Abstract for the Historical Code-switching. The Next Step conference, 11–13 June 2014, Tampere, Finland.
Samuli Kaislaniemi
University of Helsinki
Visual aspects of code-switching in historical and contemporary texts have yet to receive their due attention (but see Machan 2011 and Sebba 2013). Although we still commonly use italics to mark foreign words or phrases, it is not generally known that this convention derives from historical typographical practices for textual emphasis. These practices in printed texts in turn ultimately stem from medieval scribal traditions of associating scripts with languages. Just as Tudor books printed in blackletter use Roman typeface to emphasise or flag words and phrases, EModE manuscripts written in Secretary script use Roman or italic script for emphasis.
In analogy of the term code-switching, I call this practice script-switching.
The practice of script-switching correlating with code-switching has not gone completely unnoticed. But we have yet to see even pilot studies of script-switching in Early Modern English, and its linguistic aspects remain uninvestigated. For instance, script-switching could be used to determine code boundaries: does the absence of script-switching indicate (fully) integrated borrowings? Script-switching also reveals information about scribal practices and linguistic competence: there were distinct ‘national’ scripts, such as English Secretary, French Secretary, and Spanish italic, so being able to write a ‘foreign’ script implies knowledge of the language it indicates.
In this paper I will chart and analyse the use of script-switching and code-switching in a corpus of about one hundred letters written by an English merchant living in France 1603-1608. 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.
References
Machan, Tim William. 2011. “The visual pragmatics of code-switching in late Middle English literature”. In Schendl, Herbert & Laura Wright (eds.), Code-Switching in Early English. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 303-333.
Sebba, Mark. 2013. “Multilingualism in written discourse. An approach to the analysis of multilingual texts”. International Journal of Bilingualism 17(1): 97-118.