Multilingualism and Language Contact in the Cely Letters

Abstract

The Cely Letters is a well-known collection of correspondence exchanged by members of this London family of wool merchants and their associates between 1472 and 1488. A substantial part of the corpus was written and received by factors based in Calais, which had been an English outpost in France since 1346 and was strategically connected to the wool marts of the Low Countries. The great majority of the letters are monolingual English texts, thus attesting to the widespread use of the vernacular in personal correspondence by the late fifteenth century. Nevertheless, behind the monolingual English surface, traces of multilingualism are revealed. In this paper, I intend to analyse this issue with a twofold purpose. In the first place, attention will be paid to the multilingual background of the letters, considering both the persistent use of French in late medieval England and the specificity of the business transactions carried out at Calais and the marts, where language contact must have been the norm. In the second place, different textual reflections of such contact in the letters are examined and classified, both as regards the generic conventions of letter writing and as part of the multilingual business context where they were produced and received.

Community of Practice in the Mercers of the City of London

“…The vernacularisation of written texts in medieval England has long been a popular research area among historical sociolinguists interested in diverse social domains, such as medicine, science, law, or administration (Dodd, 2019;Pahta & Taavitsainen, 2004;Stenroos, 2020). My work tries to extend that line of research to business writing, thereby complementing recent historical sociolinguistic studies about language mixing and standardisation -or supralocal spread (Wright, 2020b)-in the same social domain (Conde Silvestre, 2021;Wright, 2020a).…”

“…As detailed in Table 1, most warden-bookkeepers born before 1375 -the first and second generations-and mainly in office before 1400 maintained Latin or French; the majority of warden-bookkeepers born between 1375 and 1425 -the third and fourth generations-and mostly in office between 1400 and 1450 mixed Latin, French, and English; most warden-bookkeepers born after 1425 -the fifth generation-and predominantly in office from 1450 shifted to English. Social networks are another variable whose explanatory power has been assessed satisfactorily regarding multilingual phenomena among the three languages in medieval records by guilds of London (Alcolado Carnicero, 2017, 2021. Guild members in contact with English as the main language of record outside their own guild's network usually acted as bridges of language variation and change.…”