medievalnonstandard

Medievalnonstandard is a neologism used in some strands of manuscript studies and digital humanities to describe features in medieval texts that depart from what scholars consider the standard language of a given tradition. The term is used to flag nonconformity in linguistic form, orthography, or textual presentation, rather than to categorize texts as inferior.

The term encompasses a range of phenomena, including nonstandard orthography and dialectal spellings within Latin writings, hybrid passages that mix Latin with vernacular elements, unusual grammatical constructions, atypical word orders, scribal abbreviations, and marginal glosses or interpolations. It is descriptive and contextual, signaling deviation from the norms defined by scholars for a particular temporal or regional milieu.

As a label, medievalnonstandard does not imply a value judgment about the text; it merely indicates nonconformity with the standard conventions of a given tradition. What counts as standard varied by place, period, and function, so the same feature might be nonstandard in one context and routine in another. The term is often found in critical apparatus, edition notes, and digital corpora tagging to assist analysis of linguistic diversity and scribal networks.

Scholars caution that the category can obscure social and practical contexts of these features or imply an external standard that may not have existed for medieval practitioners. Critics also warn against an overgeneralized sense of “nonstandard” that erases stylistic nuance or regional variation. Related topics include medieval linguistics, standardization processes, scribal culture, and textual criticism.