8 - Instances of Language Contact

Summary

The positive attitudes of most travellers to foreign borrowings were in startling contrast to the voices of their contemporaries writing from home. Positive attitudes towards foreign borrowings were typical on the Grand Tour, an experience inspired by the desire to acquire and share knowledge which, by definition, could not be fully realized without opportunities for linguistic contact and language mixing. Travellers who inserted foreign loans into letters and journals did so neither as a faithful reconstruction of the event nor as evidence of familiarity with the donor language. They felt that using idiomatic expressions without offering a translation or an English equivalent added a special flavour which was capable of conveying to readers some of the sense of exoticness they had experienced. An appropriate distinction is that code-switching in a travel narrative is different from the practice of alternating two languages in real life. In ordinary communication, a single word can quite naturally trigger a change of language, while code-switching in travel writing involves a premeditated change of emphasis. Typically, foreign phrasing is used when there is the need to signal a change of mood vis-à-vis a situation, an idea or attitude that expresses a different vision of the world.