Vernacular

Vernacular comprises words, forms and phrases of lowered, everyday speech that lie on the border of the literary norm or beyond it and are marked by a shade of coarseness, familiarity or informality. Vernacular has neither the territorial limitation of a dialect nor the social closedness of jargon, but constitutes a nationwide lowered register of oral communication. In literature vernacular elements individualise a personage's speech, attest to their educational and social level, reproduce the atmosphere of everyday life, create a comic or character-building effect. The introduction of vernacular requires artistic motivation and a sense of measure. Vernacular borders on colloquial vocabulary, dialectisms and vulgarisms and is studied by stylistics and the culture of language in the aspect of stylistic differentiation and the normativity of speech.