The Monastic Rules of Visigothic Iberia - eTheses Repository ...

Traditionally, approaches have tended to focus on a simple question, put forward
famously by Lot (1932): a quelle époque a-t-on cessé de parler latin? In this sense, there
existed always preponderance towards liminality, a date in which Latin stopped being Latin
and became Romance. This is a theoretically difficult starting point, highlighted by Richter
(1983) to be “une question mal posée”. Indeed, such a black and white approach ignores the
sociolinguistic intricacies of language use and language change. Nevertheless, it has long
been understood that the Romance languages descend from the spoken, rather than literary,
Latin. Therefore, the problem of the Latin to Romance transformation was one of proximity
between two different, and perhaps increasingly divergent, registers of the spoken and written
language. Romance was born when the two became so distanced as to be no longer mutually
intelligible.
This „two-norm‟ theory provided a framework for the „split‟ between written Latin and
spoken Romance (Wright 1982: 1-4). However, the chronology of this process divided
scholars: on the one hand, some believed that such a division occurred only after the collapse
of a centralised Roman government, implying a large degree of homogeneity during the
Roman period; on the other hand, there were those who believed that such a distinction could
be made from a much earlier date, dating possibly from the institutionalisation of the Latin
literary language itself in the mid-Republic. These have been termed respectively as the
„thèse unitaire‟ and the „thèse différencialle‟ (Väänänen 1982).
The two-norm theory found an advocate in the concept of diglossia. Diglossia is “the
state of affairs in which two quite distinct languages or language varieties are spoken in a
single community, with a high degree of specialization between the two, so that each variety
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