Lingua franca – lingua materna. Limbi și comunități în orașele medievale din Transilvania
Lingua franca – lingua materna. Languages and Communities in the Medieval Towns of Transylvania

Summary/Abstract: Communication in the Middle Ages, like today, was an inevitable component of social behavior, without which society was unimaginable, the forms of communication being closely linked to the use and spread of literacy in a particular society. In the present paper we shall try to capture the phenomenon of communication in its traditional, oral and written forms, limiting the exploration to the medieval towns of Transylvania. The research area being very wide, duet its interdisciplinary as well as to the new methods of analysis introduced and used by the scholars, this segment of the medieval communication research has its own „artisans” consecrated both in national, Hungarian and Romanian historiography, as well as (especially) in the international one. Therefore, the present analysis does not want to „invade” their territory, but rather to emphasize some aspects already captured in the research. Regarding the area of use of spoken and written languages (Latin, German, and Hungarian) in medieval Transylvania, we can observe a wide and diverse use, from public administration, religious life, justice, foreign relations, trade and accounts to literature and everyday life. In this study, of all these possibilities we shall refer only to the first two.

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