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

with Vergil have fully understood the language of the Aeneid? When dealing with language
change over such a large geographical area, one must also take into account whether these
changes occurred at steady paces, or whether they varied depending on region and time
period. Diglossia, therefore, is a useful schema, but one that answers few questions.
The topic of language change in the early medieval period has been revitalised over the
past few years, largely on the basis of two scholars: Michel Banniard and Roger Wright.
Their respective theories will be discussed below.
6.2 The Thesis of Michel Banniard
The work of the French scholar Banniard (1990, 1992) remains relatively little talked
of in English-language scholarship, or else has received rather negative reviews (for example,
O‟Donnell 1995). Banniard‟s theory relies on the two-norm schema, and advocates the thèse
unitaire, i.e. a late and rapid transformation from Latin into Romance in the late-eighth
century, a period he noted for the “abandon de la compétence passive” (1992: 241). The
reason why this was able to occur, according to Banniard, lies in the distinction between
„active competence‟ in a language, roughly synonymous with idiolect and meaning a
speaker‟s daily ability to use the language, and „passive competence‟, meaning a speaker‟s
ability to understand aspects of the language used by other speakers that are not necessarily
within his own linguistic competence or common usage (Banniard 1995: 703-704). It is
Banniard‟s view that throughout the Roman and post-Romance world, active competence
may have been subject to sociolinguistic variation, but the spoken registers were nevertheless
sufficiently homogeneous as to permit a state of general passive competence between
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