The Art of Code-Switching: Toward a ‘Tongueprint’ of Multilingual Literary Personas in Erasmus’ Praise of Folly and Aleandro’s Diaries?

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.The extent of early modern Neo-Latin literature istruly vast, but its substantial Greek component, in the form of code-switches,has been largely overlooked. Often dismissed as mere quotes from classicalsources, the phenomenon deserves further scrutiny, especially since thislinguistic technique served various purposes, which differed from one author tothe other, as we argue. We explore the functions of Latin–Greek code-switchingin two prose texts by initially like-minded humanists who ended up in bittercontroversy: the Praise of Folly byErasmus of Rotterdam (ca. 1469–1536)and the diaries of Girolamo Aleandro (1480–1542). We argue that Erasmus and Aleandroused code-switching differently in the construction of their bilingual literarypersonas, Folly in Erasmus’ case and the author himself in Aleandro’s. Wedetect their code-switching profiles by computational and traditional philologicalmethods, working toward a ‘tongueprint’ parameter that requires refinement infollow-up research. Our paper in any case provides a proof-of-concept.Overall, Erasmus seems tohave used code-switching more sparingly and with, in proportion, more quotesfrom classical sources than Aleandro, who has more substantial code-switches. Weexplore to what extent this difference was the result of the divergent genre,audience and publication history of their texts, while at the same time askingthe question what role their general profiles and linguistic competencies asauthors played. This question becomes all the more pressing once one takes alook at their broader oeuvre, including the correspondence they exchanged,where the hypothesis that their overall code-switching profiles were differentseems to receive further support.