ABSTRACT
While the previous chapters of this part of the book have argued from a more theoretical point of view, the following chapter provides ample evidence of the practical difficulties in establishing the ‘codes’ in ‘code-switching’. The topic is ‘code-switching’ between French and Lingala or between French and Kiswahili in Zaire, particularly in Kinshasa. (Although the data investigated here have been collected among Zairian emigrés in Belgium, the migrant context, for which a detailed description may be found in Meeuwis 1997, is not directly relevant to the argument since the same type of bilingual conversations may be observed in Zaire as well.)
