Abstract

Multilingualism has long been wrapped up in the ‘historical enigma’ of Spain, one answer to the question of its origins and development. Iberia is remarkable in Western Europe as a sustained interface zone of distinct languages, from before the start of the Roman conquest in the Second Punic War to the 'Siglo de Oro' spanning the expulsion of the Jews and the Moriscos. Yet the undoubted dynamism of the long-term context can disguise a basic conservatism in the Latin of the late antique and early medieval Peninsula. In this paper, I sketch the general features of Latin in its linguistic context during the periods 400–700 and 700–1000 as a starting point, then consider the factors sustaining the conservatism of that Latin by exploring formulism in the drafting of everyday documents and the cyclical relationship between text and speech.