We can thus consider the style-switching phenomenon as a multilingual texture within a unilingual text, highlighted by multi-style (though uni-script) typography. Only when the presence of Latin in literature and education receeded, around the year 1800, in favor of the ‘national language’, were terms of Latin origin fully re-defined as German ‘foreign terms’ and therefore no more regarded as to be highlighted by typographic means. It can be stated that the convergence of blackletter and Roman typefaces in Prussian printed matter (in a main timeframe from around 1530 to the early 1700s) may well be regarded as a multilingual markup within German-language texts, because at the time, the idea of ‘foreign terms’ was not yet fully recognized as a fixed ingredient of national languages, but rather as an element of vivid Latin, then still an educated world language in its own right (‘lingua franca’). The version shown here has 19 pages, the back cover apparently being left empty. The main headline (“Edict/Edit”) is capitalized on both sides, making it shared in style (though not shared in terms of language). While the German side features decorative forms in the first line to emphasize the representativeness of the medium, the French side shows italics, however in places of secondary importance. With regard to the 1806 sample shown later, the upper/left position was propably regarded as taking the leading role, followed by the lower/right position, therefore the German text would be presented as the more active part. 6 This bilingual German-French version combines a vertically-arranged cover page (German above, French below) with horizontal juxtaposition of the languages (German left – French right) on the following pages. The Edict of Potsdam, issued by Frederick William of Brandenburg-Prussia in 1685, encouraged oppressed Huguenots to immigrate from France and granted them freedom of worship in their native French. The first sample was chosen to show a strong sense of the style-switching/multi-style phenomenon. I am, in turn, discussing this complex of subjects under the wing of multilingual typography, because Latin was, even though a firm element of written German, regarded an international language (‘lingua franca’) before the early 1700s. Apart from that, blackletter typography was also temporarily common to Polish and Lithuanian media. However, it is either rarely contemplated that the German-speaking community, contrary to speakers of Roman languages, had adopted Latin as a distinctively foreign language, encouraging them to develop their own unique way of typographic mark-up. The phenomenon is well-rooted in contemporary discourse 3. Being a part of my current research on multilingual typography, I would like to share a theory which may be of special interest to methods of republishing and re-contextualizing original material from this context. 2Ĭontrary to Meiji Japan, where an existing script (Katakana) was standardized to spell all non-Chinese loanwords, Prussian bookprinters used ‘style switching’ to provide the desired linguistic clarity. The decline of ‘style-switching’ in later Prussian letterpress converges with the growing dominance of the national languages in printed media, gradually amplified by increasing nationalism in the respective countries. During this period, peaking in the 1690s, Roman typefaces were used within the context of the common German blackletter to distinguish words or parts of words from Latin or Romance origin.

In the 17th and 18th century, Latin was still a vidid world language used by scholars throughout Europe. While the whole region served as a base for protestant missionaries, she was also an exchange hub for scholars from all origins.

During a timeframe of roughly 250 years, books and leaflets were printed in various letterpress offices, centered around places such as Halle (Saale), Gdansk, or Koenigsberg (present-day Kaliningrad), the latter being of special historic interest for her role in Polish and Lithuanian publishing. In 16th-century Prussia, letterpress was widely used as a mass medium to spread new religious and academic concepts (mainly of the growing Protestant faith and pietism).

Blackletter typeface textur