A potential synonym for “folk.” The term “vernacular” has been used at least since the
17th century to indicate the rootedness of a given cultural expression within a particular
nation, region, or province. Most often applied to language—specifically to dialect
variations of received standard speech—“vernacular” is a word that signals indigenous
character.
Having a Latinate origin, “vernacular” was never the term of choice among northern
Europes 19th-century Romantics, who pioneered the study of local custom and habit that
came to be known as folklore. They opted instead for “folk,” a term with aTeutonic
pedigree that would both separate their scholarly ventures from classical Mediterranean
learning and allow them to affiliate with the presumed nobility of newly emerging
nations and empires. Moreover, since verna, the word’s Latin root, describes specifically
a homeborn slave, “vernacular” carried for some the despicable connotations of misery,
servitude, and failure. These unpleasant attributes obviously did little to enhance the
term’s overall popularity.
Contemporary associations for “vernacular,” however, are considerably more positive.
In the late 20th century the term signals authenticity, vigor, and independence. A
vernacular building, for example, is presumed to naturally belong in its setting by virtue
of its design, construction, and history. By contrast, an academic attempt to create a
similar form will seem like an out-of-place affectation. Since the word “folk” has become
freighted with contradictory and confusing meanings, “vernacular” is looked to more and
more as a firesh alternative. Lacking, so far, a history of misuse, the word “vernacular” is
now encountered frequently in folkloristic discussions.
To a great extent in the United States, the term owes its validity to the growth of
material-culture research in the field of American studies in the 1950s. Folklorists seem
to have encountered the term chiefly through their investigations of the sources of
American folk buildings. It was British restoration architect Sir Gilbert George Scott who
first used the word “vernacular” in connection with buildings in 1857 in his book
Remarks on Secular and Domestic Architecture. Following almost a century’s worth of
publication on rural buildings of all types, an English scholarly organization calling itself the Vernacular Architecture Group (VAG) was founded in 1954, and in 1970 it began to
publish an annual journal, Vernacular Architecture. By 1979 an American counterpart,
the Vernacular Architecture Forum (VAF), was established to promote interdisciplinary
dialogue on the topic, and soon, it too, began to publish not only a quarterly newsletter,
but also occasional collections of papers from the organization’s annual meetings titled
Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture.
One by-product of VAF activities has been the further legitimization in American
scholarly circles of the word “vernacular” as the preferred descriptor for architectural
expressions that otherwise might be referred to as folk, traditional, native, indigenous,
popular, ordinary, local, or customary. It may not be long before the term “vernacular” is
regularly used to describe other genres like art, craft, food, medicine, music, and so forth.
Henry Glassie already suggested this trajectory when he wrote: “Vernacular architecture
is one area of folk art that has been accorded careful historical study and so supplies
usefiil inspiration for the whole field” (Glassie 1989:264). One wonders then if the
discipline of folklore might not eventually be re-named “vernacular studies.” It was more
than forty years ago that one scholar suggested that folk arts be dubbed “Vernacular
Arts.” However, given the fact that much that can be properly described as vernacular lies
beyond the boundaries of folk culture, the word “folk” will probably never be completely
supplanted.
John Michael Vlach
References
Glassie, Henry. 1989. The Spirit of Folk Art: The Girard Collection at the Museum of International
Folk Art. New York: Harry N.Abrams.
De Zouche Hall, Sir Robert. 1974. Origins of the Vernacular Architecture Group. Vernacular Architecture 5:3–6.
Upton, Dell. 1990. Outside the Academy: A Century ofVernacular Architecture Studies, 1890–
1990. In The Architectural Historian in America, ed. Elisabeth Blair MacDougall. Washington,
DC: National Gallery of Art, pp. 199–213.
Upton, Dell, and John Michael Vlach. 1986. Common Places: Readings in American Vernacular
Architecture. Athens: University of Georgia Press.