ABSTRACT
During the last twenty years, we have experienced a sharp rise of scientific interest in phenomena of bilingual speech, and in particular, in code-switching. Code-switching used to be a matter for a few specialists in the 1950s and 1960s, of peripheral importance for linguistics as a whole. A number of pioneering and now classical publications of the 1970s, both on the syntactic (Poplack 1979 [1981]) and the sociolinguistic (Blom and Gumperz 1972) aspects of bilingual speech, have moved it into the focus of interest of a great number of researchers in syntax, sociolinguists and psycholinguists. The 1980s and particularly the 1990s have witnessed the publication of numerous monographs and articles on the subject, and, in Europe, the establishment of an ESF (European Science Foundation) Network on Code-Switching and Language Contact (cf. Milroy and Muysken 1995). Thus, code-switching has developed from what used to be looked upon as ‘possibly a somewhat peculiar…act’ (Luckmann 1983:97) into a subject matter which is recognised to be able to shed light on fundamental linguistic issues, from Universal Grammar to the formation of group identities and ethnic boundaries through verbal behaviour.
