Exophony is the practice of writing, usually creative, in a language that is not the writer's mother tongue. While the practice is age-old, the term is relatively new: French linguists such as Louis-Jean Calvet have only discussed "littérature exophone" since 1979, while the German equivalent, Exophonie, was used within the field of literary and cultural studies by Susan Arndt, Dirk Naguschewski and Robert Stockhammer in 2007. In English, Chantal Wright proposed its more widespread use in 2008, wrote a paper on it in 2010, and went on to teach a course at the University of Warwick in 2016/7.
Exophony is the practice of writing, usually creative, in a language that is not the writer's mother tongue. While the practice is age-old, the term is relatively new: French linguists such as Louis-Jean Calvet have only discussed "littérature exophone" since 1979, while the German equivalent, Exophonie, was used within the field of literary and cultural studies by Susan Arndt, Dirk Naguschewski and Robert Stockhammer in 2007. In English, Chantal Wright proposed its more widespread use in 2008, wrote a paper on it in 2010, and went on to teach a course at the University of Warwick in 2016/7.
Some exophonic authors may be bilingual or multilingual from their childhood years, even polyglots, while others may write in an acquired language. In some cases the second language is acquired early in life, for example through immigration, and it is not always clear whether the writer should strictly be classed a non-native speaker. However, by no means all bilingual/multilingual writers are exophonic. For instance, J. M. Coetzee has commented that despite being bilingual in English and Afrikaans and having "a fairly wide-ranging acquaintance with Spanish", he has "absolutely no competence as a writer" in that language, and even his "command of English, spoken and written, feels like the kind of command a foreigner might have”. He further says that "the versions that my translators produce are in no way inferior to the original” and even that "the Spanish translation of 'El Polaco' reflects [my] intentions more clearly than the original English text does", adding that he likes being “read in a language in which I feel myself to be a somewhat more humorous writer than in the original”.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).