ABSTRACT
The linguistic traditions of Spanish diplomacy in the eighteenth century differed considerably from the practices in the diplomacies of many other European countries at the time. My exploration, based on an important corpus of unpublished documents from Spanish, Russian, British, French, and Swedish archives, identifies the ways in which various languages (mainly Spanish, French, and Latin) were used in the different spheres and genres of the diplomatic correspondence of Spanish and other European diplomats who interacted with their Spanish counterparts. Comparing their linguistic practices with those of other European diplomats, I will show what was specific about the Spanish linguistic tradition and to what extent the processes occurring in other European diplomacies, namely the gradual replacement of other diplomatic languages by French, were underway in Spanish diplomacy.
