Code-Switching Patterns in Bilingual Youth Literature of Central Europe

Abstrakt

Contemporary youth literature produced in multilingual Central European contexts increasingly incorporates code-switching as a stylistic device reflecting the everyday linguistic experience of bilingual young readers, yet the narrative functions of such switching remain underexamined relative to code-switching research in spoken discourse. This study analyzes code-switching patterns across a corpus of recently published bilingual youth novels, examining where in narrative structure code-switching occurs and what discourse functions it serves, including character voice differentiation, emotional emphasis, and marking of culturally specific concepts without translation. Close textual analysis is combined with reader response data gathered from focus groups of bilingual adolescent readers, allowing comparison between authorial intent inferred from textual patterns and actual reader interpretation of switching instances. Findings indicate that code-switching most frequently occurs at moments of heightened emotional intensity or peer dialogue, functioning less as translation avoidance than as an authenticity marker recognized and valued by bilingual readers themselves. Readers reported stronger character identification with passages containing naturalistic switching compared to fully monolingual equivalents. These findings contribute to understanding how literary code-switching operates as a deliberate narrative resource in multilingual youth publishing markets.