Multilingual practices in medieval Britain: Reflections on the scholarship of the last twenty years

This chapter considers research published over the last two decades onthe linguistics of medieval multilingualism as evidenced in all sorts of text types, including work published by our honorand and her collaborators. As historical multilingualism has now become such a burgeoning field, Pahta’s contribution tothe use of corpus-building and searching for evidence of historical multilingualism can be seen as pioneering. The research consid-ered in this chapter reveals the ubiquity of multilingual practices,the discourse-organizing functions of code-switching, the functional properties of switches, the relevanceof abbreviations and their frequency, and the major contribution of Romance borrowings to nuancing the English lexicon. Code-switching,in particular, played an important role in vernacularisation processes, accompanying the shift from French to English in the fifteenth century,and as an intermediate stage in the shift from Latin to English in civicrecords. Further, work has been carried out on multilingual practices involving Middle Dutch, Old Norse, and Celtic languages. The field of historical multilingualism in Britain has advanced considerably in recent years, not least as a result of Pahta’s inspirational work on the topic.