The newly established ICLA Research Committee on Language Contact in Literature: Europe (LCLE)intends to revisit translation, literary multilingualism and related fields as sites of linguistic contact and change within the literary realm. We thus reconsider literature with a focus on the multiple ways in which languages interact and influence each other when they come into contact, both at the level of individual speakers and that of linguistic communities. A number of scholars have recently proposed to apply a contact linguistics paradigm to translation (Kotze 2020; Malamatidou 2016); this Committee’s goal is to reinvent this approach for the global literary context (e.g. Hassan 2022). As many contemporary scholars of comparative literature recognize (Yildiz 2012, Gramling 2016), the traditional focus on national literatures is insufficient to capture the global dimensions of the literary process. We therefore propose language contact in literature as a unified framework that can encompass and facilitate dialogue across several fields: literary translation, multilingual and translingual literature, minor and borderland literature, influence across language boundaries, postcolonial literature, international literary movements and potentially others. Our aim is to identify and distinguish the diverse elements that contribute to literary language contact in its various guises, including linguistic and sociolinguistic factors, as well as aesthetic and stylistic considerations. At the same time, we aspire to understand more accurately how different settings of language contact relate to one another, how they interact and what distinguishes them. To achieve these purposes, linguistics offers valuable theoretical support.

The Objectives of the LCLE committee are:  

• Start a more constructive dialogue between linguistics, literary multilingualism and translation (within the comparative literature framework more widely understood). In this light, we aim to reevaluate the productive but somewhat imprecise dialogue between multilingualism and translation studies. 
• Structure a clear and carefully-tailored framework named “Language Contact in Literature” which will be broad enough to include multiple literary language contact cases but at the same time detailed enough to tackle the array of elements/factors involved in the framework and their modulations.  
• Challenge the implicit assumption in the field that a writer’s linguistic background is irrelevant to literary analysis or secondary to considerations of biography or identity. In addition to that, we aim to give more relevance to the role played by the reader in the meaning-creating process. This aspect has been recently developed by scholars such as Grutman (2023), Hansen (2024) etc. but can be implemented further.     
• Create a broad and interdisciplinary network and encourage the collaboration between well-established and early career researchers. Our aim is not just to put them in touch but also to create new opportunities for this conversation to happen in a fruitful way.  
• Organize events (both in person and online) such as workshops, seminars, conferences devoted to the topic of Language Contact in Literature.  

Chairs

Eugenia Kelbert (Institute of World Literature SAS/University of East Anglia) 

Marianna Deganutti (Institute of World Literature SAS) 

For further information on the Research Committee on Language Contact in Literature: Europe, including its membership, current research, activities, and scholarly output, please contact the chairs.

To participate in the activities of the Research Committee, please contact the Chairs:

Eugenia Kelbert (eugenia.kelbert@savba.sk) and Marianna Deganutti (marianna.deganutti@savba.sk).