Conclusions
This chapter highlights the significance of the Aberdeen Council Registers for linguistic research on vernacularisation and multilingualism in late medieval texts. Due to their almost continuous run from 1398, these records are particularly suitable to investigating diachronic changes in language use.
The quantitative analyses allow us to trace the increasing vernacularisation of the Aberdeen Council Registers, concluding that Scots can be considered the dominant language in these records from the early 1480s onwards (at least with regard to the number of Scots words). Nevertheless, Latin remained in constant use during the period under investigation (1398–1511). This is particularly interesting in the later volumes: scribes did not use Scots consistently, despite accepting it as a suitable language for legal discourse. Latin remains visible in the records and thus maintains its role as language of law, albeit alongside the vernacular.The coexistence of Latin and Scots in the records can be seen as constituting �a complex multilingual code’, which was used by the scribes to convey meaning.50 The use of abbreviations that could be either read as Latin or Scots suggests that scribes did not distinguish rigidly between the two languages. Nevertheless, clear instances of code-switching can be found in the registers. These seem to be more common at the beginning of the vernacularisation process and, as the analysis of volume 5.2 showed, were used for different purposes. CS into Latin mainly occur for formulaic parts, such as dates or structural elements, or specific writing conventions (e.g. filius after a name). Some of the CS into Scots, on the other hand, seem to aid comprehension, suggesting that not all readers were able to understand Latin. This raises questions about how audiences engaged or were expected to engage with the records, which is an aspect that needs to be investigated further.
The multilingual nature of the Aberdeen Council Registers presents some problems for the quantitative analyses presented here. A strict categorisation into Latin and Scots words is not always possible due to frequent abbreviations and suspension marks used by scribes. The TEI-compliant annotations in the transcriptions of the council registers can point to these problems to some extent (e.g. by annotating entries with multiple languages and frequent CS with “mul”). One point to stress here is that the main aim of creating the Aberdeen Council Registers transcriptions, the ARO, was to build an open basis for further investigation from various disciplinary perspectives (including the historical, legal, linguistic, palaeographical) rather than to construct a corpus richly annotated for linguistic research. Furthermore, the transcriptions should be comprehensible to non-academics. Therefore, Scots abbreviations were expanded and annotated with the tag, while Latin expansions remain unmarked, also due to the time constraints of the LACR project. Wright stresses the problem of silent expansions in transcriptions of medieval texts and their role in neutralising the language.51 In the transcriptions of the Aberdeen Council Registers, this problem can only be overcome by a rather time-consuming process of adding specific annotations to the expanded words, but that is possible given that the resource is open for reuse. Despite these issues, the analyses presented here are a worthwhile exercise, showing the multilingual nature of the Aberdeen Council Registers and the increasing vernacularisation between 1398 and 1511. The results highlight the point that different records were vernacularised at different times and/or at a different pace in different regions. In-depth analyses of individual records are, therefore, necessary to gain an accurate picture of vernacularisation processes in Scotland and elsewhere.
The vernacularisation of legal texts more generally has to be seen in the context of a changing legal culture.
The use of the vernacular allowed more people to access legal contents, even if this access was controlled and not necessarily direct. At the same time, the elite could use these legal texts to diffuse certain knowledge, as Hepburn and Small point out.52 It would be interesting to investigate what kind of �knowledge’ was disseminated via the vernacular. While we know that certain legal contents remained to be expressed in Latin, such as property transfers or the admissions of the burgesses of guild, it remains to be seen to what extent the contents of an entry influenced a scribe’s language choice and whether the scribes were �free to choose’ between languages. Such research on the choices made by the people directly involved in writing legal texts, i.e. by the community of practice, would provide further insights into how �cultures of law’ developed over time. The Aberdeen Council Registers would certainly be a suitable source to research this topic.Appendix
XQuery 1:
for $i in //ns:div[@xml:lang=“sco”] [@xml:id >“ARO-4-0001-00”][@xml:id “ARO-4-0001-00”][@xml:id “ARO-4-0001-00”][@xml:id see Havinga and Wyner, �The Aberdeen burgh records’.
22 Cf. C. Myers-Scotton, Contact Linguistics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, and P. Auer and R. Muhamedova, �“Embedded language” and “matrix language” in insertional language mixing: Some problematic cases’, Journal of Italian Linguistics 17(1), 2005, pp. 35–54.
23 There are, however, cases of entries that start and end with a passage in Latin, with a larger Scots section in between. These entries were annotated as Latin, even though the number of Scots words may have exceeded the number of Latin words in the entry. The quantitative analysis based on word counts (see the �Quantitative analysis of the number of words in Scots as opposed to Latin’ section) takes these cases into account.
24 M. Heller, �Introduction’, in M. Heller (ed.) Codeswitching.
Anthropological and Linguistic Perspectives, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1988, pp. 1–24, at p. 1.25 Cf. H. Schendl, �Code-switching in Anglo-Saxon England: A corpus-based approach’, in P. Pahta, J. Skaffari and L. Wright (eds) Multilingual Practices in Language History: English and Beyond, Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2017, pp. 39–60.
26 Y. Matras, Language Contact, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 110.
27 Scottish Language Dictionaries, �item’, Dictionary of the Scots Language, online, n.d., (accessed 4 May 2018).
28 Cf. R.Q. de Barros, �Twentieth-century Romance loans: Code-switching in the Oxford English Dictionary?’, in Pahta, Skaffari and Wright (eds) Multilingual Practices in Language History, pp. 61–76.
29 D.A. Trotter, �Multilingualism in later medieval Britain: Introduction’, in D.A. Trotter (ed.) Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain, Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000, pp. 1–5, at p. 3.
30 Ibid.
31 Cf. A.D. Havinga, �Assessing the intensity of language contact between Middle Dutch and Scots in late medieval Aberdeen’, inJ. Kopaczyk and R. Millar (eds) Language on the Move across Contexts and Communities, Aberdeen: Publications of the Forum for Research on the Languages of Scotland and Ulster, in press.
32 Volumes one and two are not included in this figure since, as Table 4.2 shows, the percentage of entries with Scots as the matrix language is very low in these two volumes.
33 D.A. Trotter, �Language contact and lexicography: The case of Anglo-Norman’, in H.F. Nielsen and L. Schøsler (eds) The Origins and Development of Emigrant Languages, Proceedings from the Second Rasmus Rask Colloquium, Odense University, November 1994, Odense: Odense University Press, 1996, pp. 21–39, at p. 21.
34 The last interval contains only four years (1507/1508–1510/1511).
35 In 1482/1483: 48.5 per cent of entries and 64.6 per cent of words annotated as Scots; 1483 /1484: 57.5 per cent of entries and 71.5 per cent of words annotated as Scots; 1484 /1485: 64.2 per cent of entries and 74.5 per cent of words annotated as Scots.
36 E. Frankot, �Manslaughter in 1480s Aberdeen: Notes from another fifteenth-century register’, Aberdeen Registers, Aberdeen, 2017, (accessed 29 March 2018).
37 Ibid.
38 An analysis of the matrix language of entries in the Newburgh Burgh Court Book, which was transcribed by Dr William Hepburn, shows that 98.3 per cent of the entries have Scots as the matrix language between 1457 and 1479 compared to 20.9 per cent of entries during the same period in the Aberdeen Council Registers. The Newburgh burgh records are held at the University of St Andrews Library Department of Special Collections, reference number B54, (accessed 30 March 2018).
39 Heller, �Introduction’, p. 1.
40 Schendl, �Mixed-language texts’, p. 70.
41 The Pearson correlation test resulted in a coefficient (r) of 0.173, with a p-value of 0.682 (threshold for p-value = 0.05), which means that there is no statistically significant correlation between the percentage of entries in Latin and the normalised number of CS in volumes one to eight of the ACR. The same test was carried out for volumes 1–5.2 with the percentage of entries in Scots, which resulted in a higher coefficient (r) of 0.828, which means that there is a positive correlation between the increase of Scots entries and the rise in the relative number of CS, but it also did not show a statistically significant correlation (p = 0.083).
42 S. Romaine, Bilingualism, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989, p. 112–3, and H. Schendl, �Beyond boundaries: Code-switching in the leases of Oswald of Worcester’, in H. Schendl and L. Wright (eds) Code-Switching in Early English, Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011, pp. 47–94, at p. 69.
43 J. Kopaczyk, �Administrative multilingualism on the page in early modern Poland: In search of a framework for written code-switching’, in Pahta, Skaffari and Wright (eds) Multilingual Practices in Language History, pp. 262–84.
44 L.E. Voigts, �What’s the word? Bilingualism in late-medieval England’, Speculum 71, 1996, pp.
813–26.45 Kopaczyk, �Administrative multilingualism’, p. 276. See J. Kopaczyk, �The language of medieval legal record as a complex multilingual code’ in this volume for examples of code-switching on these different levels.
46 The orthographic level needs to be investigated further. Instances of orthographic code-switching, assuming that these can be found in the Aberdeen Council Registers, were not annotated as �foreign’ in the transcriptions, so they would have to be analysed manually.
47 Scottish Language Dictionaries, �le def. art.’, Dictionary of the Scots Language, online, n.d., (accessed 7 May 2018).
48 L. Wright, �Bills, accounts, inventories: Everyday trilingual activities in the business world of later medieval England’, in Trotter (ed.) Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain, pp. 149–56.
49 L. Wright, �Mixed-language business writing: Five hundred years of code-switching’, in E.H. Jahr (ed.) Language Change: Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1998, pp. 99–118; Schendl, �Mixed-language texts’; Schendl, �Multilingualism’; Kopaczyk, �Administrative multilingualism’; cf. Trotter, Multilingualism; and Schendl and Wright (eds) Code-Switching in Early English.
50 Kopaczyk, �The language of medieval legal record as a complex multilingual code’, in this volume.
51 L. Wright, �On variation in medieval mixed-language business writing’, in Schendl and Wright (eds) Code-Switching in Early English, pp. 191–218.
52 W. Hepburn and G. Small, �Common books in Aberdeen, c. 1398–c. 1511’, in this volume.