Vernacular refers to the native language Sometimes the term first language is used for the language that the speaker speaks best of a country or a locality. In general linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of meaning (semantics). Grammar encompasses morphology (the formation and composition of words), syntax (the rules that determine how words combine into, it is used to describe local languages as opposed to linguas franca Lingua franca is a functionally defined term, independent of the linguistic history or structure of the language: though pidgins and creoles often function as lingua francas, many lingua francas are neither pidgins nor creoles, official standards or global languages. It is sometimes applied to nonstandard dialects The term dialect is used in two distinct ways, even by scholars of language. One usage refers to a variety of a language that is characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors, such as social class. A dialect that is of a global language. For instance, in Western Europe Western Europe refers to the countries generally in the westernmost half of Europe, but the definition is complex and carries political connotations. As a result, geographically eastern countries that steered clear of Soviet influence during the Cold War are usually included, while Western members of the former Eastern Bloc (Czech Republic, Poland) up until the 17th century, most scholarly work had been written in Latin Latin is an Italic language historically spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Through the Roman conquest, Latin spread throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe. Romance languages such as Italian, French, Catalan, Romanian, Spanish, and Portuguese are descended from Latin, while many others, especially European languages, including, so works written in a native language were said to be in the vernacular. Also, In the history of European literature European literature includes literature in many languages; among the most important of the modern written works are those in English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Polish, German, Italian, Modern Greek, Czech and Russian and works by the Scandinavians and Irish, there can be said to have been various periods of “vernacularization” when, for example, those languages now referred to as Romance languages The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family comprising all the languages that descend from Latin, the language of ancient Rome. There are more than 600 million native speakers worldwide, mainly in the Americas, Europe, and Africa, as well as many smaller regions scattered throughout the world. The six most widely spoken started to produce literatures of their own. The Divine Comedy The Divine Comedy , written by Dante Alighieri between 1308 and his death in 1321, is widely considered the central epic poem of Italian literature, and is seen as one of the greatest works of world literature. The poem's imaginative and allegorical vision of the Christian afterlife is a culmination of the medieval world-view as it had developed, the Cantar de mio Cid El Cantar de Mio Cid , also known in English as The Lay of the Cid, is the oldest preserved Spanish epic poem (epopeya). The Spanish medievalist Ramón Menéndez Pidal included the "Cantar de Mío Cid" in the popular tradition he termed the mester de juglaría. Mester de juglaría refers to the medieval tradition according to which, and The Song of Roland The Song of Roland is the oldest surviving major work of French literature. It exists in various different manuscript versions, which testify to its enormous and enduring popularity in the 12th to 14th centuries. The oldest of these versions is the one in the Oxford manuscript, which contains a text of some 4,004 lines (the number varies slightly are examples of early vernacular literature in those languages that would one day be called Italian, Spanish, and French, respectively. Dante’s Durante degli Alighieri , commonly known as Dante, was an Italian poet of the Middle Ages. His central work, the Divina Commedia (originally called Commedia and later called Divina ("divine") by Boccaccio), is often considered[who?] one of the greatest literary works composed in the Italian language and a masterpiece of world literature De Vulgari Eloquentia De vulgari eloquentia is the title of an essay by Dante Alighieri, written in Latin and initially meant to consist of four books, but abandoned in the middle of the second. It was probably composed shortly after Dante went into exile; internal evidence points to a date between 1302 and 1305. The first book deals with the relationship between Latin (1305), which he wrote before the Divine Comedy, was an important justification of the need to start writing literature in the vernacular, the language of the people. (See Vernacular literature In the European tradition, this effectively means literature not written in Latin. In this context, vernacular literature appeared during the Middle Ages; among the earliest European vernacular literature include Irish literature, Welsh literature, Anglo-Saxon literature and Gothic literature)

The vernacular is also often contrasted with a liturgical language A sacred language, or liturgical language, is a language that is cultivated for religious reasons by people who speak another language in their daily life (in linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of meaning (semantics). Grammar encompasses morphology (the formation and composition of words), syntax (the rules that determine how words combine into, the relationship between these "High" and "Low" languages or varieties of a language is referred to as diglossia In linguistics, diglossia is a situation where a given language community uses two languages or dialects: the first being the community's present day vernacular and the second being either an ancestral version of the same vernacular from centuries earlier (example: Arabic, Chinese) or a distinct yet closely related present day dialect, e.g). For example, until the 1960s, Latin Rite The Latin Church or Rite is the majority Rite or particular Church within the Catholic Church, comprising roughly 98% of its membership. The Latin Rite is one of the 23 sui iuris particular Churches within the Catholic Church. This particular Church developed in western Europe and north Africa, where, from antiquity to the Renaissance, Latin was Roman Catholics held Masses The Mass is the Eucharistic celebration in the Latin liturgical rites of the Roman Catholic Church. The term is used also of similar celebrations in Old Catholic Churches, in the Anglo-Catholic tradition of Anglicanism, and in some largely High Church Lutheran regions, including the Scandinavian and Baltic countries. For the celebration of the in Latin Latin is an Italic language historically spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Through the Roman conquest, Latin spread throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe. Romance languages such as Italian, French, Catalan, Romanian, Spanish, and Portuguese are descended from Latin, while many others, especially European languages, including rather than in local vernacular language, to this day the Coptic Church The Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria is the official name for the largest Christian church in Egypt. The Church belongs to the Oriental Orthodox family of churches, which has been a distinct church body since the Council of Chalcedon in AD 451, when it took a different position over Christological theology from that of the Eastern Orthodox and holds liturgies A liturgy is the customary public worship done by a specific religious group, according to their particular traditions. The word may refer to an elaborate formal ritual such as the Eastern Orthodox Divine Liturgy and Catholic Mass, or a daily activity such as the Muslim salat and Jewish services. As a religious phenomenon, liturgy is a communal in Coptic Coptic or Coptic Egyptian is the final stage of the Egyptian language, a northern Afro-Asiatic language spoken in Egypt until at least the seventeenth century. Egyptian began to be written using the Greek alphabet in the first century. The new writing system became the Coptic script, an adapted Greek alphabet with the addition of six to seven; though parts of Mass are read in Amharic Amharic is a Semitic language spoken in North Central Ethiopia by the Amhara. It is the second most-spoken Semitic language in the world, after Arabic, and the official working language of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. Thus, it has official status and is used nationwide. Amharic is also the official or working language of several of, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church is an Oriental Orthodox Christian church in Ethiopia that was part of the Coptic Orthodox Church until 1959, when it was granted its own Patriarch by Coptic Orthodox Pope of Alexandria and Patriarch of All Africa, Cyril VI holds liturgies in Ge'ez Ge'ez is an ancient South Semitic language that developed in the current region of Eritrea and northern Ethiopia in the Horn of Africa. It later became the official language of the Kingdom of Aksum and Ethiopian imperial court, etc. The Reformation The Protestant Reformation was a Christian reform movement in Europe which is generally deemed to have begun with Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses although a number of precursors such as Johannes Hus predate that event. As a historical period, the Reformation is considered to have ended with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648; however, many of the was spread by the publication of Bibles Modern Judaism generally recognizes a single set of canonical books known as the Tanakh, or Hebrew or Jewish Bible. It comprises three parts: the Torah , the Prophets, and the Writings. It was primarily written in Hebrew with some small portions in Aramaic.[citation needed] In Christian religions, the Tanakh is known as the Old Testament and other religious writings in the vernacular, and the reforms of the Second Vatican Council The Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, or Vatican II, was the twenty-first Ecumenical Council of the Roman Catholic Church. It opened under Pope John XXIII on October 11, 1962 and closed under Pope Paul VI on December 8, 1965. At least four future pontiffs took part in the council's opening session: Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini, who permitted the use of vernacular liturgies in Roman Catholicism.

Similarly, in Hindu A Hindu ( pronunciation , Devanagari: हिन्दू) is an adherent of Hinduism, a set of religious, philosophical and cultural systems that originated in the Indian subcontinent. The vast body of Hindu scriptures, divided into Śruti ("revealed") and Smriti ("remembered"), lay the foundation of Hindu beliefs, which culture, traditionally religious or scholarly works were written in Sanskrit Classical Sanskrit is the standard register as laid out in the grammar of Pāṇini, around the 4th century BCE. Its position in the cultures of South and Southeast Asia is akin to that of Latin and Greek in Europe and it has significantly influenced most modern languages of Nepal and India (long after its use as a spoken language) or in Tamil Tamil is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly by Tamil people of the Indian subcontinent. It has official status in India, Sri Lanka and Singapore. Tamil is also spoken by significant minorities in Malaysia, Mauritius, Vietnam, Réunion as well as emigrant communities around the world. It is the administrative language of the Indian state of in the Tamil land (since Sangam era). With the rise of the bhakti movement The Bhakti movement is a Hindu religious movement in which the main spiritual practice was loving devotion to God, or bhakti. The devotion was directed towards a particular form of God, such as Shiva, Vishnu, Murukan or Shakti. The bhakti movement started in southern India and slowly spread north during the later half of the Indian medieval period from the 1100s onwards, religious works started being created in other languages Hindi Hindi (Devanāgarī: हिन्दी or हिंदी, IAST: Hindī, IPA: [ɦɪnd̪iː] ) is the name given to an Indo-Aryan language, or a dialect continuum of languages, spoken in northern and central India (the "Hindi belt"), Kannada Kannada is one of the major Dravidian languages of India, spoken predominantly in the state of Karnataka. Kannada, whose native speakers are called Kannadigas (ಕನ್ನಡಿಗರು Kannadigaru), number roughly 35 million, making it the 27th most spoken language in the world. It is one of the official languages of India and the official and, Telugu Telugu is a Dravidian language mostly spoken in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, where it is the official language. It is also spoken in the state of Tamil Nadu where it enjoys a secondary language status. It is also spoken in the states of Karnataka, Maharashtra and Jharkhand. Telugu language has a history of over 3000 years. Including non- and many other Indian languages throughout the different regions of India. For example, the Ramayana The Ramayana is an ancient Sanskrit epic. It is attributed to the Hindu sage Valmiki and forms an important part of the Hindu canon (smṛti). The Ramayana is one of the two great epics of India, the other being Mahabharata. It depicts the duties of relationships, portraying ideal characters like the ideal servant, the ideal brother, the ideal, one of Hinduism's sacred epics in Sanskrit had vernacular versions such as Ramacharitamanasa Śrī Rāmacaritamānasa (Avadhi) is an epic poem composed by the 16th-century Indian poet, Goswami Tulsidas (c.1532–1623) (also transliterated as Tulasidasa). An English translation of Rāmacaritamānasa is "The Lake of the Acts of Rama". As mentioned in the Bāla Kaṇḍa of the composition, Tulsidas started writing it in Vikram a Hindi Hindi (Devanāgarī: हिन्दी or हिंदी, IAST: Hindī, IPA: [ɦɪnd̪iː] ) is the name given to an Indo-Aryan language, or a dialect continuum of languages, spoken in northern and central India (the "Hindi belt") version of the Ramayana by the 16th century poet Tulsidas Gosvāmī Tulsīdās or Tulasī Dāsa or Tulsidas , was an Awadhi composer, philosopher, and the author of Ramacharitamanasa, an epic poem devoted to Hindu god Rama.

Vernacular in sociolinguistics

Within the subcategory of sociolinguistics Sociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used. Sociolinguistics differs from sociology of language in that the focus of sociolinguistics is the effect of the society on the language, while the latter's focus is on the language's effect, the term vernacular has been applied to several concepts, leading to confusion among scholars regarding what is actually being referred to. This term had not been heard in the western world until the late 1800s. One use of the term, as exemplified by Poplack Shana Poplack is a leading proponent of variation theory, the approach to language science pioneered by William Labov. She has extended the methodology and theory of this field into bilingual speech patterns, the prescription-praxis dialectic in the co-evolution of standard and non-standard languages, and the comparative reconstruction of (1993) and Labov William Labov is an American linguist, widely regarded as the founder of the discipline of variationist sociolinguistics. He has been described as "an enormously original and influential figure who has created much of the methodology" of sociolinguistics. He is employed as a professor in the linguistics department of the University of (1972), defines vernacular varieties as casual varieties used spontaneously rather than self-consciously. It could also be described as informal talk used in intimate situations. Linguists consider the vernacular to be the first form of speech acquired by a person.

Wolfram and Schilling-Estes (1998) on the other hand define vernacular varieties as nonstandard, local dialects The term dialect is used in two distinct ways, even by scholars of language. One usage refers to a variety of a language that is characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors, such as social class. A dialect that is, particularly because of the nonstandard grammatical In linguistics, grammar refers to the logical and structural rules that govern the composition of sentences, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology and syntax, often complemented by phonetics, phonology, semantics, and pragmatics features that they contain. They also state that there is a continuum between the vernacular and the standard.

Similar approaches have been made to define vernacular culture: Cheshire Jenny Cheshire is a British sociolinguist and professor at Queen Mary, University of London. Her research interests include language and gender, syntactic and discourse structure and narrative analysis. She has written widely on these topics for various publications (1982) sees vernacular culture as a non-standard or counter culture that is expressed through participation in particular activities or clothing styles, whereas Edwards (1992) defines it as a local culture determined by the connectedness to a certain neighbourhood.^{[citation needed]}

First vernacular grammars

Through metalinguistic publications vernaculars acquired the status of official languages An official language is a language that is given a special legal status in a particular country, state, or other territory. Typically a nation's official language will be the one used in that nation's courts, parliament and administration. However, official status can also be used to give a language a legal status, even if that language is not. Between 1437 and 1586 the first grammars In linguistics, grammar refers to the logical and structural rules that govern the composition of sentences, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology and syntax, often complemented by phonetics, phonology, semantics, and pragmatics of Italian Italian ( italiano , or lingua italiana) is a Romance language spoken by about 60 million people in Italy, and by a total of around 70 million in the world. In Switzerland, Italian is one of four official languages. It is also the official language of San Marino, as well as the primary language of Vatican City. Standard Italian, adopted by the, Spanish Spanish , sometimes called Castilian (castellano), is a Romance language that originated in northern Spain, and gradually spread in the Kingdom of Castile and evolved into the principal language of government and trade. It was taken most notably to the Americas, and also to Africa and Asia Pacific with the expansion of the Spanish Empire between, French, German and English were written, though not always immediately published.

Italian grammar

Leon Battista Alberti’s Grammatichetta vaticana was written between 1437 and 1441, but not printed until 1908, which is why its influence is debated. Alberti was concerned with showing that dialects also had structures by mapping them onto Latin, whereas his fellow grammarians Giovanni Francesco Fortunio (Regole grammaticali della vulgar lingua, 1516) and Pietro Bembo (Prose della vulgar lingua, 1525) strived to establish a norm dialect that would qualify for becoming the Italian national language.

Spanish grammar

The first (contrastive) Spanish grammar by Antonio de Nebrija (Gramática 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.

German grammar

In Germany, the first grammar evolved from pedagogical works that also tried to create a uniform standard from the many regional dialects. Like Nebrija, Valentin Ickelsamer (Ein Teütsche Grammatica, 1534) stresses the importance of understanding the structure of the national language in order to learn other languages, above all Latin.

English grammar

William Bullokar (Pamphlet for Grammar, 1586) was the first to learn a proper English grammar, preceded only by Richard Mulcaster’s general plea for mother tongue education in England, The first part of the elementary, 1582. Bullokar followed leading Latin grammarians in England to prove that English was, like Latin, governed by rules.

First vernacular dictionaries

The first vernacular dictionaries emerged together with vernacular grammars. As can be seen from the section above, many of the new grammars were based on traditional Latin ones, comparing the structure of both languages. This preservation of traditional form does not apply for the new type of dictionaries. Although they kept the macrostructure and elements of the microstructure of old dictionaries, there was more drastic change than in the case of grammars.

Up to the mid-fifteenth century, glosses and dictionaries were mostly bilingual and served the teaching of Latin. For reading and translation of Latin texts, dictionaries would usually display the sequence Latin lemma (unknown) followed by explanatory vernacular expression (known). Dictionaries with reversed order would serve the more active tasks of speaking and writing. Both types were solely concerned with the study of Latin, but at the same time they unintentionally documented the development of vernaculars at a time that these were not considered worth writing about.

With the emergence of monolingual dictionaries vernaculars arrived at their breakthrough. The gradual formation of nation states and the growing importance of national languages (that are briefly explained in the section Early Vernacular Studies) led to the publication of multilingual vernacular dictionaries in various combinations.

Some early bilingual vernacular dictionaries include:

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 fraçois 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 espanol e italiano, Roma, 1620.

Some early monolingual vernacular dictionaries:

Italian

- 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

Spanish

- Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco: Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, 1611

French

- 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

- Académie française : Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, 1694

German

- Georg Heinisch: Teütsche Sprache und Weißheit, 1616

- Johann Christoph Adelung : Versuch eines vollständigen grammatisch-kritischen Wörterbuches Der Hochdeutschen Mundart, 1774-1786

Language can blur into vernacular architecture, where the local vernacular is sometimes reflected in the form of the styles of naive/vernacular typography & hand lettering seen on signs and shopfronts. Similarly the word may be used to describe local craft - e.g. "vernacular ceramic wares".

In literature, it may apply to works that have been written to emulate the everyday speech of the middle class or the working class. Sometimes, this means that slang and colloquial speech is included.

Such material may also use different rules of grammar and punctuation than other writings, both academic and literary.

See also

• Literary language
• Sociolect
• Vernacular literature
• Vernacular architecture
• Vernacular photography

External links

• Vernacular Values by Ivan Illich

Categories: Sociolinguistics | Language varieties and styles

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