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Vernacular refers to the native language of a country or locality. In general linguistics, it is used to describe local languages as opposed to linguae francae, official standards or global languages. It is sometimes applied to nonstandard dialects of a global language.

In previous centuries scholarly work in Western Europe was typically written in Latin, so the works written in a native language (such as Italian or German) were said to be in the vernacular.

The vernacular is also often contrasted with a liturgical language (in Linguistics, the relationship between these "High" and "Low" languages or varieties of a language is referred to as diglossia). For example, until the 1960s, Latin Rite Roman Catholics held masses in Latin rather than in local vernacular language, to this day the Coptic Church holds liturgies in Coptic; though parts of mass are read in Amharic, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church holds liturgies in Ge'ez, etc. The Reformation was spread by the publication of Bibles and other religious writings in the vernacular, and the reforms of the Second Vatican Council permitted the use of vernacular liturgies in Roman Catholicism.

Similarly, in Hindu culture, traditionally religious or scholarly works were written in Sanskrit long after its use as a spoken language. With the rise of the bhakti movement from the 1100s onwards, religious works started being created in Tamil, Hindi, Kannada, Telugu and many other Indian languages throughout the different regions of India. For example, the Ramayana, one of Hinduism's sacred epics in Sanskrit had vernacular versions such as Ramacharitamanasa, a Hindi version of the Ramayana by the 16th century poet Tulsidas and Kambaramayanam by the poet, Kamban in Tamil.

Vernacular in sociolinguistics

Within the subcategory of sociolinguistics, the term vernacular has been applied to several concepts, leading to confusion among scholars regarding what is actually being referred to. One use of the term, as exemplified by Poplack (1993) and Labov (1972), defines vernacular varieties as casual varieties used spontaneously rather than self-consciously. It could also be described as informal talk used in intimate situations. Linguists consider the vernacular to be the first form of speech acquired by a person.

Wolfram and Schilling-Estes (1998) on the other hand define vernacular varieties as nonstandard, local dialects, particularly because of the nonstandard grammatical features that they contain. They also state that there is a continuum between the vernacular and the standard.

Similar approaches have been made to define vernacular culture: Cheshire (1982) sees vernacular culture as a non-standard or counter culture that is expressed through participation in particular activities or clothing styles, whereas Edwards (1992) defines it as a local culture determined by the connectedness to a certain neighbourhood.

Early vernacular studies

The earliest documents that are subject to vernacular studies date back as far as 1450 and mainly consist of grammars of various national languages as well as teaching materials for spoken languages. They show that in the Middle Ages venaculars grew more important and were looked at from a new perspective, because previously Latin was the only language considered worth documenting and teaching.

Throughout Europe, Latin was the language that intellectuals, clergy and leading members of society spoke. It distinguished them from plain people to whom it was largely unintelligible. It was in every case a second language that served as a register for special purposes and marked members of its speech community as educated, not only because it was a language acquired through teaching in formal settings, but also because it was the only medium for academic and theological studies that were thus open to its speakers.

When vernaculars started to be investigated in the mid-fifteenth century and their significance grew as opposed to that of Latin, the challenge was not only a linguistic but also a cultural one. Latin had dominated European tradition for over 8 centuries, it had been the language of the institutions that dictated structures of thinking. National languages threatened to overthrow these. In the course of what is now called the Renaissance, many European states underwent an individual development that shared yet common motivation and effects. These can be summarised as follows:

• the struggle for independence from the Roman Church
• the increasing manifestation of national political entities, in which language played a particular role
• early mass production of books and the establishment of a new intellectual culture
• the crossing of continental and linguistic barriers through sea trade.

Part of these innovations was the early study of vernaculars that were now structured and analysed like Latin had been.

First vernacular grammars

Through metalinguistic publications vernaculars acquired the status of official languages. Between 1437 and 1586 the first grammars of Italian, Spanish, French, German and English were written, though not always immediately published.

Italian grammar

Leon Battista Alberti’s Grammatichetta vaticana was written between 1437 and 1441, but not printed until 1908, which is why its influence is debated. Alberti was concerned with showing that dialects also had structures by mapping them onto Latin, whereas his fellow grammarians Giovanni Francesco Fortunio (Regole grammaticali della vulgar lingua, 1516) and Pietro Bembo (Prose della vulgar lingua, 1525) strived to establish a norm dialect that would qualify for becoming the Italian national language.

Spanish grammar

The first (contrastive) Spanish grammar by Antonio de Nebrija (Gramática Castellana, 1492) was divided into parts for native and nonnative speakers, pursuing a differenct purpose in each: Books 1-4 describe the Castilian language grammatically in order to facilitate the study of Latin for its Spanish speaking readers. Book 5 contains a phonetical and morphological overview of Castilian for nonnative speakers.

French grammar

The first (methodical) grammar of French was not written in France but in England and aimed at foreign speakers intending to learn the language. An interest in learning French had already been expressed before John Palsgrave wrote Lesclarcissement de la langue francoyse in 1530 by his contemporaries Alexander Barclay (Here begynneth the introductory to wryte and to pronounce frenche, 1521), Pierre Valence (Introductions in frensshe, 1528) and Giles du Wes (An introducterie for to lerne to rede to prononce and to speke Frenche trewly, 1532-1533). Palgrave’s instructive work was based on literary examples, following the model of Theodorus Gaza’s grammar of Greek (1495).

German grammar

In Germany, the first grammar evolved from pedagogical works that also tried to create a uniform standard from the many regional dialects. Like Nebrija, Valentin Ickelsamer (Ein Teütsche Grammatica , 1534) stresses the importance of understanding the structure of the national language in order to learn other languages, above all Latin.

English grammar

William Bullokar (Pamphlet for Grammar, 1586) was the first to write a proper English grammar, preceded only by Richard Mulcaster’s general plea for mother tongue education in England, The first part of the elementary, 1582. Bullokar followed leading Latin grammarians in England to prove that English was, like Latin, governed by rules.

First vernacular dictionaries

The first vernacular dictionaries emerged together with vernacular grammars. As can be seen from the section above, many of the new grammars were based on traditional Latin ones, comparing the structure of both languages. This preservation of traditional form does not apply for the new type of dictionaries. Though they kept the macrostructure and elements of the microstructure of old dictionaries, there was more drastic change than in the case of grammars.

Up to the mid-fifteenth century, glosses and dictionaries were mostly bilingual and served the teaching of Latin. For reading and translation of Latin texts, dictionaries would usually display the sequence Latin lemma (unknown) followed by explanatory vernacular expression (known). Dictionaries with reversed order would serve the more active tasks of speaking and writing. Both types were solely concerned with the study of Latin, but at the same time they unintentionally documented the development of vernaculars at a time that these were not considered worth writing about.

With the emergence of monolingual dictionaries vernaculars arrived at their breakthrough. The gradual formation of nation states and the growing importance of national languages (that are briefly explained in the section Early Vernacular Studies) led to the publication of multilingual vernacular dictionaries in various combinations.

Some early bilingual vernacular dictionaries include:

Italian/French

- Nathanael Duez : Dittionario italiano e francese/Dictionnaire italien et François, Leiden, 1559-1560

- Gabriel Pannonius: Petit vocabulaire en langue françoise et italienne, Lyon, 1578

- Jean Antoine Fenice : Dictionnaire fraçois et italien, Paris, 1584

Italian/English

- John Florio : A Worlde of Words, London, 1598

- John Florio: Queen Anna’s New World of Words, London, 1611

Italian/Spanish

- Cristobal de las Casas: Vocabulario de las dos lenguas toscana y castellana, Sevilla, 1570

- Lorenzo Franciosini: Vocabulario italiano e spagnolo/ Vocabulario espanol e italiano, Roma, 1620.

Some early monolingual vernacular dictionaries:

Italian

- Francesco Alunno: Le richezze della lingua volgare, 1543

- Francesco Alunno: La fabrica del mondo, 1548

- Giacomo Pergamini: Il memoriale della lingua italiana, 1602

- Academia della Crusca: Vocabulario degli Academici della Crusca, 1612

Spanish

- Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco: Tresoro de la lengua castellana o espanola, 1611

French

- Maurice de la Porte: Epitheta, 1571

- Jean Nicot: Thresor de la langue fracoyse, tant ancienne que moderne, 1606

- Pierre Richelet : Dictionnaire françois contenant les mots et les choses, 1680

- Académie française : Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, 1694

German

- Georg Heinisch: Teütsche Sprache und Weißheit, 1616

- Johann Christoph Adelung : Versuch eines vollständigen grammatisch-kritischen Wörterbuches Der Hochdeutschen Mundart, 1774-1786

Language can blur into vernacular architecture, where the local vernacular is sometimes reflected in the form of the styles of naive/vernacular typography & hand lettering seen on signs and shopfronts. Similarly the word may be used to describe local craft - e.g. "vernacular ceramic wares".

In literature, it may apply to works that have been written to emulate the everyday speech of the middle class or the working class. Sometimes, this means that slang and colloquial speech is included.

Such material may also use different rules of grammar and punctuation than other writings, both academic and literary.

See also

• Vernacular literature
• Vernacular architecture

• Sociolinguistics
• Language varieties and styles