Research tips

Here's an account of some of the 20th century scholarship available to those interested in writing articles or books about the aesthetics of multilingual literary texts.  This is from “Mixed Language Texts as Data and Evidence in English Historical Linguistics” by Herbert Schendl in Volume 1, page 57, of Studies in the History of the English Language:  A Millennial Perspective (2002), edited by Donka Minkova and Robert P. Stockwell:

“Though there was some interest in ‘macaronic poetry’ before the 20^th century, serious research only began with Wehrle’s study on medieval macaronic hyms and lyrics (1933).  Wehrle establishes a typology of macaronic poetry from the 13th to the 15th centuries and classifies patterns of Latin insertions from a formal literary perspective, viewing them as ‘a genre of versification.’  The second half of the 20^th century saw quite a number of literary studies on the aesthetic and poetic functions of language-mixing in macaronic poems, such as Zumthor (1960, 1963) in a European perspective, Harvey (1978) for Anglo-Norman lyrics, or Archibald (1992) for the poems of Dunbar and Skelton.  These more recent studies emphasise the often highly artistic stylistic functions of poetic language-mixing.”