Transmitting Urgency in the Romance: An Example of Strategic Codeswitching in the Crown of Aragon’s Thirteenth-Century Chancery

Latin functioned as the sole language of record for the kings of the Crown of Aragon until the mid-thirteenth century, when royal scribes began emitting a select few documents in the realms’ Romance languages, Catalan and Aragonese.  King Peter III’s (II of Catalonia) military and financial orders during the French Crusade of 1285 represent the single largest category of thirteenth-century royal documents composed in the vernacular.  Using theoretical frameworks from linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, and literary criticism, I argue that Peter and his advisors bypassed Latin in favor of a Romance language to consign a sense of emphasis and urgency onto their orders.  Before the French army entered Catalonia, King Peter dispensed preparations for the imminent war to his subjects, as he and his predecessors had always done, in Latin.  But an unexpectedly early incursion by the French army forced Peter to gather his host sooner than anticipated.  When Peter informed his subjects of the invasion and ordered them to prepare for war, he switched from Latin to the vernacular to transmit the importance of his instructions as well as the urgency of the situation.  By forgoing established protocol and choosing to write these commands in the “marked” or less commonly used codes (Romances) rather than the “unmarked” register (Latin), the kings underscored the magnitude of their requests.