What is this?
Won o arrest a single person.
This morning I hantar my baby tu dekat
babysitter tu lah.
Kio ke six seven hours te school de vic
spend kurde ne they are speaking English
all the time
Code-switching
Language contact – may lead to co-
existence of 2 or more languages
Diglossia – languages used in different
domains – Classical and spoken Arabic,
BM and Malay dialects
Mixing/switching infrequent
Code-switching and mixing
Code-switching (intersentential) change
from one language or dialect to another –
sentences or utterances in one language
Code-mixing (intrasentential) – inside a
sentence – elements of one language
incorporated in another – words, phrases,
particles
continued
Difficult to distinguish from borrowing
What is SingE “let’s go makan”?
Key may be acquisition of morphological,
orthographical and phonological features –
diskriminasikan is a loan word
Attitudes
Not a subject of serious study until recently
Often stigmatised – bahasa rojak
Lazy etc
Threat to languages
Often confused with language change/death
and borrowing
continued
Code-mixing often precedes language
shift/death
East Sutherland Gaelic, Hungarian to
German shift in Oberwart
But may also occur in stable bilingual
situation
Affective causes
Change of mood – in Oberwart a switch to
German adds force to a statement
In Haiti, patois (French Creole) is used to
express intimacy, Standard French to create
social distance
In Paraguay, jokes and insults are in
Guarani rather than Spanish
continued
Taiwanese Chinese – use English
obscenities
Words of affection
Malay – “you” – because status neutral?
Social Causes
Languages associated with domains
Code-switching indicates passage from one
domain to another
MC Malay mother scolds children in
English for problems at school, in Malay for
neglecting religious obligations
Malaysia conferences open with doa in
Malay
continued
Malaysia – arguments after accidents in
English
Insurance policies in English?
Chinese salesman and customer – after
greetings, “let’s get down to business”
continued
Social solidarity – Africans often address
strangers in a lingua franca – Swahili,
English pidgin or creole, Lingala, Zulu,
Hausa – switch to another language if from
same ethnic group
May revert to LF to avoid obligations – job
or loan
continued
Social identity – Africans wish to express
ethnic/national loyalty and appear modern
and educated
India – Persianisation/ Englishisation of
local languages
India – code-mixing is a marker of
education, religion, geographical origin,
caste
continued
Increase social distance or assert status
Latin phrases by English lawyers
French in 19th century Russia and Italy
Political causes
Code-mixing may indicate political identity
Irish phrases by Irish nationalists in NI
Arabic phrases by conservatives in Iran and
Indonesia
Example
1990s –East Jerusalem
Arab shopkeeper “you want bracelets” (E)
Israeli soldier 1: How much? (E)
SK “you want this one or this one?” (E)
S2 “those aren’t pretty” (H)
S1 ”that’s not pretty” (A)
SK ”pretty” (A) “Like women soldiers” (H)
Variation in code switching
England – Jamaican patois avoided in
formal situations or with white speaker
More common in informal situations and
with black speaker
Two factors -- ethnic solidarity and marker
of formality
Types of mixing
New York Hispanics used several types
depending on proficiency
Usually words or phrases
Usually signalled metalinguistically
Dominant bilinguals -- tags
Balanced bilinguals -- phrases
Continued
Canada – lot of English-French
intersentential switching
Balanced bilingualism
Role of proficiency?
Status of languages?
