Preacher, scholar, brother, friend

no human being talks the same way all the time (Hymes 1984: 44) The article examines variation in the use of multilingual resources in the verbal repertoire of one individual in different social roles involving various contexts of discourse in eighteenth-century England. We discuss the language practices of Thomas Twining, scion of the tea merchant family, clergyman and classical scholar, in text representing different genres and registers in the public and private domains. The study shows that the writer’s varying social roles are reflected in patterns of code-switching, functioning as an index of the communicative situation and the interpersonal relationship between the interlocutors.