‘Slavic Irishness’ and the Fluidity of National Identity in Finnegans Wake

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article adopts a sociolinguistic approach to multilingualism within James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), paying attention to how, in Book 2, Chapter 3, two Irish soldiers called Butt and Taff extensively code-switch into numerous Slavonic languages (for which Bulgarian serves as the focus of this study), and how they do so for the purposes of bonding (through humour) and expressing their complex identities as ‘Slavic Irishmen’. The study looks in depth at the Wake’s extreme levels of multilingualism (with more than 70 languages present within the work) and how a sociolinguistic approach to reading it – one which specifically employs terminology and research drawn from the academic field of sociolinguistics – can provide fresh and intriguing academic perspectives on it. Within this article, I argue that this unique approach may ‘humanize’ Butt and Taff for the reader and that these figures may even be seen to acquire identities akin to ‘real-life’ personas through their use of code-switching. This makes them unlike the ‘avatars’ or ‘siglas’ that critics in Wake studies normally identify in the work.