Literary multilingualism: exploring latent practices

Abstract

Over the last decades, literary multilingualism scholarship has focused above all on the way linguistic diversity openly manifests itself, for instance by examining multilingual practices such as code-switching, code-mixing, hybridization, etc. However, fewer studies have analysed so-called latent multilingualism, which could be defined as the presence of languages in a text even when they are not immediately perceptible. Even though it is less discernible, latent multilingualism is certainly more widespread than manifest multilingualism. More often than not narrators relate their stories in the tongue of the supposedly monolingual reader, rather than directly inserting or even mixing foreign tongues in their narrative. In this paper, I aim to trace back the origins of latent multilingualism, explore its principles, and compare the different theoretical approaches which have been formulated to examine it. Additionally, I aim to show that the research on latent multilingualism has helped to further expand literary multilingual boundaries. Latent practices have provided writers with extra tools to achieve their narratological aims, which would not be reached with manifest forms.