The multilingual practices of Laurence Sterne

Abstract

This article discusses the multilingual practices identified in the public and private writings of Laurence Sterne, novelist and clergyman. The data used consists of Sterne’s two novels as well as a selection of his personal correspondence. Sterne uses a wide variety of languages in his texts, although the most common ones are French and Latin, the languages he seems to have been most fluent in. Sterne engages in some practices associated with translanguaging, particularly in terms of playful language use and mediation of foreign-language passages, but it is impossible to pinpoint any specific characteristics of translanguaging for certain. On the whole, it would seem that the analysis of Sterne’s multilingual practices does not benefit from the translanguaging point-of-view.