Code-switching in early English

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The complex linguistic landscape of earlier multilingual Britain has significantly influenced the history of English through various contact-induced changes. Despite the prevalence of bi- and multilingual texts across diverse genres, this aspect remains underexplored. Texts that switch among Latin, English, and French are increasingly recognized as examples of written code-switching, offering valuable insights into the linguistic strategies employed by medieval and early modern multilingual speakers. This volume examines mixed-language texts through the lens of code-switching, a key mechanism of linguistic evolution. The contributions provide detailed linguistic analyses of numerous texts from the medieval and Early Modern English periods, tackling methodological, functional, pragmatic, syntactic, and lexical dimensions of language mixing. The unique characteristics of language mixing in certain texts also prompt significant theoretical inquiries, such as the differentiation between borrowing and switching, the presence of distinct linguistic codes in earlier multilingual contexts, and the broader implications of the code-switching framework for analyzing these mixed texts. Consequently, this work is particularly relevant for historical linguists, medievalists, and students of English history, as well as sociolinguists, psycholinguists, language theorists, and typologists.