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"Schendl, Herbert"
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Code-Switching in Early English
The complex linguistic situation of earlier multilingual Britain has led to numerous contact-induced changes in the history of English. However, bi- and multilingual texts, which are attested in a large variety of text types, are still an underresearched aspect of earlier linguistic contact. Such texts, which switch between Latin, English and French, have increasingly been recognized as instances of written code-switching and as highly relevant evidence for the linguistic strategies which medieval and early modern multilingual speakers used for different purposes.
The contributions in this volume approach this phenomenon of mixed-language texts from the point of view of code-switching, an important mechanism of linguistic change. Based on a variety of text types and genres from the medieval and Early Modern English periods, the individual papers present detailed linguistic analyses of a large number of texts, addressing a variety of issues, including methodological questions as well as functional, pragmatic, syntactic and lexical aspects of language mixing. The very specific nature of language mixing in some text types also raises important theoretical questions such as the distinction between borrowing and switching, the existence of discrete linguistic codes in earlier multilingual Britain and, more generally, the possible limits of the code-switching paradigm for the analysis of these mixed texts from the early history of English.
Thus the volume is of particular interest not only for historical linguists, medievalists and students of the history of English, but also for sociolinguists, psycholinguists, language theorists and typologists.
eBook
Language Choice as a Dramatic Device in an Early Viennese Adaptation of Isaac Bickerstaff's \The Padlock\
The present paper discusses an unusual case of code-choice in a Viennese farce from the late 1850s, Carl Juin's Das Vorhängeschloß. One of the main characters of this play, the black servant Mungo, uses English as well as English-German code-switching in the otherwise German play, though English was hardly ever used on the 19th century Viennese stage. Trying to account for this clearly marked use of language, the paper first looks at the source of Juin's play, Isaac Bickerstaff s comic opera The Padlock (1768). In a second step, the historical context in which Das Vorhängeschloß was written and produced is analysed. A link to the highly successful Continental tour of the black British-American actor Ira Aldridge is established, whose English production of The Padlock on the Viennese stage in 1853 is considered as a trigger for Juin's German adaptation of The Padlock. An additional model for Juin's language use is found in Aldridge's bilingual production of The Merchant of Venice, also shown in Vienna in 1853.
Journal Article
Literacy, Multilingualism and Code-switching in Early English Written Texts
The multilingual nature of medieval Britain is a well-established fact, though there is some controversy on the exact nature and the results of language contact in the period. This particularly applies to early contacts of English with the Celtic languages as well as to the contact situation with the Scandinavian languages in the Danelaw area, from which hardly any written evidence has survived. More is known about the roles and changing status of the two prestigious languages of the Middle English period, Latin and French, and their relation to English. As the high language, Latin was widely used in domains such as religion, scholarship, administration and literature, while French as the prestigious vernacular was widespread in both official and private writing far into the fifteenth century. English, on the other hand, started as a mainly spoken low language and only gradually acquired the prestige it enjoyed by the middle of the fifteenth century as the newly emerging standard language, though Latin kept some of its strongholds for more than another century.
Book Chapter
