In the spirit of decolonization, the chapter argues that we read English as a vernacular and not simply a global or colonial language. It takes seriously the emphasis on “speakers” – people and technologies/media – in the “phone” of anglophone literatures to find vernacular grounds to read literary English from. The chapter parses the political meanings of English through the contested political and mediated lives it has across the world in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Pakistan), Caribbean, Eastern Europe, and anglophone Africa. For instance, English is not only a formerly colonial language in South Asia or a language of the postcolonial state in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. It is also a populist language that mediates Dalit, racioethnic, and Indigenous assertion against the fascist logics of postcolonial vernaculars like Hindi, Urdu, and Sinhala. Here, English often lives outside literary works – in other media and in other languages – as “less than a language,” as a sound, a sight, and materiality that inflects meanings on the page.Literary studies have long been concerned with the liberal axiom of voice – who speaks – and thus sought to bring new voices into the scholarly field. Through specific literary examples from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this chapter asks the critic to situate themselves and their conceptual categories: who listens and how? Which English is legitimized as “English” and which as its “other”? How do we, as readers, make English speak on the page? I use “vernacular” as a term to highlight the embodied and material mediations of English that alter its colonial meanings, as well as the very real political and multivalent desire to make common that animates English as eminently global and mobile. Vernacular names the colonial and transnational capitalist structures associated with English without re-inscribing them each time we discuss English.

The rising price of literature after the Black Death incentivized the invention of movable-type printing. An example of technological overshooting, the printing press turned an acute shortage of literature, and of human capital, into a sudden abundance. Cheaper literature encouraged wider literacy; new grammar schools and universities further multiplied human capital. That expansion sorely threatened the earlier Latinate elite, both clerical and secular, and led directly to the Reformation. Southern Catholic Europe invoked censorship; northern Protestant Europe censored only lightly. European publishing migrated northward. The divergent responses to printing are explained by: (a) the growth of Atlantic commerce and (b) the rise in Northern Europe of absolutist states. Both commerce and state-building required, and depended on, newly abundant human capital. In northern, Protestant Europe, rapidly multiplying human capital led to prosperity and technical progress; in southern, Catholic Europe, censorship constricted human capital and imposed persistent backwardness.

The conquest of Jerusalem in the summer of 1099 marked the founding of a new Latin polity on the Eastern shores of the Mediterranean, known as the Kingdom of Jerusalem. This Kingdom, which would continue to exist, with changing borders, till 1291, was the home of a greatly varied population, which included speakers of a very wide range of languages. These circumstances make the Kingdom of Jerusalem a fascinating laboratory for the study of questions related to multilingualism. Against this background, the first part of this paper provides some basic comments concerning the multilingualism which characterized the Kingdom. The second part focuses on one particular issue within this wider theme: the development of an attitude toward the French vernacular which was, at the time, unusual and innovative in comparison to the perceptions of French and Latin that dominated the western Christendom.

African American women writers of the 1980s were arguably the beneficiaries of cultural and political phenomena that held sway during the 1970s and 1980s. One of the major tenets and accomplishments of the Black Arts Movement and the Black Aesthetic of the 1960s was the validation of Black voices that came from within Black communities, drew upon the culture of Black communities -- especially the use of music and the vernacular -- and posited the validity, reality, and truth of that culture. Black women writers of the 1980s provide a logical progression from those communal assertions of value and freedom to extending the possibilities for such expression. This chapter considers the contributions of writers such as Nikki Giovanni, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, Rita Dove, Octavia Butler, Gloria Nayor, Sherley Anne Williams, and Toni Morrison as writers who extend and liberate creative and cultural possibilities initiated in earlier decades.

Ready-made histories of 1960s cultural development might easily overlook Robert Hayden. His apparently genteel politics, reflected in commitments to racial cosmopolitanism and substantial reverence for the Western canon, distinguished him from many of the innovators and experimentalists of 1960s Black radical poetry. However, Hayden’s distinctive contributions to the decade played a key role in the evolution of African American poetics. His political aesthetic became an important model for successful Black poets of the later twentieth century. These academic poets, whose professional and intellectual lives were distanced from the economic and cultural exigencies of the Black majority, learned much from Hayden’s theory of aesthetic distance. While a powerful Black aesthetic of the 1960s called for art that appeared to spring from the heart of the Black folk masses, Hayden honed a deeply introspective Black poetics, which contemplated the experiential distance that stretched between the “colleged” poet-speaker and the Black folk world.

This chapter argues that the French coutumiers are part of a Europe-wide vernacular legal revolution. Traditional narratives set these texts within the transition from custom to law, or as attempts to make custom more elegant in the face of a sense of inferiority to Roman law. The question of language of these early written customs has received little attention since outdated debates between Romanists and Germanists over whether custom originated in primordial Germanic tribes or was a disguised spin-off of university legal studies. However, language was key to the development of a written customary law. Vernacular writing in Europe began in earnest in the later twelfth century and proliferated afterwards. Coutumier authors chose to ride this wave of vernacular writing, rejecting the language of the universities and traditional written record in favour of the language of new histories, epics, and romance. The coutumiers were part of the new vernacular culture; it was a literature of lordship and dispute resolution in the lay courts for a lay public who lived in the vernacular.

This book tells the story of the formation of a new field of knowledge. It shows how various authors combined their knowledge, experience, and critical thought to write lawbooks that made various disparate customs into a field of knowledge known as customary law. These authors wrote texts, known as the coutumiers in the French legal tradition, in thirteenth-century northern France. ‘Customary law’ typically refers to a type of rule made in practice, and in the courts, by the community, which can include ‘the people’ in some form, lords and kings, or lawyers and judges. Customs concerning specific rules of property, succession, and other subjects certainly emerged out of this oral practice. Coutumier authors, however, successfully crafted customary law into an expository genre of writing, one that took ideas of custom from practical experience and different forms of book learning and transformed them into bodies of customary law.

This chapter traces three stages in the formation of a French literary tradition that take place in the early Middle Ages. The first is the awareness that a vernacular language distinct from spoken Latin exists (which would of course pertain to all Romance languages); the second, the appearance of this language in written form; the third, the establishment of a solidified written tradition of literary works, both devotional and secular, translations of Latin works as well as transcriptions of hitherto orally transmitted poetic works. The first stage occurs early in the ninth century with the first documented acknowledgments of a Romance vernacular distinct from Latin in Gaul. A mere handful of written texts of modest size in the vernacular have survived from the following three centuries, predominantly in the margins of Latin manuscripts. Autonomous secular texts in Old French start appearing in the early twelfth century, most notably in England, within a couple of generations of the Norman Conquest. The balance of the chapter deals with the insular social dynamic of the twelfth century in England that differentiated its interests from those on the Continent, where innovations in courtly love literature thrived, whereas they were ultimately sidelined in England.

In Iceland, as on the Continent, the fifty years on either side of 1200 witnessed a burst of literary production in the vernacular. The new medium of the book, with its state-of-the-art technological infrastructure and storage potential, had arrived. Norse prose texts were composed and compiled in emulation of or in rivalry with Latin and European vernacular models. Elite channels funnelled Latin learning throughout the country, invigorating and fertilizing its famed indigenous traditions. In the centuries that followed, some literary works were kept, some discarded, some were remodelled to suit shifting tastes. Textual collections reveal individual strategies of acquisition, classification, and censorship. Sociologists speak of the dynamics of hip-hop or jazz in terms of African and European counterflows, minglings, intertwinings, see-sawings, stigmergies, feedback loops, co-optations, hybridizations, and other vertiginous to-ings and fro-ings. In medieval Scandinavia as elsewhere, the exotic and different exerted an attraction, with new literary forms slowly obsoleting the old. The literary culture of medieval Scandinavia achieved its shape under the influence of European models, but was at the same time conditioned by local economic, social, and political arrangements.

This chapter provides an introductory coverage of the major issues involved in designing and executing sociolinguistic research with a focus on spoken Arabic in natural settings. It explains the concept of the observer’s paradox and suggests methods to reduce its effects in sociolinguistic interviews. It covers ethnographic, qualitative, and quantitative methods. The use of dependent and independent variables is explained in detail, with a focus on age as a social variable. The chapter ends with ethical considerations as an integral part of research and research conduct.

Premodern literary circulation resembles premodern trade in material goods in that it covers the planet less completely than does the modern world-system. Instead, different kinds of literary texts circulated on different scales and in different networks. Short, simple, easily translated and adapted texts such as beast fables and frame-tales, travelled the most widely and crossed the most linguistic borders. Religious scripture, and other highly valued texts, also travelled great distances, thanks to the huge resources occasionally invested in their transmission and translation. By contrast, denser patterns of literary circulation took place in smaller, more clearly-defined, regions. A key index of such regions in pre-modern literature is the adaptation of specific poetic forms, tied to the distinctive prosodic qualities of a major literary language, and requiring sustained investment and effort to carry over successfully into new languages, typically vernaculars culturally dependent to some degree on the source language. This phenomenon is traced through the gradual circulation of two poetic forms, the Arabic qasida and the sonnet.

Between 1750 and 1800, writers of African descent drew on oral and written traditions to create literature that expressed their desires for freedom, equality, and a future for themselves and their children. Moved and shaped by transitional events ranging from the forced migration of millions of Africans to enslavement in the Americas to revolutions that shook and transformed the British colonies, Saint-Domingue, and France, they developed cultural productions that articulated their longings, supported their communities, and impacted the rapidly shifting sociopolitical environments in which they lived. Like Phillis Wheatley, who publicly declared her impatience of oppression in a letter to Rev. Samson Occum on the eve of the American Revolution, they were compelled to resist enslavement, choose their own racial affiliations, and assert their agency by writing themselves into the metanarratives that marginalized or omitted them.

Taking on a contemporary topic of pervasive importance, Francesco Sinatora examines in detail linguistic heterogeneity and identity construction as they impact Arabic Facebook and YouTube discourse. Key issues of identity, positioning, performance, and multimodality are embedded in Arabic speakers’ use of discourse strategies that convey meaning in multiple ways and on multiple levels. ‘Social media’, states Sinatora, ‘provides a platform for the emergence of more hybrid practices, including the mixing of the vernaculars with MSA, as well as the localization of multilingual forms and global pop culture references.’ Sinatora reviews concepts of intertextuality and indexicality as they pertain to the use of language both written and spoken in Arabic-based social media. He connects these concepts to the idea of ‘vernacular globalization’, which refers to the linguistic construction of identities through diverse and multimodal formulation of powerful and appealing text messages. The second part of his paper documents how dissent is expressed through close examination of postings on Facebook and on YouTube. Through both written and spoken text analysis and face-to-face interviews with authors, Sinatora takes steps toward creating a new methodology for analysing variation in Arabic.

The chapter explores the paradoxes of the abundant sources for the west, where only a limited proportion of the population understood the dominant written language of communication, Latin; and until the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the reams of fiscal and judicial records which survive come mostly from a fairly narrow band of senior clerics. But the clergy were not monolithic, and their impact on the actual practice of governance varied north and south of the Alps. Much depended on the extent to which principles of Roman law and the habit of living in towns persisted. Yet there is striking consistency both in the prerequisite virtues of a ruler propounded by clerical writers and in the essentials of inauguration ritual. The law which a king swore to uphold at his coronation was not made at will: he was expected to govern consensually and heed good counsel. Who could give such counsel and what constituted reasonable constraints on the king’s volition changed over time. In some realms, assemblies developed the authority to approve taxes and become law-makers in the late middle ages: the monarch’s exercise of his authority was tempered by popular demand.

Norms in the Latin west, and the sources they drew upon, were surprisingly consistent: those in power were supposed to be just, pious, generous, humble and valiant; they were to protect the defenceless and heed advice from wise and prudent men; so said the Bible, the Church Fathers, authors of classical antiquity and a body of medieval writers. For real insight into medieval thinking about power, we should look at the debates around these norms and their interpretation, and who had the resources and capabilities to engage in these debates. Surplus resources and widening literacy helped new social groups to emerge, challenging traditional clerical elites and adapting, appropriating and ultimately transformed existing discourses. Social and linguistic diversification, shifts in how a realm was defined, and the emergence of new actors and audiences – all affected how power was conceived. This diversity led to a multiplicity of opinions on how shared norms were constructed and interpreted. An inherent flexibility and elusiveness, along with the vigorous and even violent debates they engendered, define the norms and values of power in the Latin west.

Based on a neo-Confucian vision that the monarch’s mandate relied on listening to his people’s grievances, the Joseon state (1392–1910) empowered subjects regardless of gender or status to petition the sovereign regarding grievances not rectified in lower courts. While Joseon-era women are usually considered to have been silent subjects outside the home, their petitioning activity shows that women, irrespective of their status, had the same legal rights as men to appeal grievances to the state. This chapter parses women’s linguistic practices in claims-making to show how their petitioning rights complicated gender dynamics of Confucian society. The gender hierarchy was reinforced through women’s narrative strategy as they appropriated discourses of domesticity. At the same time, I posit that women as legal agents were re-gendering legal identity by constructing a sense of personhood via their petitioning. Through gendered claims, women struggled to defend not only themselves and their sense of morality but also their entire family.

This chapter explores singers’ repertoires, from whence they were derived, and their networks of dissemination, and centres on my formulation of a cultural ‘mainstream’ of songs. I begin by placing the notoriously mixed repertoires available to us within a theoretical framework of the miscellaneous as a form of cultural consumption, before moving beyond specific lists of songs to a consideration of historical process. I examine the remarkable ways in which singers appropriated tunes from other cultural spaces, and the varying methods by which a lyric might be sourced. I look at the question of circulation both within and without London, and the movement of songs between different physical and social sites, demonstrating in particular the overwhelming musical importance of the theatre to mainstream song culture. I construct an image of this ‘mainstream’ as a working model for understanding how songs were produced, performed, and consumed in an age before sound recording: a model that necessarily takes issue with Peter Burke’s influential theory of the separation of elite and popular cultures by 1800. As the century progressed and harmonic forms of songwriting, informed by keyboards, came to prominence, this cultural model was no longer tenable, and newly-literate workers with a slightly improved disposable income began to consume songs in both physical and performative forms that bypassed the ballad-singer.

This chapter provides an autoethnographic account of the use of AAE from an African American middle-class perspective. Reflecting on some of the tensions and expectations that inform my own identity performance, I examine the quantitative distribution of several salient AAE features within my stylistic repertoire and discuss how such distributions inform assumptions about middle-class AAE and our understanding of intraspeaker variation.