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

period is still a long way from being understood fully, and there is more work to be done
here.
6.16 Conclusions
This chapter has attempted to explore the issues of language use and language change
within the specific confines of a certain linguistic problem, using the evidence presented by
the monastic rules. It has perhaps veered slightly from the topic of the monastic rules in its
more wide-ranging discussions, but this was intended. This final chapter aimed to use the
monastic rules as evidence through which to explore these wider issues, and they have
functioned as a launch-pad for this purpose.
Although drawing on arguments concerning the state of the contemporary language,
this chapter does not purport to offer a new theory of the Latin to Romance transition.
Instead, it aims to show that current understanding of it, and specifically the Wright thesis, is
still not entirely satisfactory. New approaches to the subject, therefore, remain necessary and
it continues to be, to a large extent, an open book.
However, it would be worth offering some preliminary remarks. The history of
spoken Latin and Romance is one of a change from a situation of classic diglossia to one of
extended diglossia. This change can be recognised when the passive competence of a Latin-
speaker was no longer sufficient to be able to understand the written language of later Latin.
Clearly, this is not a straightforward process: some contemporary speakers, even from the
same region, will possess higher levels of competence than others due to factors such as
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