ABSTRACT
The following chapter deals with code-switching of a certainly non-prototypical kind (see Franceschini, Chapter 3), and therefore one that has hardly been mentioned in the existing linguistic literature. ‘Crossing’, the use of a minority variety by speakers of the majority in socially and communicatively ‘liminoid’ cases, is not only a case of switching into a non-legitimate language (Bourdieu 1982), but also a case of non-legitimate switching, since the switchers do not have unproblematic access to this variety, a point that was first made by Hewitt in his pace-setting study of Creole usage among white British adolescents (Hewitt 1986). In fact, as Rampton has shown elsewhere in detail (Rampton 1995), the British adolescents who use (usually a small set of expressions or features of) varieties such as Punjabi, stylised Asian English or Creole cross both a linguistic border and a group border, i.e. that of their ethnic group. At the same time, the use of the others’ ‘we-code’ may be seen as an attempt to allude to an identity which the adolescents have in common despite their different cultural and racial backgrounds. It is an attempt to create a transracial and transethnic common ground, or, as Ben Rampton puts it, ‘the use of an out-group language [can] be cross-ethnically “we-coded”’ (1995:59).
