Multilingualism in Venetian Dalmatia: studying languages and orality in written administrative documents from Split (fifteenth/sixteenth centuries)

Abstract

This article addresses the linguistic situation in late medieval Venetian Dalmatia, where a predominantly Slavic-speaking population met an administration working in Latin and the Venetian variant of Italian. On the basis of Venetian archival records, mostly notarial acts and case files, and by examining the city of Split from a micro-historical perspective, two questions are addressed: the first concerns the methodological challenge of studying spoken language and orality by using written administrative documents. The interplay between written Latin, written and spoken Venetian, and spoken Slavic makes the archival records of the Venetian administration highly interesting and illustrates the complex linguistic situation the notaries had to cope with. The second question addresses the social consequences of Dalmatia’s multilingualism, as well as the ways Venice faced the language barrier to its Slavic-speaking subjects. To make communication and thus trade and rule possible, Venice established the communal office of a translator in Split only in 1472, several decades later than in other Dalmatian towns. The examples given in this article will show that there existed a tendency towards a correspondence between social status and knowledge of language. However, given the long-standing Romance-Slavic-symbiosis in Dalmatia, no clear division between Romance-speakers on the one hand, and Slavic-speakers on the other can be affirmed.