ABSTRACT
In many bilingual and multilingual communities, it is normal for speakers to use two or more languages in the same interaction – possibly the same utterance – when talking with other bilinguals who share their language repertoire. This phenomenon of language alternation or code switching has been attracting attention from researchers for the last few decades. Researchers studying code switching have tended to focus on one of three main areas of interest (see Sebba 1993 for a fuller discussion):
The formal linguistic aspects of code switching, in particular the grammatical mechanisms whereby a bilingual individual can produce a sentence (or sentence-like utterance) partly in one language and partly in another without breaking the grammatical rules of either.
Pragmatic and discoursal aspects of code switching – in particular, the motivations for speakers’ switches and the meanings or symbolic values underlying them.
Ethnographic description of code switching, focusing on ‘who speaks what language to whom and when’ (Fishman 1965), the status of switching within a community and its relation to phenomena such as language maintenance and language death.
