CODE-SWITCHING

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'Code-switching' is a term in linguistics referring to alternation between two or more languages, dialects, or language registers in a single conversation, stretch of discourse, or utterance between people who have more than one language in common.
Work on bilingualism has revealed that codeswitching is governed by systematic rules.^[1]
There are two principal directions in which code-switching research has developed. One focuses on the social motivations for switching, a line of inquiry concentrating both on immediate discourse factors such as lexical need and the topic and setting of the discussion, and on more distant factors such as speaker or group identity, and relationship-building.
The other direction of research concerns syntactic constraints on switching. This is a line of inquiry that has postulated grammatical rules and specific syntactic boundaries for where and why a switch may occur.

Occurrence

There are a number of situations where code-switching occurs.
A family that has recently immigrated to a country where a different language is spoken may switch back and forth between that language and their mother tongue, while they are learning the new language (this phenomenon is frequently noted amongst first and second-generation immigrants to France from its former North African, Arabic-speaking, colonies; now the Maghreb countries of Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria).
Also, in countries with a large number of people from different ethnic backgrounds, communities will commonly switch between the language of their indigenous roots, and the language of the country they are living in.

USA

In the United States, a country with a large number of Spanish speaking communities, a sentence might contain a mixture of Spanish and English words. It is so common that a slang term, spanglish, refers to this.

Canada

Communities in Canada with both Francophone and Anglophone populations, the phenomenon is called "Franglais".

Israel

As a result of the huge amount of new immigrants (''Olim Hadashim'' - ''עולים חדשים'') living in Israel code-switching is very common. New immigrants from the former Soviet Union, the biggest group of new immigrants in Israel, switch between Russian and Hebrew. Code-switching is also common with the native born Israeli (''Sabra'') using words and expressions from Arabic in Hebrew.

Great Britain

Code-switching occurs in the Pakistani heritage communities of Great Britain. This is the most widely distributed minority ethnic population outside of London. Members of this community generally speak one of three languages: Mirpuri, Punjabi or Urdu. Although described as dialects, these languages are distinct. Intrasentential codeswitching between these languages and English is extremely common.
Code-switching also occurs in Wales where the slang term Wenglish exists. Wales is a part of Great Britain, although Welsh is a Celtic language and is not related to English. There are two main dialects of the Welsh language. The Welsh language has increased and is the largest language of the Celts, and spans across the globe.
Code switching is also common in users of the Scottish Gaelic, and lowland Scots languages.

Singapore

Singapore, the multi-racial community speaks "Singlish", a mixture of English with Mandarin Chinese, Chinese dialects and Malay.

Japan

Another example of this phenomenon is the mixing of Japanese and English by Western-educated Japanese and half-Japanese children, most notably those living in bilingual environments (e.g., attending international schools in Japan).

Tatars

Code-switching from Tatar to Russian is very popular among bilingual urban Tatars. This situation is similar to that of other non-Russian urban populations in the former USSR.

Germany

In Germany, code switching is particularly common among third-generation descendants of post-World War II immigrants from Turkey, Italy and other Southern European countries, as well as among the many so-called ''Russian Germans'', who are Russian/former Soviet Union nationals with German ancestry that have been allowed to migrate to Germany since the early 1990s.

Gibraltar

Code-switching can be seen by people in Gibraltar, who speak a relatively unique mixture of English and Spanish called Llanito.

Ukraine

In contemporary Ukraine both code-switching and language mixing (called surzhyk) are widely popular. Politicians and TV hosts frequently engage in code-switching between Ukrainian and Russian. As in officially bilingual Canada with French-English code-switching, in Ukraine code-switching is considered as a polite form of public speech. Meanwhile average Ukrainians prefer mixing Ukrainian and Russian languages, surzhyk. As a distinction between ''code-switching'' and ''mixing'' languages, some Ukrainians admit that code-switching consists of mixing full expressions, while language mixing means mixing words inside of a complete sentence.

Poland

In his autobiography the mathematician Stanisław Ulam, who was a member of the Polish School of Mathematics that flourished in an exceptionally polyglot region of Central Europe, quotes some amusing examples of sentences he remembers hearing colleagues utter without apparently noticing they were using as many as four languages in a single sentence.

India

In countries such as India, where English is a lingua franca, educated people whose first language is a language other than English but who are also practically fluent in English often employ code-switching by inserting English words, phrases or sentences into their conversations. This has given rise to dialects jokingly referred to as 'Hinglish', 'Tanglish' and 'Banglish' (from Hindi, Tamil and Bangla). In fact, close examination reveals that in normal conversation, an average sentence spoken by an Indian (even if said to be in an Indian language) invariably contains words from both English and the relevant Indian language. This happens naturally, and is often hard to curb. Examples of this type of code-switching can be heard in many Bollywood films.

The Philippines

Code-switching occurs frequently in the Philippines. The most well-known form of code-switching is Taglish, which involves switching between Tagalog and English. Taglish is used frequently in the popular media and by many government officials. Code-switching also occurs with regional languages of the Philippines as well as Min Nan Chinese. It is not uncommon to code-switch between three or even four languages.

Taiwan

Code-switching most commonly occurs between Standard Mandarin and Taiwanese, but have been observed to occur with Hakka and other local languages (e.g. Formosoan) as well. The degrees of usage can vary from complete sentences (e.g. a Mandarin conversation occasionally being replied with Taiwanese), or simply one or 2 words used in a similar manner to a loanword.

China

In China, code-switching occurs very frequently in regions where the spoken variety differs greatly with Standard Mandarin, the ''lingua franca''. Many regions speak three varieties, along with Mandarin. As a former British colony, code-switching in Hong Kong switches between Cantonese and English.

Why

People code-switch for a number of reasons.
#Code-switching a word or phrase from language-B into language-A can be more convenient than waiting for one's mind to think of an appropriate language-A word.
#Code-switching can help an ethnic minority community retain a sense of cultural identity, in much the same way that slang is used to give a group of people a sense of identity and belonging, and to differentiate themselves from society at large.

Mechanics

Code-switching is distinct from pidgin, in which features of two languages are combined. However, creole languages (which are very closely related to pidgins), when in close contact with related standard languages (such as with Jamaican Creole English or Guyanese Creole English), can exist in a continuum within which speakers may code-switch along a basilect-mesolect-acrolect hierarchy depending on context. Code-switching is also different from (but is often accompanied by) spontaneous borrowing of words from another language, sometimes outfitted with the inflections of the host language, sometimes not.
Code-switching within a sentence tends to occur more often at points where the syntax of the two languages align; thus it is uncommon to switch from English to French after an adjective and before a noun, because a French noun normally "expects" its adjectives to follow it. It is, however, often the case that even unrelated languages can be "aligned" at the boundary of a relative clause or other sentence sub-structure.
#'Intersentential switching,' switching outside the sentence or clause level, for example at sentence or clause boundaries
#'Intra-sentential switching,' switching within a sentence or clause
#'Tag-switching,' switching a tag phrase or word from language B into language A (this is a common ''intra-sentential switch'')
#'Intra-word switching,' switching within a word itself, such as at morpheme boundary

Example

Kroskrity (2000:340-341) gives the following example of code-switching by three older male Arizona Tewa speakers, who are trilingual in Tewa, Hopi, and English. The topic concerns the selection of a site for a new high school on the eastern Hopi Reservation:
:Speaker A: Tututqaykit qanaanawakna. ['spoken in Hopi']
:Speaker B: Wédít’ókánk’egena’adi imbí akhonidi. ['spoken in Tewa']
:Speaker C: Naembí eeyae nąeląemo díbít’ó’ámmí kąayį’į wédimu::di. ['spoken in Tewa']
English translation:
:Speaker A: "Schools were not wanted." ['spoken in Hopi']
:Speaker B: "They didn't want a school on their land." ['spoken in Tewa']
:Speaker C: "It's better if our children go to school right here rather than far away." ['spoken in Tewa']
In this two-hour conversation, these men had been speaking primarily in Tewa. However, when Speaker A makes a statement that considers the Hopi Reservation as a whole, he switches to Hopi. This usage of the Hopi language when speaking of Hopi-related issues is a conversational norm in the Arizona Tewa speech community. Kroskrity makes the claim that these Arizona Tewa who identify both as Hopi and Tewa use the different languages to help construct and maintain these discrete ethnic identities linguistically.

External links

★ Discussions of code switching

★ Gayle Tufts, a Berlin-based American performer whose comedy is often based on code-switching between German and English

★ Code Switching as a Countenance of Language Interference, academic paper by Richard Skiba with 23 references

★ The Functions of Code Switching in ELT Classrooms. By Olcay Sert (Hacettepe University (Ankara, Turkey) at The Internet TESL Journal.

References

1. An Introduction to Language, , Victoria, Fromkin, Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1998,

Bibliography

★ Auer, Peter (Ed.) (1998) Code-Switching in Conversation. London: Routledge.

★ AZUMA, S., 1993, The frame-content hypothesis in speech production: evidence from intrasentential code switching. Linguistics, 31, 1071-1093.

★ Di Sciullo, A. M., Muysken, P., Singh, R. (1986). "Government and code-mixing", ''Journal of Linguistics'', vol. XXII, pp1-24

★ Kroskrity, Paul V. (2000). Language ideologies in the expression and representation of Arizona Tewa identity. In P. V. Kroskrity (Ed.), ''Regimes of language: Ideologies, polities, and identities'' (pp. 329-359). Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.

★ Myers-Scotton, Carol. (2002). Contact Linguistics: Bilingual Encounters and Grammatical Outcomes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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