Oldal 40 [40]
LITERARY CODE-SWITCHING AND BEYOND
indeed to offer observations and insights into European society, mentality and
way of life gained through adventures and encounters with the locals in dif¬
ferent contexts and circumstances, as well as to make his audience laugh. The
book is strongly characterized by funny anecdotes and stories which are often
the result of Twain’s “fertile imagination.” During this European trip, Twain’s
goal was also a linguistic one. He wanted to “learn the German language”
(Twain 1880, 3), a language which played a key role in his life and which is
central throughout the entire work.
Twain’s German
Twain was described by Cracroft (1993, 11) as a “self-proclaimed philologist”
who wrote numerous essays on a great variety of languages - Italian, Portu¬
guese, English, American English and French — showing also in his novels a
remarkable language mindset (Sewell 1987). For instance, in the Introduction
to the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain explained that to faithfully re¬
produce the languages spoken in the area where the novel was set, Missouri,
he had to use: “a number of dialects [...] the Missouri Negro dialect; the ex¬
tremist form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary ‘Pike
County’ dialect; and four modified varieties of this last” (2014, 3). This testifies
that languages and varieties of languages were a key component in building
his characters and stories.
Despite his interest in numerous languages, no language could be compared
to German, which occupied him for his entire life, which he “loved with a rare
intensity” and found “most intriguing and stimulating” (Hemminghaus 1966,
477), although rather challenging and not all fun and games. Hedderich un¬
derlines that Twain’s contact with German was twofold: on the one hand, Twain
strongly admired it; on the other, it caused him “severe frustration” (2003, 30),
as Clearly stated by the writer himself in the famous Appendix The Awful
German Language included in A Tramp abroad. Here, Twain explains the
effort he made to learn it in a hilarious way: “If he [the Heidelberg Castle’s
keeper, whom he addressed in German] had known what it had cost me to
acquire my art [the German language], he would also have known that it would
break any collector to buy it” (390).
This life-long fascination with German has been reconstructed by critics
multiple times. The first contact with the language could possibly be traced
back to Twain’s youth in Hannibal, Missouri, where he was raised and had the
chance to come into contact with German settlers and immigrants. Missouri,
as Hedderich reminds us, “had a sizable percentage of German immigrants”
(2003, 2). In St. Louis, where Twain moved when he was 18, he collaborated at
the Anzeiger des Westens, a popular German newspaper in America. Later in
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