ABSTRACT
This paper investigates the language choices made in 766 entirely or partly encrypted manuscripts—ciphertexts and keys—used in diplomatic correspondence in the eighteenth century. The encrypted sources originate from archives in Austria, Hungary, the Netherlands, Saxony, and the Vatican. The comparison of language choices reveals the prominence of French in the documents from all the regions except the Vatican. However, the local languages, such as German in Saxony, Dutch in the Netherlands, and Hungarian in Hungary, were used more frequently than French in these regions. As case studies show, the choice for a non-local language, often French, depended mainly on an external addressee. In the few multilingual documents present in our dataset, the languages used have different functions.
