Multilingual Practices in Historical Language Contexts
Summary
Multilingual practices in historical settings encompass the ways in which speakers and writers negotiated multiple linguistic systems within a single community or text. From late antique inscriptions that interweave Greek and Latin to medieval administrative records blending Latin, Old English and Old Norse, these practices reveal dynamic contact zones where languages coexisted, competed and fused. Scholars examine phenomena such as code-switching, loan formation, and vernacularisation to understand how social status, identity and function shaped language choice. Scribes and speakers often deployed a dominant lingua franca for formal registers while drawing on vernacular elements for local or technical terminology. Such hybridity is evident in ecclesiastical translations, account rolls, legal charters and literary compositions, where the layering of linguistic conventions reflects cultural exchange, political alliances and educational traditions. Research explores how multilingual repertoires were managed—whether through selective borrowing, adaptation of foreign inflectional patterns or alignment with scriptorial norms—and how these strategies informed the development of emerging national and regional languages. The study of historical multilingualism thus illuminates broader questions about literacy, authority and the transmission of knowledge across linguistic boundaries.
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Multilingual Practices in Historical Language Contexts publication trend
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Technical terms
Code-switching: The alternation between two or more languages or dialects within a discourse or utterance.
Diglossia: A sociolinguistic situation in which two varieties of a language coexist, each with a distinct functional role.
Loanword: A word adopted from one language into another with little or no modification.
Translanguaging: The process by which multilingual speakers integrate features of different languages within a single communicative act.
Vernacularisation: The adoption and development of a local or native language for writing and official use, often replacing a previous lingua franca.
References
- The Inflection of Latin Proper Names in the Old English Translation of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica. Languages (2024).
- Old Norse-derived lexis in multilingual accounts: a case study. English Language and Linguistics (2021).
- Personal names in medieval libri vitæ as a sociolinguistic resource. Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics (2023).
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