The vernacular

The rise of the vernaculars of Europe towards their thirteenth-century maturity in relation to Latin as the language of international religion, was far from being a uniform or steady process in terms of time and place. The adaptation of the Latin alphabet for writing in Old Irish seems to have taken place about 600 and a strong vernacular literary tradition developed beside the monastic Latin one. The Carolingian reform of Latin pronunciation of the liturgy was extended to Spain beyond Catalonia by the Council of Burgos in 1080, when the 'Mozarabic' liturgy which had existed since Visigothic times was replaced by the standard Roman form. The progress of the vernaculars as written and literary languages depended greatly on political circumstance. For most of the Middle Ages the attitude of the Church to the vernaculars was a tolerant and even encouraging one.