Language ideology and code-switching practices in a socio-historical perspective. Evidence from Plautus’ and Goldoni’s comedies

In this paper we analyze the ideological import underlying code -switching practices in the specific text genre of comedies, with regard to two past multilingual societies, namely 3rd-century BC Rome (Plautus’ comedies) and 18th-century Italy (Goldoni’s comedies). Comedies are “written-to-be-spoken” and tend to mimetically reflect as closely as possible the dynamics and structures of lively, oral language. Hence, they represent a privileged genre to explore what social “actors” in ancient texts used to think about languages, how they perceived them in their plurality, when and why they switched to different codes in interaction, and how they evaluated them, as part of a reconstruction of their ideologies and attitudes towards the different codes at their disposal. By commenting on relevant cases, we will show that the choice of language is an enactment of an identity in the local context of interaction, typically carrying ideological meanings which are determined by socio -cultural stances and positioning. In this, code-switching emerges as an ideologically conscious strategy adopted to align characters with a specific type of communicative context.