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LITERARY CODE-SWITCHING AND BEYOND
Travel writing may potentially include multiple code-switching types. Overt
ZCS seems to be mainly used as a compromise. On the one hand, it satisfies
the presumed monolingual reader’s needs; on the other hand, it allows the
writer to give a taste of a foreign tongue that the work of travel literature is
most probably imbued with.
Examples:
1. Twain and his companion Harris are travelling by train to Heilbronn. The
train is crowded, and they try to interact in German with fellow travellers.
Despite the fact that the character’s attempt is unsuccessful — he is not under¬
stood, and they end up speaking in English, a language already widespread in
Germany at that time — the fact that the protagonist tries to speak in German
is reported in the narrative.
There were some nice German people in our compartment. (...) After a while some
of those folks got out and a German gentleman and his two young daughters got
in. I spoke in German: to one of the latter several times, but without result (Mark
Twain: A Tramp Abroad, 23).
2. Twain and Harris would like to rent a boat in order to go rafting along the
river Neckar, in the proximity of Hirschhorn. However, by employing High
German, they struggle to talk to the raftman renting boats. An unknown man,
called Mr. X, makes himself understood by using broken German — more
precisely a German interspersed with English words. This hybrid language is
reflected by Twain in the narrative.
X. always spoke English, to Germans, but his plan was to turn the sentence wrong
end first and upside down, according to German construction, and sprinkle in a
German word without any essential meaning to it, here and there, by way of flavor.
Yet he always made himself understood. He could make those dialect-speaking
raftsmen understand him, sometimes, when even young Z. had failed with them;
and young Z. was a pretty good German scholar. For one thing, X. always spoke
with such confidence, — perhaps that helped (Mark Twain: A Tramp Abroad, 164).
SUMMARY
Depending on whether the multilinguality of the fictional situation is re¬
ported either through direct or indirect linguistic mapping, with reflections
on the specificity of the multilingual situation, or with narratorial translation,
these techniques can be categorized as overt, reflected or covert
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