Language variety has played an important, even an essential role in the creation of the cultural heritage of Europe, and indeed of the world as a whole. Admittedly, linguistic unity as a basis for universal understanding is one of the oldest dreams of humankind, expressed in the biblical myth of the Tower of Babel, and the repeated attempts throughout the centuries to create a universal language, not to speak of the pretensions of some major languages to embody universal values, from Latin, French and Spanish to (American) English or Mandarin Chinese. Yet linguistic variety is the rule and the background of such dreams. Ever since the actual appropriation of languages by nations, states or political regimes, many centuries ago, languages have been identified as ‘vernacular’, ‘domestic’, ‘regional’ or ‘national’, owned by specific social groups and cultural communities. They distinguish themselves from ‘foreign’ languages or idioms used by speakers who do not belong to the in-group of native speakers and those who have joined them in the course of history. The distinction between ‘own’/‘native’ and ‘foreign’/‘acquired’ has no linguistic foundation, but is of a social and cultural nature. This distinction is at the basis of the series on languages and culture in history inaugurated by this volume.

The scope of this series is to explore the multifarious relations between language and culture in history. Some definitions are required. In this series, we will consider language in its very broad definition as a tool, system and symbolic form of communication among persons, communities and peoples. However, there are hundreds of definitions of culture. Taken broadly, they all amount to one general conception, worded as follows by the cultural historian Peter Burke in a definition that has acquired authority among historians: culture is ‘a system of shared meanings, attitudes and values, and the symbolic forms (performances, artefacts) in which they are expressed or embodied’. In this broad, social and societal sense, recognizing formally its symbolic expressions, culture goes well beyond the traditional normative or aesthetic conception and applies to the larger field of social and cultural anthropology. In a discussion of the role of language in history, Graham Dunstan Martin has called this the socioculture as opposed to the value culture.