Code-switching and script-switching in letters of English East India Company merchants, 1613–1623: A community of practice?

Abstract for ICEHL XX (20th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics), 27–30 August, Edinburgh, UK.

Samuli Kaislaniemi

University of Helsinki

Code-switching in historical texts is a vibrant emerging field (Schendl & Wright 2011; Pahta et al., In press). One largely uncharted but significant question in the field is, can visual features in manuscript texts be used as linguistic evidence? Researchers working on code-switching in contemporary texts have found visual and multimodal aspects to be linguistically relevant (Sebba 2013), and preliminary studies on historical texts appear to corroborate this finding (Kendall et al. 2013). This paper contributes to this discussion by looking at multilingualism and scribal practices in early English East India Company (EIC) merchant letters.

Early EIC trading posts in Asia worked in multilingual environments, and in relative isolation from each other. This environment is reflected in high levels of code-switching in texts produced by EIC merchants. These texts, and in particular their letters, show that the early EIC can be seen to have formed a linguistic community of practice (see Wenger 1998: 72–85; Kopaczyk & Jucker; Kaislaniemi 2017a).

There are indications that linguistic choices can be accompanied by scribal choices (e.g. Machan 2011). The everyday practice of typographical flagging for textual emphasis—the use of markers such as Capitalisation, italics, or underlining—stem from historical typographical practices, which in turn partly derive from older scribal traditions. And one such tradition was the association of scripts with languages. Just as Tudor English books printed in black letter use Roman typeface for Latin words and passages, contemporary manuscripts written in English Secretary script switch to Italic for Italian. In analogy of the term code-switching, this practice can be called script-switching.

A previous study of a scribal idiolect found a strong correlation of code- and script-switching (Kaislaniemi 2017b). This paper looks at the code- and script-switching practices of a community of early EIC merchants. I chart and analyse the use of script-switching in a small corpus of sixty letters (c. 70,000 words) written by English East India Company merchants living in the East Indies, 1613-1623. The discussion of results will focus on the correlation of script- and code-switching and its implications, both from a linguistic and a palaeographical perspective. Preliminary findings suggest that the co-occurrence of script-switching with code-switching is by no means a straightforward practice.

References

Kaislaniemi, Samuli. 2017a. “The early English East India Company as a community of practice: Evidence of multilingualism”. In Merchants of Innovation: The Language of Traders, ed. by Miriam Wagner, Bettina Beinhoff & Ben Outhwaite [Studies in Language Change 15]. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. pp. 132–157.

Kaislaniemi, Samuli. 2017b. “Visual aspects of code-switching in Early Modern English manuscript letters and printed tracts”. In Verbal and Visual Communication in Early English Texts, ed. by Matti Peikola, Aleksi Mäkilähde, Hanna Salmi, Mari-Liisa Varila & Janne Skaffari [Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy 37]. Turnhout: Brepols. pp. 165–200.

Kendall, Judy, Manuel Portela & Glyn White (eds.). 2013. European Journal of English Studies 17(1), special issue on Visual Text.

Kopaczyk, Joanna & Andreas H. Jucker (eds.). 2013. Communities of Practice in the History of English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Machan, Tim William. 2011. “The visual pragmatics of code-switching in late Middle English literature”. In Schendl, Herbert & Laura Wright (eds.), 303-333.

Pahta, Päivi, Janne Skaffari & Laura Wright (eds.). 2017. Multilingual Practices in Language History: English and Beyond, ed. by by Päivi Pahta, Janne Skaffari & Laura Wright [Language Contact and Bilingualism 15]. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

Schendl, Herbert & Laura Wright (eds.). 2011. Code-Switching in Early English. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter.

Sebba, Mark. 2013. “Multilingualism in written discourse. An approach to the analysis of multilingual texts”. International Journal of Bilingualism 17(1): 97-118.

Wenger, Etienne. 1998. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity. New York: Cambridge University Press.