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  • 26 - Language and Communication in Carolingian Europe

  • from PART IV - CULTURE AND INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENTS
  • Edited by Rosamond McKitterick, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    The New Cambridge Medieval History
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    14 September 1995, pp 695-708

  • Summary

    This chapter focuses on the application of modern socio-linguistic advances to the Carolingian period. From the socio-linguistic point of view, the transition from different kinds of spoken Latin to the Romance languages, and the corresponding wreck of general Latin communication, led, from the 750s onwards, to the establishment of a situation of diglossia. The end of the Merovingian centuries and the whole of the Carolingian period in the linguistic and cultural history of Europe can be described in a way which, however complex its elements, reveals a creative development, much less confused than appeared at first sight; the ills and the disorders which the language of the Merovingian charters appears, time and time again, to display are the indirect sign of an intense linguistic activity, from which would emerge the new and unforeseen perfection of the Romance dialects, fruit of a process by which final order was born of apparent chaos.