Macaronic language uses a mixture of

language Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of ...

s, particularly bilingual puns or situations in which the languages are otherwise used in the same context (rather than simply discrete segments of a text being in different languages).

Hybrid word A hybrid word or hybridism is a word that etymologically derives from at least two languages. Common hybrids The most common form of hybrid word in English combines Latin and Greek parts. Since many prefixes and suffixes in English are of Latin ...

s are effectively "internally macaronic." In spoken language,

code-switching In linguistics, code-switching or language alternation occurs when a speaker alternates between two or more languages, or language varieties, in the context of a single conversation or situation. Code-switching is different from plurilingualis ...

is using more than one language or dialect within the same conversation. Macaronic Latin in particular is a jumbled

jargon Jargon is the specialized terminology associated with a particular field or area of activity. Jargon is normally employed in a particular communicative context and may not be well understood outside that context. The context is usually a partic ...

made up of

vernacular A vernacular or vernacular language is in contrast with a "standard language". It refers to the language or dialect that is spoken by people that are inhabiting a particular country or region. The vernacular is typically the native language, n ...

words given

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

endings or of Latin words mixed with the vernacular in a pastiche (compare

dog Latin Dog Latin or cod Latin is a phrase or jargon that imitates Latin, often by "translating" English words (or those of other languages) into Latin by conjugating or declining them as if they were Latin words. Dog Latin is usually a humorous devi ...

). The word ''

macaronic Macaronic language uses a mixture of languages, particularly bilingual puns or situations in which the languages are otherwise used in the same context (rather than simply discrete segments of a text being in different languages). Hybrid words ...

'' comes from the

New Latin New Latin (also called Neo-Latin or Modern Latin) is the revival of Literary Latin used in original, scholarly, and scientific works since about 1500. Modern scholarly and technical nomenclature, such as in zoological and botanical taxonomy ...

''macaronicus'' which is from the

Italian Italian(s) may refer to: * Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries ** Italians, an ethnic group or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom ** Italian language, a Romance language *** Regional Ita ...

''maccarone'' ("dumpling," regarded as coarse peasant fare). It is generally derogatory and used when the mixing of languages has a humorous or satirical intent or effect but is sometimes applied to more serious mixed-language literature.

History

Mixed Latin-vernacular lyrics in Medieval Europe

Texts that mixed Latin and

vernacular language A vernacular or vernacular language is in contrast with a "standard language". It refers to the language or dialect that is spoken by people that are inhabiting a particular country or region. The vernacular is typically the native language, n ...

apparently arose throughout Europe at the end of the

Middle Ages In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire ...

—a time when Latin was still the working language of scholars, clerics and university students, but was losing ground to vernacular among poets,

minstrel A minstrel was an entertainer, initially in medieval Europe. It originally described any type of entertainer such as a musician, juggler, acrobat, singer or fool; later, from the sixteenth century, it came to mean a specialist entertainer ...

s and storytellers. An early example is from 1130, in the

Gospel book A Gospel Book, Evangelion, or Book of the Gospels (Greek: , ''Evangélion'') is a codex or bound volume containing one or more of the four Gospels of the Christian New Testament – normally all four – centering on the life of Jesus of Nazareth ...

Munsterbilzen Abbey Munsterbilzen Abbey was an abbey of Benedictine nuns in Munsterbilzen, Limburg, Belgium, founded in around 670 by Saint Landrada. It was plundered by Vikings in 881 but restored. From the 9th century it was dedicated to Saint Amor. It was an impe ...

. The following sentence mixes late

Old Dutch In linguistics, Old Dutch (Dutch: Oudnederlands) or Old Low Franconian (Dutch: Oudnederfrankisch) is the set of Franconian dialects (i.e. dialects that evolved from Frankish) spoken in the Low Countries during the Early Middle Ages, from aroun ...

and Latin:

Tesi samanunga was edele unde scona et omnium virtutum pleniter plena

Translated: ''This community was noble and pure, and completely full of all virtues.'' The ''

Carmina Burana ''Carmina Burana'' (, Latin for "Songs from Benediktbeuern" 'Buria'' in Latin is a manuscript of 254 poems and dramatic texts mostly from the 11th or 12th century, although some are from the 13th century. The pieces are mostly bawdy, irreverent ...

'' (collected c.1230) contains several poems mixing Latin with Medieval German or French. Another well-known example is the first stanza of the famous carol ''

In Dulci Jubilo "In dulci jubilo" (Latin for "In sweet rejoicing") is a traditional Christmas carol. In its original setting, the carol is a macaronic text of German and Latin dating from the Middle Ages. Subsequent translations into English, such as J. M. N ...

'', whose original version (written around 1328) had Latin mixed with German, with a hint of

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

. While some of those early works had a clear humorous intent, many use the language mix for lyrical effect. Another early example is in the

Middle English Middle English (abbreviated to ME) is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old English ...

recitals '' The Towneley Plays'' (c.1460). In '' The Talents'' (play 24),

Pontius Pilate Pontius Pilate (; grc-gre, Πόντιος Πιλᾶτος, ) was the fifth governor of the Roman province of Judaea, serving under Emperor Tiberius from 26/27 to 36/37 AD. He is best known for being the official who presided over the trial of ...

delivers a rhyming speech in mixed English and Latin. A number of English political poems in the 14th century alternated (Middle) English and Latin lines, such as in MS Digby 196:

The taxe hath tened uinedvs alle, Probat hoc mors tot validorum The Kyng þerof had small fuit in manibus cupidorum. yt had ful hard hansell, dans causam fine dolorum; vengeaunce nedes most fall, propter peccata malorum ''(etc)''

Several anthems also contain both Latin and English. In the case of 'Nolo mortem pecatoris' by

Thomas Morley Thomas Morley (1557 – early October 1602) was an English composer, theorist, singer and organist of the Renaissance. He was one of the foremost members of the English Madrigal School. Referring to the strong Italian influence on the Engl ...

, the Latin is used as a refrain:

Nolo mortem peccatoris; Haec sunt verba Salvatoris. Father I am thine only Son, sent down from heav’n mankind to save. Father, all things fulfilled and done according to thy will, I have. Father, my will now all is this: Nolo mortem peccatoris. Father, behold my painful smart, taken for man on ev’ry side; Ev'n from my birth to death most tart, no kind of pain I have denied, but suffered all, and all for this: Nolo mortem peccatoris.

Translated: "'I do not wish the death of the wicked'; These are the words of the Saviour." An allusion to John 3:17 and 2 Peter 3:9.

Latin–Italian macaronic verse

The term ''macaronic'' is believed to have originated in

Padua Padua ( ; it, Padova ; vec, Pàdova) is a city and ''comune'' in Veneto, northern Italy. Padua is on the river Bacchiglione, west of Venice. It is the capital of the province of Padua. It is also the economic and communications hub of the ...

in the late 15th century, apparently from ''maccarona'', a kind of pasta or dumpling eaten by peasants at that time. (That is also the presumed origin of '' maccheroni''.) Its association with the genre comes from the '' Macaronea'', a comical poem by Tifi Odasi in mixed Latin and Italian, published in 1488 or 1489. Another example of the genre is '' Tosontea'' by Corrado of Padua, which was published at about the same time as Tifi's ''Macaronea''. Tifi and his contemporaries clearly intended to satirize the broken Latin used by many doctors, scholars and bureaucrats of their time. While this "macaronic Latin" (''macaronica verba'') could be due to ignorance or carelessness, it could also be the result of its speakers trying to make themselves understood by the vulgar folk without resorting to their speech. An important and unusual example of mixed-language text is the ''

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili ''Hypnerotomachia Poliphili'' (; ), called in English ''Poliphilo's Strife of Love in a Dream'' or ''The Dream of Poliphilus'', is a book said to be by Francesco Colonna. It is a famous example of an incunable (a work of early printing). The wor ...

'' of Francesco Colonna (1499), which was basically written using Italian syntax and morphology, but using a made-up vocabulary based on roots from Latin,

, and occasionally others. However, while the ''Hypnerotomachia'' is contemporary with Tifi's ''Macaronea'', its mixed language is not used for plain humor, but rather as an aesthetic device to underscore the fantastic but refined nature of the book. Tifi's ''Macaronea'' was a popular success, and the writing of

humorous Humour (Commonwealth English) or humor (American English) is the tendency of experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement. The term derives from the humoral medicine of the ancient Greeks, which taught that the balance of fluids in th ...

texts in macaronic Latin became a fad in the 16th and 17th centuries, particularly in Italian, but also in many other European languages. An important Italian example was '' Baldo'' by Teofilo Folengo, who described his own verses as "a gross, rude, and rustic mixture of flour, cheese, and butter".The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, Oxford University Press (1996)

Other mixed-language lyrics

Macaronic verse is especially common in cultures with widespread bilingualism or language contact, such as Ireland before the middle of the nineteenth century. Macaronic traditional songs such as '' Siúil A Rúin'' are quite common in Ireland. In Scotland, macaronic songs have been popular among

Highland Highlands or uplands are areas of high elevation such as a mountainous region, elevated mountainous plateau or high hills. Generally speaking, upland (or uplands) refers to ranges of hills, typically from up to while highland (or highlands) is ...

immigrants to

Glasgow Glasgow ( ; sco, Glesca or ; gd, Glaschu ) is the most populous city in Scotland and the fourth-most populous city in the United Kingdom, as well as being the 27th largest city by population in Europe. In 2020, it had an estimated popul ...

, using English and

Scottish Gaelic Scottish Gaelic ( gd, Gàidhlig ), also known as Scots Gaelic and Gaelic, is a Goidelic language (in the Celtic branch of the Indo-European language family) native to the Gaels of Scotland. As a Goidelic language, Scottish Gaelic, as well ...

as a device to express the alien nature of the anglophone environment. An example: Folk and popular music of the

Andes The Andes, Andes Mountains or Andean Mountains (; ) are the longest continental mountain range in the world, forming a continuous highland along the western edge of South America. The range is long, wide (widest between 18°S – 20°S ...

frequently alternates between Spanish and the given

South American South America is a continent entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere at the northern tip of the continent. It can also be described as the southe ...

language of its region of origin. Some Classical Persian poems were written with alternating

Persian Persian may refer to: * People and things from Iran, historically called ''Persia'' in the English language ** Persians, the majority ethnic group in Iran, not to be conflated with the Iranic peoples ** Persian language, an Iranian language of the ...

and

Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter ...

verses or hemistichs, most famously by Saadi and

Hafez Khwāje Shams-od-Dīn Moḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī ( fa, خواجه شمس‌‌الدین محمّد حافظ شیرازی), known by his pen name Hafez (, ''Ḥāfeẓ'', 'the memorizer; the (safe) keeper'; 1325–1390) and as "Hafiz", ...

. Such poems were called ''molamma (, literally "speckled", plural ''molamma‘āt'' ), Residing in

Anatolia Anatolia, tr, Anadolu Yarımadası), and the Anatolian plateau, also known as Asia Minor, is a large peninsula in Western Asia and the westernmost protrusion of the Asian continent. It constitutes the major part of modern-day Turkey. The ...

, in some of his poems Rumi mixed Persian with Arabic as well as the local languages of Turkish and

. Macaronic verse was also common in

medieval In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire ...

India, where the influence of the Muslim rulers led to poems being written in alternating indigenous

Hindi Hindi ( Devanāgarī: or , ), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: ), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of northern, central, eastern, and western India. Hindi has been ...

and the Persian language. This style was used by the famous poet

Amir Khusro Abu'l Hasan Yamīn ud-Dīn Khusrau (1253–1325 AD), better known as Amīr Khusrau was an Indo-Persian culture, Indo-Persian Sufi singer, musician, poet and scholar who lived under the Delhi Sultanate. He is an iconic figure in the cultural his ...

and played a major role in the rise of the

Urdu Urdu (;"Urdu"
'' Hindustani language Hindustani (; Devanagari: , * * * * ; Perso-Arabic: , , ) is the '' lingua franca'' of Northern and Central India and Pakistan. Hindustani is a pluricentric language with two standard registers, known as Hindi and Urdu. Thus, the lang ...

Unintentional macaronic language

Occasionally language is unintentionally macaronic. One particularly famed piece of schoolyard Greek in France is

Xenophon Xenophon of Athens (; grc, Ξενοφῶν ; – probably 355 or 354 BC) was a Greek military leader, philosopher, and historian, born in Athens. At the age of 30, Xenophon was elected commander of one of the biggest Greek mercenary armies o ...

's line "they did not take the city; but in fact they had no hope of taking it" (, ''ouk élabon pólin; álla gàr elpìs éphē kaká'').

Read Read Read may refer to: * Reading, human cognitive process of decoding symbols in order to construct or derive meaning * Read (automobile), an American car manufactured from 1913 to 1915 * Read (biology), an inferred sequence of base pairs of ...

in the French manner, this becomes "Où qu'est la bonne Pauline? A la gare. Elle pisse et fait caca." ("Where is Pauline the maid? At the ailwaystation. She's pissing and taking a shit.") In English literature, the untranslated line makes an appearance in

James Joyce James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of ...

's ''

Finnegans Wake ''Finnegans Wake'' is a novel by Irish writer James Joyce. It is well known for its experimental style and reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the Western canon. It has been called "a work of fiction which combines a bod ...

''.

Modern macaronic literature

Prose

Macaronic text is still used by modern Italian authors, e.g. by

Carlo Emilio Gadda Carlo Emilio Gadda (; November 14, 1893 – May 21, 1973) was an Italian writer and poet. He belongs to the tradition of the language innovators, writers that played with the somewhat stiff standard pre-war Italian language, and added elements o ...

and Beppe Fenoglio. Other examples are provided by the character Salvatore in

Umberto Eco Umberto Eco (5 January 1932 – 19 February 2016) was an Italian medievalist, philosopher, semiotician, novelist, cultural critic, and political and social commentator. In English, he is best known for his popular 1980 novel ''The Name of th ...

's ''

The Name of the Rose ''The Name of the Rose'' ( it, Il nome della rosa ) is the 1980 debut novel by Italian author Umberto Eco. It is a historical murder mystery set in an Italian monastery in the year 1327, and an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in ficti ...

'', and the peasant hero of his ''

Baudolino ''Baudolino'' is a 2000 novel by Umberto Eco about the adventures of a man named Baudolino in the known and mythical Christian world of the 12th century. ''Baudolino'' was translated into English in 2001 by William Weaver William is a male ...

''.

Dario Fo Dario Luigi Angelo Fo (; 24 March 1926 – 13 October 2016) was an Italian playwright, actor, theatre director, stage designer, songwriter, political campaigner for the Italian left wing and the recipient of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Literature. ...

's ''

Mistero Buffo ''Mistero buffo'' ("Comical Mystery Play") is Dario Fo's solo ''pièce célèbre'', performed across Europe, Canada and Latin America from 1969 to 1999. It is recognised as one of the most controversial and popular spectacles in postwar European th ...

'' ("''Comic Mystery Play''") features

grammelot Grammelot (or gromalot or galimatias) is an imitation of language used in satirical theatre, an ''ad hoc'' gibberish that uses prosody along with macaronic and onomatopoeic elements to convey emotional and other meaning, and used in association w ...

sketches using language with macaronic elements. The 2001 novel ''

The Last Samurai ''The Last Samurai'' is a 2003 epic period action drama film directed and co-produced by Edward Zwick, who also co-wrote the screenplay with John Logan and Marshall Herskovitz from a story devised by Logan. The film stars Ken Watanabe in the ...

'' by

Helen DeWitt Helen DeWitt (born 1957 in Takoma Park, Maryland) is an American novelist. She is the author of the novels ''The Last Samurai'' (2000) and ''Lightning Rods'' (2011) and the short story collection ''Some Trick'' (2018) and, in collaboration with t ...

DeWitt, Helen. ''The Last Samurai'' (Chatto and Windus, 2000: ; Vintage, 2001: ) includes portions of Japanese,

Classical Greek Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic peri ...

, and Inuktitut, although the reader is not expected to understand the passages that are not in English. Macaronic games are used by the literary group

Oulipo Oulipo (, short for french: Ouvroir de littérature potentielle; roughly translated: ''"workshop of potential literature"'', stylized ''OuLiPo'') is a loose gathering of (mainly) French-speaking writers and mathematicians who seek to create works ...

in the form of interlinguistic

homophonic transformation Homophonic translation renders a text in one language into a near-homophonic text in another language, usually with no attempt to preserve the original meaning of the text. In one homophonic translation, for example, the English "sat on a wall" i ...

: replacing a known phrase with homophones from another language. The archetypal example is by

François Le Lionnais François Le Lionnais (3 October 1901 – 13 March 1984) was a French chemical engineer and writer. He was a co-founder of the literary movement Oulipo. Biography Le Lionnais was born in Paris on 3 October 1901. Trained as a chemical en ...

, who transformed John Keats' "A thing of beauty is a joy forever" into "Un singe de beauté est un jouet pour l'hiver": 'A monkey of beauty is a toy for the winter'. Another example is the book '' Mots d'Heures''. Macaronisms figure prominently in ''

The Trilogy The Trilogy (1884-1888) is a series of three novels written by the Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz. The series follows dramatized versions of famous events in Polish history, weaving fact and fiction. It is considered great literary work on p ...

'' by the

Polish Polish may refer to: * Anything from or related to Poland, a country in Europe * Polish language * Poles Poles,, ; singular masculine: ''Polak'', singular feminine: ''Polka'' or Polish people, are a West Slavic nation and ethnic group, w ...

novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz, and are one of the major compositional principles for James Joyce's novel ''

''. In Michael Flynn's science fiction novels of the Spiral Arm series, a massive interplanetary exodus from all Earth language groups has led to star system settlements derived from random language and culture admixtures. At the time of the novels' setting, several hundred years later, each planet has developed a macaronic pidgin, several of which are used for all the dialogs in the books. The Reverend Fergus Butler-Gallie's second book bears a cross-lingual pun as its title, ''Priests de la Résistance''.

Poetry

Two well-known examples of non-humorous macaronic verse are

Byron George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824), known simply as Lord Byron, was an English romantic poet and peer. He was one of the leading figures of the Romantic movement, and has been regarded as among the ...

's '' Maid of Athens, ere we part'' (1810, in English with a

refrain); and Pearsall's translation of the carol ''In Dulci Jubilo'' (1837, in mixed English and Latin verse). An example of modern humorous macaronic verse is the anonymous English/Latin poem '' Carmen Possum'' ("''The Opossum's Song''"), which is sometimes used as a teaching and motivational aid in elementary Latin language classes. Other similar examples are ''

The Motor Bus "The Motor Bus" is a macaronic poem written in 1914 by Alfred Denis Godley (1856–1925). The mixed English-Latin text makes fun of the difficulties of Latin declensions. It takes off from puns on the English words " motor" and " bus", ascribin ...

'' by

A. D. Godley Alfred Denis Godley (22 January 1856 – 27 June 1925) was an Anglo-Irish classical scholar and author of humorous poems. From 1910 to 1920 he was Public Orator at the University of Oxford, a post that involved composing citations in Latin for ...

, and the anonymous '' Up I arose in verno tempore''. Ezra Pound's ''

The Cantos ''The Cantos'' by Ezra Pound is a long, incomplete poem in 120 sections, each of which is a ''canto''. Most of it was written between 1915 and 1962, although much of the early work was abandoned and the early cantos, as finally published, date ...

'' makes use of Chinese, Greek, Latin, and Italian, among other languages. Recent examples are the ''mużajki'' or 'mosaics' (2007) of Maltese poet Antoine CassarGrech, Marija
"Mosaics: A symphony of multilingual poetry"
, ''The Daily Star'' (Kuwait), 25 August 2007 mixing English, Spanish, Maltese, Italian, and French; works of Italian writer Guido Monte; and the late poetry of Ivan Blatný combining Czech with English.Wheatley, David
"The Homeless Tongue: Ivan Blatný"
. ''

Contemporary Poetry Review Garrick Davis (born 1971 in Los Angeles) is an American poet and critic. He was Poetry Editor of ''First Things'' magazine from 2020 until 2021. Career Davis is the founding editor of the ''Contemporary Poetry Review'', the largest online arch ...

'', 2008. Brian P. Cleary's "What Can I C'est?" makes use of macaronic verse, as do other poems in his book ''Rainbow Soup: Adventures in Poetry'': A whole body of comic verse exists created by John O'Mill, pseudonym of

Johan van der Meulen Johan van der Meulen (11 January 1915, Breda - 13 September 2005, Breda), better known by his pseudonym John O'Mill (a jocular translation of his given name, as if O' stands for "of the"), was a Dutch author mostly known for his wordplay and lime ...

, a teacher of English at the Rijks HBS (State Grammar School), Breda, the

Netherlands ) , anthem = ( en, "William of Nassau") , image_map = , map_caption = , subdivision_type = Sovereign state , subdivision_name = Kingdom of the Netherlands , established_title = Before independence , established_date = Spanish Netherl ...

. These are in a mixture of English and Dutch, often playing on common mistakes made when translating from the latter to the former.

Theatre

The finale of act 1 of Gilbert and Sullivan's

Savoy Opera Savoy opera was a style of comic opera that developed in Victorian England in the late 19th century, with W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan as the original and most successful practitioners. The name is derived from the Savoy Theatre, which impr ...

'' Iolanthe'' has several instances of humorous macaronic verse. First, the three lords mix Italian and Latin phrases into their discussion of Iolanthe's age:

Lord Mountararat: This gentleman is seen, / With a maid of seventeen, / A-taking of his ''dolce far niente''...
Lord Chancellor: Recollect yourself, I pray, / And be careful what you say- / As the ancient Romans said, ''festina lente''...
Lord Tolloller: I have often had a use / For a thorough-bred excuse / Of a sudden (which is English for ''repente'')...
Lord Mountararat: Now, listen, pray to me, / For this paradox will be / Carried, nobody at all ''contradicente''...

Then, the chorus of peers sing macaronic verse as they attempt to resist the fairies' powers:

Our lordly style you shall not quench with base ''canaille''! (That word is French.)
Distinction ebbs before a herd of vulgar ''plebs''! (A Latin word.)
Twould fill with joy and madness stark the ''oι πoλλoί''! (A Greek remark.)
One Latin word, one Greek remark, and one that's French.

Film

'Macaronisms' are frequently used in films, especially comedies. In Charlie Chaplin's anti-war comedy ''

The Great Dictator ''The Great Dictator'' is a 1940 American anti-war political satire black comedy film written, directed, produced, scored by, and starring British comedian Charlie Chaplin, following the tradition of many of his other films. Having been the o ...

'', the title character speaks English mixed with a parody of German (e.g. "Cheese-und-cracken"). This was also used by Benzino Napaloni, the parody character of Benito Mussolini, using Italian foods (such as

salami Salami ( ) is a cured sausage consisting of fermented and air-dried meat, typically pork. Historically, salami was popular among Southern, Eastern, and Central European peasants because it can be stored at room temperature for up to 45 days ...

and

ravioli Ravioli (; singular: ''raviolo'', ) are a type of pasta comprising a filling enveloped in thin pasta dough. Usually served in broth or with a sauce, they originated as a traditional food in Italian cuisine. Ravioli are commonly square, tho ...

) as insults. Other movies featuring macaronic language are the Italian historical comedies ''

L'armata Brancaleone ''L'armata Brancaleone'' (known in English-speaking countries as ''For Love and Gold'' or ''The Incredible Army of Brancaleone'') is an Italian comedy film released on April 7, 1966, written by the duo Age & Scarpelli and directed by Mario Monice ...

'' and '' Brancaleone alle crociate'' (d. Mario Monicelli), which mix modern and medieval Italian as well as Latin (sometimes in rhyme, and sometimes with regional connotations, such as the Italo-Normans using words from modern Sicilian).

Song

A macaronic song is one that combines multiple languages. Macaronic songs have been particularly common in Ireland (

Irish Irish may refer to: Common meanings * Someone or something of, from, or related to: ** Ireland, an island situated off the north-western coast of continental Europe ***Éire, Irish language name for the isle ** Northern Ireland, a constituent unit ...

–English) and also occur for other languages, such as

Yiddish Yiddish (, or , ''yidish'' or ''idish'', , ; , ''Yidish-Taytsh'', ) is a West Germanic language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. It originated during the 9th century in Central Europe, providing the nascent Ashkenazi community with a ve ...

–Ukrainian. Macaronic language appearing in popular songs include

Rammstein Rammstein (, "ramming stone") is a German Neue Deutsche Härte band formed in Berlin in 1994. The band's lineup—consisting of lead vocalist Till Lindemann, lead guitarist Richard Kruspe, rhythm guitarist Paul Landers, bassist Oliver Riedel, ...

's " Amerika" (German and English), the Beatles’ " Michelle", the

Talking Heads Talking Heads were an American rock band formed in 1975 in New York City and active until 1991.Talki ...

Psycho Killer "Psycho Killer" is a song by the American band Talking Heads, released on their 1977 debut album '' Talking Heads: 77.'' The group first performed it as the Artistics in 1974. The band also recorded an acoustic version of the song featuring A ...

" and

The Weeknd Abel Makkonen Tesfaye (born February 16, 1990), known professionally as the Weeknd, is a Canadian singer, songwriter, record producer, and actor. Known for his sonic versatility and dark lyricism, his music explores escapism, romance, and ...

's "

Montreal Montreal ( ; officially Montréal, ) is the second-most populous city in Canada and most populous city in the Canadian province of Quebec. Founded in 1642 as '' Ville-Marie'', or "City of Mary", it is named after Mount Royal, the triple ...

" (French and English),

The Clash The Clash were an English rock band formed in London in 1976 who were key players in the original wave of British punk rock. Billed as "The Only Band That Matters", they also contributed to the and new wave movements that emerged in the w ...

's "

Spanish Bombs "Spanish Bombs" is a song by English punk rock band The Clash, with principal vocals by Joe Strummer and additional vocals by Mick Jones. It was written by Strummer and recorded for the band's 1979 album ''London Calling''. The song also appea ...

José Feliciano José Montserrate Feliciano García (born September 10, 1945) () is a Puerto Rican musician, singer and composer. He recorded many international hits, including his rendition of the Doors' "Light My Fire" and his self-penned Christmas song " F ...

's " Feliz Navidad" (Spanish and English), and

JJ Lin Wayne Lin Junjie (; born 27 March 1981), better known by his stage name JJ Lin, is a Singaporean singer, songwriter, record producer and actor. Lin launched his musical career by releasing his debut album '' Music Voyager'' (2003). GIO, Taiwa ...

's track entitled trilingually as "只對你說 Sarang Heyo 사랑해요" 只對你說 (Mandarin, English, and Korean).

References

Notes

Bibliography

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Macaronic Language Latin language Language games Cultural exchange

History

Mixed Latin-vernacular lyrics in Medieval Europe

Latin–Italian macaronic verse

Other mixed-language lyrics

Unintentional macaronic language

Modern macaronic literature

Prose

Poetry

Theatre

Film

Song

See also

References

Notes

Bibliography