Banniard, Michel
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Core ideas
Michel Banniard explains that thirty years of research led him to start from speech rather than from grammars. A language is what speaking subjects produce and exchange, always fluctuating and always communicating, and long-term historical linguistics must hold variation and communication together. Instead of the traditional question of Romance philology, how Latin "decayed" into Romance, he adapts Joshua Fishman's "who speaks what to whom" by adding when, and who understands what. The method is to historicise communication. Trained as a classicist and in Cicero's oratory, he turned to the professionals of late antique communication, the bishops and preachers of Christianisation. Christianity, unlike private paganism, needed vertical communication with the masses, which classical rhetoric adapted to instruct, move and convince. Augustine's sermons, taken down live by stenographers and some of them rediscovered by François Dolbeau, preserve even the audience's reactions. Banniard concludes that vertical communication in Latin worked well until the 6th century, became harder in the 7th and broke down in the 8th. The council of Tours (813), which orders homilies to be translated into the rustica romana lingua or German, marks that a threshold has been crossed.
This gives a different chronology and model. Traditional Romanists, he says, place the end of spoken Latin in the 3rd-5th century and imagine a clerical elite cut off from a "people" speaking something else. That picture is a positivist, romantic and partly nationalist projection of the 19th century, which also invented the notions of "Vulgar Latin" and the "spelling mistake" as markers of class. For Banniard there is a single Latinophone community in flux. The seeds of the Romance languages, such as the prepositional system, already lie in classical literary Latin, and an internal dynamic, not invasions or decay, gradually changes the type of language. Literary Latin is an extraction from spoken Latin, not the reverse. Languages neither age nor die; they are abandoned or destroyed, and Latin did not die but became French. He proposes the terms proto-French and proto-Occitan for the 8th century, when the spoken language was Romance but the only writing was Latin, and Old French from the 9th, when writing such as manjet rather than manducat recognises the new language. Romance writing was created by the most learned milieus, in the service of the new feudal aristocracy that wanted its own literature.
Banniard rejects the "fashionable" idea that Romance came from a Creole: Creoles, in his account, arose from the linguistic distress of slavery in the modern era, whereas the Gauls adopted Latin willingly and soon produced rhetoric teachers in Rome. Everyday language is complex whatever one's schooling. His views are well received in Europe, by Roger Wright, Marc Van Uytfanghe and the Spanish research on early charters, but less so in French teaching, which still repeats the 19th-century account. He regrets the decline of Occitan, which bilingual schooling could have saved, while doubting that languages can be saved artificially. He insists that French is no less Romance than its neighbours. Its musicality is on the Italian side. Northern Gaul was as Romanised as the South, and the rhythm of poetry shifted from classical to late Latin and to the Chanson de Roland, before the changes of the 13th-15th centuries. He ends by calling for a neutral metalanguage, dropping "vulgar", "vernacular" and "upheaval", which repeat the viewpoint of medieval clerics.
Excerpts
Michel Banniard on speech as the basis of research:
“I was led to note that we only have speech. That is to say that everything we call the grandmother of a language is only a form that, at one time or another, enters it into the description [...] there have always been subjects who spoke, who, at that time, constructed their language, and that there was only speech”
Michel Banniard on the chronology of vertical communication:
“vertical communication works well up until the 6th century, but really well, that it becomes more difficult in the 7th and that it becomes, we can't say that it becomes blurred because I don't want a bit of a doomsday vocabulary, but that it becomes blurred, let's say, in the 8th”
Michel Banniard on literary and spoken Latin:
“spoken Latin is not a deformation of literary Latin. Literary Latin is an extraction of spoken Latin. It's a commonplace to say it like that. But I assure you that it requires some thought. Even today's literary French is an extraction of French by it.”