Languages as codes

Code is usually perceived as something secret, shared by a closed group of people, but also as something of significance to that group or to those who stay on the outside. Language is essentially a system of arbitrary signs,⁸ while meaning can be encoded and decoded by humans who are equipped with the necessary cognitive and interpretative abilities.

In this chapter I argue that despite the mixture of Latin and the vernacular in medieval legal texts, we still deal with a single code. This code has a complex structure – it is composed of multilingual ingredients which are used in a range of functions and whose proportions and forms vary across time. What is crucial for the legal culture using this code is that the code remains accessible and flexible for the community involved in local administrative and legal proceedings.¹⁰

Even though much linguistic work on code-switching originated in the context of spoken language,¹¹ of special importance for this study is the more recent recognition of the multilingual nature of written texts, which demand an analytical framework suited to their communicative characteristics and a broader cultural context.¹² For historical linguistics, which relies on written record, it is important not to dismiss writing as a somehow deficient version of â€?language’, or treat it only as an opaque window onto the elusive spoken communication of the past. Much has been done to acknowledge the systemic nature of writing in its own right, especially in the last two decades on the wave of historical sociolinguistics and pragmatics (pragmaphilology) as well as in the study of semiotics of code-switching in a written text.¹³ These publications as well as the present chapter share the conviction that â€?the material expression of the text is always significant; it is a separately variable semiotic frame’.¹⁴ Within this frame, conventionally agreed linguistic signs – morphemes, words, phrases – interact according to systematic rules; their arrangement becomes significant to those who understand these rules.

The choice of the system of signs, together with its conventional associations, carries meaning in its own right; some systems may, for instance, be more prestigious than others; some may require specialist knowledge or cultural experience to unpack. Socially oriented semiotic approaches to language use set out to understand which codes were selected for which purpose and how these choices related to a given culture. They also ask what the codes tell us about the participants of that culture.¹⁵ In the medieval context, formulaic language was framed in different (sub)codes, Latin and the vernacular, each working within a set of associated conventions: those for Latin accumulated through centuries of legal practices¹⁶ and those for the vernacular beginning to emerge.¹⁷