures
of thought and feeling they left behind permanently affected Western
culture. The Vulgar Tongue explores the history of European
vernacularity through more than a dozen studies of language situations
from twelfth-century England and France to twentieth-century India
and North America, and from the building of nations, empires, or
ethnic communities to the politics of gender, class, or religion.
The essays in The Vulgar Tongue offer new
vistas on the idea of the vernacular in contexts as diverse as Ramon
Llull’s thirteenth-century prefiguration of universal grammar,
the orthography of Early Middle English, the humanist struggle for
linguistic purity in Early Modern Dutch, and the construction of
standard Serbian and Romanian in the waning decades of the Austro-Hungarian
empire. Here Latin, the "common tongue" of European intellectuals,
is sometimes just another vernacular, Sanskrit and Hindi stake their
claims as the languages of Shakespeare, African-American poetry
is discovered in conversation with Middle English, and fourteenth-century
Florence becomes the city, not of Dante and Boccaccio, but of the
artisan poet Pucci. Delicate political messages are carried by nuances
of French dialect, while the status of French and German as feminine
"mother tongues" is fiercely refuted and as fiercely embraced. Clerics
treat dialect, idiom, and gesture—not language itself—as
the hallmarks of "vulgar" preaching, or else argue the case for
Bible translation mainly in pursuit of their own academic freedom.
Endlessly fluid in meaning and reference, the term
"vernacular" emerges from this book as a builder of bridges between
the myriad phenomena it can describe, as a focus of reflection both
on the history of Western culture and on the responsibilities of
those who would analyze it.
