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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 Wonder 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 languages 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, intercultural 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.
