Vernacular Languages

Vernacular Languages

Introduction

Vernacular language can be described as using a verbal communication that is native to a province or country rather than a foreign, cultured or literary language. vernacular languages can also be well thought-out as the large family of modern “Romance” languages. Earlier than the 12th century, Latin was the most important commonly used language by writers. The expansions of Latin were inclined by various other native languages like Greek, Celtic languages and Etruscan. Latin was incessantly developed since there were noteworthy differences in each era. These differences incorporated those in the literature i.e. written language, and moreover in the dissimilarities in the spoken language of the literate and less literate population (Garrett, 2005).

Discussion

In early 20th century, Romantics like Johann Gottfried Herder deemphasized the role of individuals and focused instead on the collective group, the people, bound together by shared culture, most notably language, religion, and history. Romantics believed that each language was a currency of thought (White, 2004). Therefore, to bond together into a nation, individuals had to speak the same language. Vernacular languages were very important because each one embodied a nation's culture, beliefs, and values, molding its members' thinking and behavior in a way not completely translatable into other languages. Nature also was seen as a determinant of national identity because it was believed to be a force that shaped culture, including language. This notion was reinforced by environmental determinism as it grew in the 20th century (Bucholtz & Hall, 2004). Thus, language and physiographic regions were seen to go hand in hand and were viewed as mutually reinforcing. For example, Irish nationalists frequently asserted that nature (which often includes God) created an island called Ireland and, therefore, nature intends for one people i.e., the Irish to live there under the governance of a single Irish state. Similarly, French nationalists developed the belief that France was naturally bounded by the Atlantic, the Pyrenees, the Alps, and the Rhine River. For example, Buache de la Neuville wrote that France's boundaries should be fixed according to “the natural division of the Globe formed at its origin by the Creator” (White, 2004).

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the idea of race became entangled with these romantic conceptions of nation, essentially making the two synonymous for a time. Maps too reinforced the unification of these concepts by depicting the spatial distributions of “races,” though they were basically the same as maps of nations defined by languages. An example is seen in a National Geographic map titled “The Races of Europe.” It appeared as a supplement in the organization's December 1918 issue of its magazine, which was devoted to the topic of race (Connor, 1978). The union of race and nation reached its culmination with the Nazis and likewise was discredited, but their association still lingers as some see nations as somehow genetically based.

In the latter half of the 20th century, scholars recognized that nations cannot be easily defined by objective criteria such as language and ...