Conservatism in Language: Framing Latin in Late Antique and Early Medieval Iberia

Abstract

This chapter sketches the general features of Latin in the Iberian Peninsula in its late antique and early medieval context: from 400 to 700, in contact with Greek, Hebrew, and trace Germanic and British Celtic elements, and from 700 to 1000, in dialogue with Arabic, Basque, and emerging Hebrew and Romance options. Allowing for the challenges posed by the markedly uneven distribution and transmission of the surviving written evidence, Latin in the Visigothic era operated in a multilingual and multi-register environment, which varied according to geography and socioeconomic situation and reflected distinct levels of educational background, expression, and communicative intention. In the post-Visigothic period, the Christian north is represented by everyday documentary Latin, and the Muslim south by one of elite literary Latin, giving the impression in comparison of a living versus a dying language. Much debate has focused on whether the living language in the north was still Latin, but the model of ‘complex monolingualism’ demonstrates how its conservative written form was capable of recording and being pronounced to accommodate evolving and diverse spoken forms incorporating external influences. If the long-term linguistic history of Iberia is dynamic, the Latin of the Peninsula is defined by this basic conservatism, and the chapter’s conclusion considers the factors sustaining it by delineating two constraints on the evolution of the language: formulism, or the recourse by scribes to old models for drafting new documents, and reading as hearing, or the recycling of text back into speech by these same scribes.