A community of practice in the Mercers of the City of London : catching the third sociolinguistic wave with a multilingual medieval guild.

Abstract

This article tests the applicability of the community-of-practice framework to the process of vernacularisation of the earliest extant account book written by the Mercers’ guild of London between 1347–1348 and 1463–1464. Its records have been informative of the satisfactory applicability of social constructs from the two early sociolinguistic waves, such as time and age and social networks, to related multilingual phenomena, such as codemixing and language maintenance and shift. My analysis shows that the replacement of Latin and French by English as the main language for the different sections of that earliest extant account book began, developed, and ended when the administration of the Mercers’ guild of London was being controlled and recorded –at least partially– by warden-bookkeepers connected through regular and strong contact with each other. Furthermore, their use of the English vernacular was influenced by the previous and simultaneous contact with other records in the same vernacular.