‘COLLOQUIALISM’

Our records trace the English adjective ‘colloquial’ back to Samuel Johnson (1751) and the noun ‘colloquialism’ to nineteenth-century poets, who used it to describe characteristics of common speech as distinct from more elevated forms of language – ‘the frequent mixture in some translation of mere colloquialisms’ (R. Polwhele, writing in 1810) – or the overall quality of a style – ‘their language is…an actual transcript of the colloquialism of the day’ (Samuel Coleridge, writing in 1818). In these modern uses, as in many ancient notes on style, one detects a sense of unease, or curiosity, about the possibility that characteristics of ordinary conversation might creep into the timeless dimension of ‘literature’.

The questions addressed in this volume rise from a desire to investigate this process: to what extent, and with what intent, do authors manipulate (generally) spoken language in the construction of their (specific) literary work? Or, in our subject-specific critical terms, what is the relation of ‘literary language’ (Kunstsprache) to ‘colloquial language’ (Umgangssprache) in individual authors, and what trends can be identified in the building of Latin literary language as a whole?

No fruitful approach to this inquiry is possible until a satisfactory definition of the colloquial is reached. Adams has rightly drawn attention to the unhelpful nature of the generalising (and dogmatic) categorisation implied in the usage of the term ‘colloquialism’, which in fact ‘embraces a multitude of phenomena with different distribution and different degrees of acceptability’ (Adams 2005b: 86).