ABSTRACT
Although it had been in use among specialists for well over a century, the term “vernacular architecture” became widely accepted only with its adoption in 1976 by the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS). Other terms persist, such as “traditional,” “rural,” “regional,” “local,” “peasant,” “folk,” and “indigenous” architecture, serving collectively to identify the field of building encompassed by the vernacular. Its original meaning (from the Latin), “the language of the people,” is applicable to architecture as an extension of the commonly employed idea of “architecture as language,” in which styles of design are analogous to grammar or syntax.
