Office language

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

As a firm language in general the one will idiom called that for Official briefs the court and in the Holy Roman Empire and city government offices is used. The use of the term can be traced back to the 18th century.

Use of the term

  • In the most general definition, the term office language denotes the special administrative written language use independent of place and time (but limited to a locally concentrated administration), for example also the specific style of the palace bureaucracy of ancient kingdoms and city-states.
  • In a narrower definition, the term only refers to the special linguistic style of the manorial offices in Europe in the Middle Ages and modern times, often narrowed down to the non-Latin / non-Greek written language.
  • Often the term is firm language related in the closest definition to the special formations in the German-speaking world, where historically the Upper German area the Maximillian firm language that the court in Prague used Prague office of German , the firm language in Vienna, the Vienna firm language , the Upper German written language as well as the Federal Country Language played an important role. The forms from Meißen and Dresden ( Saxon chancellery language ) used in Central Germany were even more important for the development of the New High German language . The German word is also used with this meaning in other languages. Martin Luther used the Saxon chancellery language in his translation of the Bible in 1522.
  • In addition, the term office language is also used as a ( pejorative ) synonym for official German (rarely).
  • The concept of business language is to be distinguished from the language of the law firm .

Standardizing effect

The language of the office plays an important role in the development of language and writing standards for the language used. The standardizing effect of the chancellery language is based on the one hand on the charisma of the center of power, be it for power politics, diplomacy or the special cultural exemplary nature of the respective court. On the other hand, it results in many cases from the preference of supra-regional forms of compensation by the clerk, be it through a conscious choice of language or through the participation of speakers or writers from different dialectal regions of the language used.

literature

  • Konrad Ewald: Terminology of a French business and office language from the 13th to the 16th century. (Based on the "Cartulaire de l'abbaye de Flines") . Printed by H. Grauwiller, Liestal 1968 (Basel, dissertation, 1966).
  • Albrecht Greule , Jörg Meier, Arne Ziegler (eds.): Office language research. An international manual. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 2012, ISBN 978-3-11-019337-4 .
  • Christian Braun (ed.): Chancellery languages ​​on the way to New High German (= contributions to chancellery language research , Volume 7). Vienna 2011, ISBN 978-3-7069-0668-5 .
  • Christian Hannick (Ed.): Chancellery and Chancellery Language in Eastern Europe (=  Archive for Diplomatics, Writing History, Seal and Heraldry. Supplement . No. 6 ). Böhlau, Cologne a. a. 1999, ISBN 3-412-13897-5 .
  • Gerhard Kettmann : The Electoral Saxon Chancellery Language between 1486 and 1546. Study on structure and development (= publications of the Institute for German Language and Literature. Series B: Building blocks for the history of language in New High German. Vol. 34, ISSN  0067-463X ). Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1967 (Leipzig, University, habilitation paper, 1966).
  • Zdeněk Masařík: The medieval German chancellery language of South and Central Moravia. Brno 1966 (= Opera Universitatis Purkynianae Brunensis: Facultas philosophica. Volume 110).
  • Christian S. Stang: The West Russian chancellery language of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (=  Norske Videnskaps-Akademi i Oslo. Historisk-Filosofisk class. Skrifter . Volume 1935, 2 ). Universitetsforlag, 1935, ISSN  0546-370X .

Web links

Wiktionary: Office language  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Office language . In: Former Academy of Sciences of the GDR, Heidelberg Academy of Sciences (Hrsg.): German legal dictionary . tape 7 , issue 2 (edited by Günther Dickel , Heino Speer, with the assistance of Renate Ahlheim, Richard Schröder, Christina Kimmel, Hans Blesken). Hermann Böhlaus successor, Weimar 1975, OCLC 832567064 ( adw.uni-heidelberg.de ). Here also references in detail for the term "office language", which was only occasionally documented in the 18th century
  2. ^ Zdeněk Masařík: The early New High German business language in Moravia. Brno 1985 (= Opera Universitatis Purkynianae Brunensis: Facultas Philosophica , Volume 259).