Four major literary code-switching strategies in Hungarian literature. Decoding monolingualism

The field of literary multilingualism has quickly grown over the last decades. Multiple studies have examined the way linguistic diversity manifests itself in literature by focusing on specific strategies such as code-switching, code-mixing, code-shifting, hybridization, etc. However, the current understanding of multilingual practices is still dominated by a remarkable terminological inconsistency. In this article, we provide a new theoretical framework called ‘literary code-switching’ (Domokos 2018–2020), that can be used to examine most literary multilingual practices – from the most hidden or latent to the more manifest ones. This formulation, which is scaled into degrees from 0 to 5, will be applied to some key examples taken from the works of Imre Madách, Mihály Tompa, Imre Oravecz, Attila Jász, Ferenc Karinthy, Terézia Mora and Anne Tardos. The aim of picking up these heuristic examples from Hungarian literature is to point towards the necessity of investigating literature more systematically according to its hidden and manifest linguistic diversity.