Abstract
Whereas previous scholars interested in multilingualism have tried to identify specific textual sources for evidence confirming that phenomenon, this article takes a different approach and examines three late medieval texts (in Latin and German) where the narrator travels around many countries in the Middle East, either enjoying the freedom to do so, or forced because he had been captured by the Ottomans and sold into slavery. Even though the authors do not reveal much at all about the linguistic situation for them personally, the textual framework clearly signals that they spent a long time in complex and difficult language conditions. Although we are not told much at all about multilingualism here, the indirect conclusions allow us to confirm the extensive presence of numerous multilingual speakers, including the three authors.
Highlights
Whereas previous scholars interested in multilingualism have tried to identify specific textual sources for evidence confirming that phenomenon, this article takes a different approach and examines three late medieval texts where the narrator travels around many countries in the Middle East, either enjoying the freedom to do so, or forced because he had been captured by the Ottomans and sold into slavery
Multilingualism in the Middle Ages normally reflects a higher level of education, which would not be the same in the modern world, especially outside of Europe
Despite significant differences between the Middle Ages and us today in that regard, multilingualism has always been a characteristic feature of the intellectual elite and the mercantile world, most of their members being strongly committed to studying foreign languages and to profit from that linguistic knowledge for their own purposes in political, scientific, medical, literary, economic, and artistic terms
Summary
There is no doubt that the European Middle Ages were characterized by multilingualism, at. Dialects were still very strongly in use, and yet the members of the courts across Europe practiced their standard languages, either Middle High German, Old French, or Spanish, etc. While courtly literature was mostly determined by a sophisticated language, the majority of the rural population employed its own dialects, which differed extensively from each other. Even though not really multilingual, the situation in the rest of Europe was complex as well, with Latin being the dominant language of the elites, and the various vernaculars spoken by the rest of the population. For the pan-European aristocracy, French was the most widely spread mode of communication, but many poets successfully endeavored to translate from the French sources into their own vernacular, such as Middle Dutch and Middle High German. Best known is the case of Heinrich von Veldeke (ca. 1150–1190) who immigrated from the Limbourg language area to German courts and soon began to compose only in the standard language in use there, such as in his Eneit (Andersen, Del Duca, and Pasques, ed., 2020), the earliest courtly romance in Middle High German
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