All of our four catalogues show an indisputable declining trend in the share of publications in Latin in the period 1500-1800, but there are noticeable differences to the timing and proportions of the transformation, which are partly explained by historical trajectories mirrored in the data but also by the composition of the data itself. The HPBD (fig.???) provides the geographically broadest overview of the decline of Latin as a language for printed materials in Europe, but as a data set it includes most gaps and uncertainties. Nevertheless, in HPBD decline of Latin in the eighteenth century is most rapid and it happens later than for the ESTC (fig.???) and SNB (fig.???). This may be a result of the composition of the database with many catalogues being predominantly focused on the eighteenth century. The earlier decline of Latin in Britain corresponds with our previous knowledge of the early establishment of English as the main language of high-level communication. Well-known symbols for using English such as Shakespeare and the Royal Society (Ryan Stark, Rhetoric, Science, and Magic in Seventeenth-Century England (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009), 9–46; Peter Dear, 'Totius in Verba: Rhetoric and Authority in the Early Royal Society’, Isis 76 (1985:2), s. 144–161; James Livesey, Civil Society and Empire: Ireland and Scotland in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World, New Haven, Yale University Press 2009, pp. #-#.) anticipate this, but once the comparison based on national bibliographies can be brought to a more reliable level, we can provide a statistically accurate picture of this. Already now, it seems the decline of Latin in Britain is more drastic than it has been previously anticipated.
The SNB and FNB allow us to zoom in and look at the Swedish case more closely and compare the different properties of the bibliographies. While the SNB (fig.???) portrays the general trend for the Swedish realm, it is also clear that Stockholm as a publication center dominates the image. Looking at the FNB (fig.???), which consists mostly of publications from Turku (Åbo), one of the four university towns in the realm, shows that the distinct publication of profile of university towns are sometimes hidden under the national average. Still, also in Turku, we find a concrete decline in the share of Latin publications, but the decline was definitely later although the Academy in Turku has been described as one of the most utlity-oriented unversities in the Swedish realm and thus also most prone to use Swedish (Lindberg, 'Utilism och upplysning'). One special feature with the FNB has to do with with the different roles of Swedish and Finnish as languages. While Swedish became a stronger candidate for academic publications, Finnish emerged as a written language especially in shorter religious and economic texts. Vernacularization was in this case not a process between two languages, but three.
Keeping in mind the uncertainties relating to the HPBD, an inspection of university towns suggests that this is a wider trend. The university town, the capital, and the commercial centers had different linguistic publication profiles and vernacularization as a process happened in different phases. An analysis of languages used in publications from Cambridge (Fig. ???), Oxford (Fig. ???), Leiden (Fig ???), and Göttingen (Fig. ???) shows how Latin lingered on, but also in these cases, like in Turku the local languages (fig. ???) did gain a much more prominent position by the end of the eighteenth century. Compared to the absolute publishing centers in Europe Paris (Fig. ???) and London (Fig. ???), the development is really late. Interestingly, the catalogues tell us about national trends, such as an early decline of Latin or competing vernaculars, but when viewed in comparison we can also see patterns that cross national boundaries, such as different types of publishing milieus in towns commercial towns, university towns or capital cities. All of Europe had a cultural debt to sources from Antiquity, but this debt materialized differently in the places that were almost self-sufficient culturally like Paris and London or the university towns that embodied learning by attaching themselves to Latin traditions (for Latin-vernacular diglossia, see Lindberg, Den antika skevheten).
Since both vernacularization and the rise of octavo seem to be inherently related to a modernization of public discourse, reading and writing, a final question is then, if the change in the popularity of formats in the sixteenth and particularly eighteenth centuries is related to the shifts in language in the same period. A short answer to this is: no. A slightly longer discussion about language and formats might, however tell us a bit more about changes in publishing. #