Acceso usuarios
Santiago de Compostela, España
The tradition of classical rhetoric coined the term barbarolexis for the use of hybrid language and considered it a grammatical defect that should be avoided. The literature of the high Middle Ages inherited this perception, but paved the way for the consideration of multilingualism as a stylistic feature and for the production of bilingual Latin-Romance texts. Troubadour lyrics used multilingualism as a means of raising the artistic profile of poetry, a practice begun by Occitanian troubadours, who used multilingualism to indicate which Romance languages were worthy of attaining the status of literary languages. And in their wake, the Galician Portuguese incorporated fragments of Occitanian, French or Latin into their songs (cantigas), as a means of reasserting the artistic and aristocratic nature of their poetry. The growing favour enjoyed by multilingualism in the literature of the time should be linked to the development of the social class of the clergy, who had the monopoly of Latin and the written word, but who were also capable of expressing themselves in several languages and of placing this linguistic competence at the service of the incipient royal chancelleries. The rise of the clerical spirit therefore prompted a change in the negative perception of multilingualism, which until then had been associated with the myth of the Tower of Babel.
