The Problem of the Vernacular

It has been said that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. Under what conditions do dialects, vernaculars, creoles, and slangs become mediums for literary and artistic expression? How have writers in different cultures managed the relationship between their "official" national languages and their more intimate mother tongues? This course explores this problem in a variety of literary traditions, including Chinese, Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Scots, Latin and the Romance vernaculars, and a variety of other languages.