Abstract
Linguistically speaking, the Middle Ages in Europe were dominated by Latin as the language of the intellectuals. It functioned as a second language for a special group of people and as a register for special purposes. The various vernaculars, as people's mother tongues, served common communication and literature and also the translation and semanticization of the second idiom. They came into their own only when, after Dante's early plea for the vernacular, the first grammars, the first monolingual dictionaries and the first teaching material of the national languages began to appear. This shift happened with grammars of Italian, Spanish, French, German, and English between 1437 and 1586, and with dictionaries and textbooks of the same languages, in a more complicated process, after 1477. These developments signal processes of great ideational importance.
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