Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book reviews the literature on code-switching. It also describes the research design, the data collection methods and detailed information on the Vietnamese community in Melbourne. The book then discusses the syntactic structure of the Vietnamese language and presents the quantification of the syntactic forms in code-switching data, with a focus on the results of the structural analysis including a discussion of the relation of social networks and topics to patterns of code-switching. The features of the Vietnamese tones, and discussions related to code-switching are articulated. The book gives a detailed study about the Vietnamese system of person reference with a view to analysing how the Vietnamese system of person reference would induce a code-switch. It finally summarises the main findings and suggests the directions for future research.