ABSTRACT
Written texts, particularly published ones, are widely perceived to have legitimacy beyond that of the spoken word in literate societies. One reason perhaps is that written text generally has more staying power as a concrete and tangible documentation of thought, intention, information, agreements and so on than does the spoken word. Furthermore, in many cases written text assumes a larger, more unified, identifiable audience that is reflective of those who share some subset of cultural norms and values. With legitimacy and cultural norms as a backdrop, the reason for code-switching in written discourse becomes an interesting subject of inquiry. Why switch between languages in a medium where one has ample time and resources to produce a monolingual text per the expected norm? Researchers have identified this phenomenon in texts ranging from blogs to historical documents and have proposed various accounts, some of which are presented in this volume. On the surface, the switches found in written text may look and read like typical oral code-switches, where two or more languages are used, at times inter-sententially, at times intra-sententially and occasionally intra-lexically, with bound and free morphemes of two (or more) languages collaborating to create a discourse.
