Yuliya Minets (Jacksonville State University)
It is relatively well-known that the Roman empire demonstrated great flexibility in language regulation and never, with maybe a short exception during the rule of Diocletian, attempted to impose Latin as an official language on conquered regions. By and large, it functioned as a bilingual Greco-Latin political entity (Jorma Kaimio, Bruno Rochette, J.N. Adams), while multiple local languages were often, though not always, accepted in the public sphere and for a variety of documents (Roger Bagnall, Fergus Millar, Arietta Papaconstantinou). The precedent of tolerating the use of multiple languages for official purposes in the Roman state is often cited against the more thorough linguistic imperialism of the modern age.
When it comes to Late Antiquity, however, the larger social, political, religious, and demographic shifts in the Mediterranean region as a whole, and in North Africa in particular, started to produce a certain air of uneasiness around the issues of language use and language choice. The changes in attitudes, perceptions, assumptions, and expectations could not be explicitly qualified as language oppression or even as any sort of official language policy. Yet the sources of the period provide a number of hints about the “proper” use of different languages and stylistic registers for certain contexts. Cultural elitism, diversity of ethnic backgrounds, military status of a speaker, religious alliances, larger geopolitical factors contributed dramatically to the power dynamic around the use of different languages. North Africa is especially interesting in this respect because of the number of languages involved, including Latin, Punic, Germanic and Berber vernaculars, and, for its earlier history, Greek and Libyan.
This paper aims at focusing on the period from approximately the lifetime of Augustine of Hippo (354–430) to Justinian’s conquest of the Vandal kingdom (533–34). I will analyze the instances when linguistic peculiarities of speakers of diverse ethnic, confessional, and political backgrounds were set off against linguistic normativity (as it was understood in any given moment) and explore how the slow violence of language use and expectations factored in the local power dynamic within the conflicting religious and political landscape. I will start with language-related sentiments attested in the works of Augustine and the younger generations of his fellow African bishops, such as Quodvultdeus and Fulgentius of Ruspe, before moving to the History of the Vandal Persecution, composed (c.484–89) by Victor of Vita, which features several relevant stories, including the famous episode when the Cyrila, a homoean bishop of Carthage, allegedly refused to speak Latin during the theological dispute with his Nicene opponents. As Robin Whelan rightly notices, scholarly speculations that “Cyrila’s claim to non-Latinity was a statement of ethnic pride: an attempt to distinguish the Homoian Church as non-Latin, and thus non-Roman and Vandal” seem to be largely unfounded. Still, there are interesting possibilities to read this and other similar cases within the framework provided by post-colonial theory. After all, alloglottic Others – Vandals, “barbarians” – were those primarily interested in linguistic diversification in the religious domain, and not the (post-)imperial center. Yet this reading can go only so far. Elites of newly established “barbarian kingdoms” often saw themselves as legitimate heirs to the Roman order and sought ways to utilize rather than subvert existing institutions and cultural patterns of Romanitas. By the time the episodes described by Victor of Vita took place, Vandals were much more integrated into the Latinophone cultural space than he may have wanted to show. While ancestral languages of Germanic peoples became a factor in shaping their religious identity as homoean Christians only to a certain degree, references to their linguistic peculiarities in the works of Latin writers were used to create an alienating effect on the rhetorical plane.