ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines relevant aspects of the concept of social network. It aims to relate the language choice patterns of the community to its informal social structure, considering separately relevant patterns of both inter-generational and intra-generational patterns of variation. The chapter examines the reflection of these patterns in code-switching behaviour at the interactional level. It discusses the relationship between network structure and language choice patterns in the bilingual Chinese community in Tyneside, before relating this analysis to code-switching behaviour at the interpersonal level. Social network analysis of the kind which is most relevant to sociolinguists was developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of mainly British social anthropologists. A coherent theory of language choice and code-switching needs to make explicit the relationship between community networks – ‘frames’ within which language choice takes place – and large-scale social and economic structure.
