Language mixing and its discontents in 16th-century France

Abstract

Plurilingualism – understood as the ability of an individual speaker to use more than one language – continues to attract both praise and blame in modern European metalinguistic debate. An individual’s ability to harness the full range of their linguistic competence for the purposes of communication, without maintaining firm distinctions between the languages to which they have access, is now celebrated in English-speaking educational contexts under the term ‘translanguaging’, and this type of plurilingual practice also underpins the Council of Europe’s framework for language learning. Lay commentators, on the other hand, are often suspicious of those using more than one language, particularly when such individuals are immigrants. This lay attitude can be traced back to an early modern preoccupation with language mixing, which was invariably viewed negatively, unlike plurilingual competence that respected and policed clear distinctions between learned languages and vernaculars. Examples from late medieval French farces and the works of François Rabelais, Innocent Gentillet and Henri Estienne demonstrate that language mixing, typically associated with the desire to obfuscate or claim unearned social status or economic advantage, was consistently condemned, despite a readiness to celebrate a learned individual’s plurilingual competence.