A historical study of codeswitching in writing: German and Latin in Schottelius' Ausführliche Arbeit von der Teutschen HaubtSprache (1663)

Abstract

The paper examines a major 17th century German text by the language theorist Justus-Georg Schottelius as an example of codeswitching in writing, an area which has received scant attention since an important study of Luther's bilingual Tischreden 40 years ago (Stolt, 1964). The paper analyzes the extent and types of Latin-German mixing in Schottelius' writing, and argues that, even though written, these are instances of codeswitching, that is, the use of two codes in the same “communicative event.” The paper identifies some pragmatic triggers for such codeswitching. It further finds that in Schottelius, embedded language (EL) constituents are always inflected according to the EL system, which appears to violate the System Morpheme Principle and Double Morphology Principle (Myers-Scotton, 1993a). It therefore hypothesizes that inflection according to EL rules need not be blocked, if the EL and ML (matrix language) are typologically close enough for speakers to be aware of morphological equivalence between morphemes in the ML and morphemes with a parallel function in the EL. Finally, it argues that differences between Luther's codeswitching practice (see Stolt, 1964) and that of Schottelius a century later confirm that codeswitching is an inherently unstable practice which must be seen in the context of wider language change and/ or language shift.