THE LANGUAGE OF THE PROFESSORS: Latin/Danish code-switching around 1600.

Among bilinguals code-switching, the mixing of languages, is extremely common, especially in spoken language, but also in writing. This phenomenon has been studied extensively over the last decennia in bilingual communities all over the world. The present article looks into a similar bilingual community in the past, namely sixteenth and seventeenth-century academics, who were as fluent in Latin as in the vernacular. The source material for the study is taken from the minutes of the professors' assembly, the consistorium, at the University of Copenhagen, 1599-1608. These texts are written partly in Danish, partly in Latin, and partly in a mixture of the two. Some passages may reflect the words actually spoken at the meetings, but in general it is advisable to consider the material as written language. The code-switching is in many ways typical of a bilingual community, but it also demonstrates the different roles of the two languages within this community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]