Exploring the Borderlands. on the Division of Labour Between Latin

Exploring the Borderlands. On the Division of Labour between Latin and the Vernacular(s) in the Church in Scania under Danish and Swedish Rule in the Seventeenth Century1 Johanna Svensson 1 Introduction I remember the national Swedish congress for classical philologists in Uppsala some time ago. I had never been to Uppsala before, and entered the Grand Auditorium of the university with curiosity and expectation. To my great sur- prise, we were welcomed in English. I looked around, there were Swedes every- where. Why were they speaking English? As people started to read their papers in English, I became more and more annoyed: English at the national Swedish congress?! The mystery was soon explained. The organizers of the congress had invited a Canadian keynote-speaker, and everybody spoke English to make it possible for the Canadian to join in the discussion. The next day, when the keynote-speaker had returned to Canada, everything went back to normal, i.e. everyone spoke Swedish. Mystery solved. In this case—banal, but quite illustrative—the practical, communica- tive function of the language was allowed to prevail. Everyone at the congress understood and spoke English, everybody except one guest understood and spoke Swedish as well. English was, thus, a natural choice, since it was deemed important that everybody should be able to understand and participate. But what if the Canadian keynote-speaker had not been present? Would the choice of English still have been possible? Everybody present would still have had the same level of proficiency in English. Since most Swedish philologists use English in all of their academic writing, it would, in fact, have been both use- ful and instructive to speak English at the congress. Still, it would hardly have been considered a natural choice. People would probably have felt uncomfort- able, just as I did, initially. According to the unwritten (and ever changing) laws 1 This paper is a revised version of my lecture for the 15th Congress of the International Association for Neo-Latin Studies (Münster, 5–11 August 2012). I thank Dr. David Bell for cor- recting my English. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��4 | doi ��.��63/9789004�80�8�_�06 exploring the borderlands 87 of language, it is possible today, but absolutely not normal nor uncontroversial, to speak in English to an audience that consists entirely of Swedes. It has often been remarked that the relationship between English and the Scandinavian languages today shows quite a few similarities to the relationship that existed between Latin and the Scandinavian vernaculars in the Early Modern period. A Swede is today able to define the limits—at least roughly— of the English and the Swedish speech domains and understand the division of labour between the two languages. There are no written rules, but he/she knows when it ‘feels right’. The past is a different matter. We know that Latin and the vernaculars coexisted for a long time, but what determined the division of labour between them? When was it indispensable, desirable, possible or ridiculous to use Latin? We have lost that feeling. What we have are texts in Latin or the vernacular from the past. If we want to understand a text, we will at least have to try to understand why one language was chosen instead of another, and the implications of such a decision. To do so, we will have to try to reconstruct the map of forgotten speech domains by pasting together the extant pieces. An interesting case for discussion is the language situation of the Church in Scania (i.e. the diocese of Lund) in the seventeenth century. Scania is a prov- ince in southern Sweden, which belonged to Denmark until 1658. This study discusses the language situation in terms of diglossia and introduces the idea of Danish, Latin and Swedish as a polysystem. The focus will be on the written non-literary language of the clerical speech community, and other speech communities will only be touched in passing. As my point of departure, I will make use of a recently discovered collection of letters written by clergymen in Scania, and I will point to some interesting features which may give some indi- cation of the division of labour between the languages at that particular time and in that particular context. 2 Background 2.1 The Status of Latin in Denmark and Sweden from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries Latin had initially come to Denmark and Sweden as a part of the conversion of these areas to Christianity. Following the Reformation, which concentrated secular and religious power in the hands of the monarch, the role and status of Latin followed a similar path in the two countries. In 1539, Denmark launched a new and ambitious system of education, where Latin acquired an even .

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