It has been well established by psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics and sociolinguistics that a speaker’s vocabulary, syntactic and even narrative choices have everything to do with the kind of language user they are and their linguistic history. Many of these findings come together in the field of contact linguistics, which considers how languages influence each other when their speakers come into contact, both at the level of individual speakers and that of linguistic communities. When language communities come into contact, new or hybrid linguistic variants are often formed. When languages come into contact in a speaker’s mind, this tends to lead to language patterns commonly associated with multilingualism such as interference and code-switching but also affects that person’s subtle linguistic preferences.
But what if this speaker happened to be a writer, perhaps a French writer who grew up speaking Russian like the Goncourt prize winners Romain Gary, Elsa Triolet and Andreï Makine? Or if they came from a linguistic minority, like Kafka? What if they were influenced by reading Virginia Woolf in the original? Or were born in the former colonies, and French was the language of the coloniser? Or used German expressions in their work for aesthetic effect? Many writers represent a linguistic community characterised by language contact or are informed, in their language use, by their experience of multiple languages. Indeed, few works of literature, if any, can be said not to carry traces of language contact in one way or another, sometimes via translation; without them, most literature we read, write and love would neither exist nor discover new ways of expression. Since the phenomena manifested through literary style in such cases are linguistic in nature, literary studies alone can describe but do not, indeed cannot, possess the tools needed to expound them.
Our project’s goal is to research and promote a linguistic perspective on the many kinds of language contact that affect literature worldwide. As a result, we work towards a framework that will enable a new dialogue between fields that focus on literature shaped by language contact, notably translation and self-translation, multilingualism, translingualism, borderlands literature, translanguaging, influence, postcolonial literature and international literary movements.
This project is financed by an IMPULZ grant of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, 2023-2028. It is hosted by the Institute of World Literature of the Slovak Academy of Sciences.