Oldal 9 [9]
INTRODUCTION
Multilingualism and Code-Switching
in Literature and Performative Arts
——o—
Linguistic diversity has always characterized aesthetic production since ancient
times. Different languages have been often skillfully incorporated in works
such as paintings and drawings, literary texts or music compositions, both in
openly manifested or clearly detectable ways and in more hidden ones, for
centuries. Incorporating more than one linguistic code in literary and artistic
production has quickly grown over the last two decades of the 21" century also
due to the globalization processes characterizing our era.’ Let us just think
about the Hollywood movies inspired by Greek mythology such as Troy, Percy
Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, Hercules, Immortals and Won¬
der Woman, which are performed using only English, even though the story
refers to an ancient Greek setting. Some movies, such as the recent Japanese
movie Drive my car even went beyond that—they used not only different lan¬
guages but also Korean sign language.
Code-switching is certainly a common practice in real life as it “affects
practically everyone who is in contact with more than one language or dialect,
to a greater or lesser extent.”* It is, at the same time, widely employed in
manifold artistic and literary genres. If we consider contemporary genres such
as comic series, migrant literature, borderland novels, climate fiction, inter¬
cultural theater, accented cinema, lyrics of rap songs or animes, but also
historical genres as that of folkloric tales, epic poems, macaronic poetry or
travelogues of past centuries, multilingual or multicultural encounters and
contacts occur in high numbers.
Strongly influenced by specific studies in sociolinguistics, second language
acquisition, narratology or cultural studies, these multilingual practices
have been classified in different ways. Among the most popular definitions,
the following stand out: “polylanguaging,” “polylingualism,” “polyglot
994 «
! Jan Blommaert: The Sociolinguistics of Globalization, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
2010.
? Penelope Gardner-Chloros: Code-switching, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009, 4.
3 Jens Normann Jorgensen — Martha Sif Karrebzek — Lian Malai Madsen - Janus Moller — Janus
Spindler: Polylanguaging in Superdiversity, Diversities 13 (2011), 23-37.
* Meir Sternberg: Polylingualism as Reality and Translation as Mimesis, Poetics Today 2 (1981),
221-239.