Multilingual texts and code-switching: the potential and limitations of a sociolinguistic notion

What is it about?

This article explores the possibilities and limitations of the sociolinguistic notion of code-switching for the analysis of multilingual texts, in particular those belonging to literature as it is commonly understood (prose fiction, drama and poetry). In such (con)texts, I argue, code-switching is ‘staged’: produced rather than reproduced. Even when texts stage bilingual conversations with the aim of imitating real-life speech events, mimesis is mediated by the shift from spoken to written mode, which contrasts with the presence and proximity typical of (spoken) verbal interaction. While this mediation limits the applicability of sociolinguistic notions when discussing literary corpora, several examples from both North America (Junot Díaz, Gloria Anzaldúa and Ana Lydia Vega) and Europe (Lydie Salvayre, Ágota Kristóf, Franz Kafka and Leo Tolstoy) show how literary texts ‘stage’ code-switching.

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Why is it important?

The sociolinguistic notion of "code-switching," originally devised for the analysis of bilingual conversations, has been uncritically imported into the study of multilingual writing, thereby downplaying or even ignoring how fundamentally different language and communication are typically framed in literature (especially in narrative fiction.)