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Social context and extreme linguistic forms: The case of neo-Latin macaronics

Macaronic Latin, an artificial linguistic form consisting not only of Latin words, but also of many hybrids built from vernacular stems and Latin endings, used to be employed in a variety of early modern European literary works. The origin of the macaronics as a well-defined genre overlaps with the radical turnover in the relative power of Latin and of the vernaculars that were standardized after the Middle Ages: in the early modern period Latin lost most of its domains of use, giving ground to the standardised varieties of the modern languages. The present paper observes the nature of the connection between the sociolinguistic context and the rise and fall of the macaronics as a text type. While extensive literature exists analysing the birth of the genre and its first decades (Paoli 1959 ; Goffis 1979 ; Paccagnella 1979 ; Lazzerini 1982 ; Scalabrini 2003), it is almost completely confined to Italian and Provençal works and tells little about the later periods. After reviewing the sociolinguistic situation in early modern Europe (Waquet 2001 ; Burke 2004) and the theoretical positions about the social potential of simultaneous employing multiple languages (Bachtin 1984 ; Bourdieu 1991 ; Edwards 2009 ; Gardner-Chloros 2009), a premise is formed proposing that the linguistic choices in the literary practice mirror the sociolinguistic reality. Then, the methodological validity of using bilingual literary writings as the signposts of the positions various linguistic forms take within a society is tested by observing the development of the macaronics within their social context. The analysis has shown that not only can the source of the Renaissance macaronic Latin be found in a set of complex sociolinguistic changes that affected Northern Italy in the 15th and 16th centuries, but also that its decline runs in parallel with Latin losing its social potential throughout Europe in the later periods. In terms of methodology, the paper points to the usefulness of observing marginal linguistic phenomena when explaining the relationship between language and society.

Latin; Renaissance; code-switching; macaronic Latin

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