Le Vernaculaire: A Brief Lexical History in French

This article traces French early modern understandings of the word vernacular in order to see what kinds of conceptual possibilities lie in the very history of the word. The investigation takes its cue from what could be identified as a quest for the moment of emergence of literatures within recent theories of world literature, a search in which the notion of the vernacular has come to play a crucial role. By investigating the etymology of the word based on a corpus of major dictionaries and encyclopedias from the seventeenth up to the nineteenth centuries, and the ways in which the vernacular has been used since its first appearance in French in Rabelais’ Le Quart livre (1542) and how it has evolved in early modern times, this study will problematise the systemic understanding of vernacularisation in terms of localizable moments and constant power struggles and explore other possible interpretations of what the vernacular may mean.