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Code-switching is a term in linguistics referring to alternation between two or more languages, dialects, or language registers in the course of discourse between people who have more than one language in common. Sometimes the switch lasts only for a few sentences, or even for a single phrase.
The switch is commonly made according to the subject of discourse, but may be for a variety of other reasons such as the mood of the speaker. For example, a person might swear only in the French language.
Occurrence
There are a number of situations where code-switching occurs.
A family that has recently immigrated to a country where a different language is spoken may switch back and forth between that language and their mother tongue, while they are learning the new language (this phenomenon is frequently noted amongst first and second-generation immigrants to France from its former North African, Arabic-speaking, colonies; now the Maghreb countries of Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria).
Also, in countries with a large number of people from different ethnic backgrounds, communities will commonly switch between the language of their indigenous roots, and the language of the country they are living in. For example, within the United States, a country with a large number of Spanish speaking communities, a sentence might contain a mixture of Spanish and English words. In this case the phenomenon is so common it has coined the term "Spanglish". Other examples of this are in communities in Canada with both Francophone and Anglophone populations, or in the Punjabi communities of Great Britain. Another example of this phenomenon is the mixing of Japanese and English by Western-educated Japanese and half-Japanese children, most notably those living in bilingual environments (e.g., attending International schools in Japan). Code-switching from Tatar to Russian is very popular around bilingual urban Tatars. This situation is similar to that of other non-Russian urban populations in the former USSR. In Germany, code switching is particularly common among third-generation descendants of post-World War II immigrants from Turkey, Italy and other Southern European countries, as well as among the many so-called Russian Germans, who are Russian/former Soviet Union nationals with German ancestry that have been allowed to migrate to Germany since the early 1990s. Finally, code-switching regularly occurs between North American Mormon missionaries stationed overseas.
In his autobiography the mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, who was a member of the Polish School of Mathematics that flourished in an exceptionally polyglot region of Central Europe, quotes some amusing examples of sentences he remembers hearing colleagues utter without apparently noticing they were using as many as four languages in a single sentence.
In the above examples, Code-switching is used for a number of reasons. It is commonly used when a person living in a different country to the language which they usually speak finds that they have no relevant translation of a word, expression or concept created in the country which they are now living. On the other hand, a person from a different culture to the one in which they are living may find it necessary to switch back their mother-tongue in order to explain something which has no linguistic equivalent in the country which they are now living. In this sense Code-switching is inevitable. Alternatively, Code-switching is also used in order to help an ethnic minority community retain a sense of cultural identity. In much the same way that slang is used to give a group of people a sense of identity and belonging, and to differentiate themselves from society at large.
In countries such as India, where English is a lingua franca, educated people whose first language is a language other than English but who are also practically fluent in English often employ code-switching by inserting English words, phrases or sentences into their conversations. This has given rise to dialects jokingly referred to as 'Hinglish' and 'Tanglish' (from Hindi and Tamil). In fact, close examination reveals that in normal conversation, an average sentence spoken by an Indian (even if said to be in an Indian language) invariably contains words from both English and the relevant Indian language. This happens naturally, and is often hard to curb. Examples of this type of code-switching can be heard in many Bollywood films.
Code-switching also occurs within a particular language. For instance, a person would likely not use the same words or phrases when speaking to a superior (e.g. an elder, teacher, advisor or supervisor) as they would use when speaking to their friends in an informal atmosphere. Another example is African American Vernacular English among African-Americans.
Code-switching is distinct from pidgin, in which features of two languages are combined. Code-switching is also different from (but is often accompanied by) spontaneous borrowing of words from another language, sometimes outfitted with the inflections of the host language, sometimes not.
Code-switching within a sentence tends to occur more often at points where the syntaxes of the two languages align; thus it is uncommon to switch from English to French after an adjective and before a noun, because a French noun normally "expects" its adjectives to follow it. It is, however, often the case that even unrelated languages can be "aligned" at the boundary of a relative clause or other sentence sub-structure.
Example
Kroskrity (2000:340-341) gives the following example of code-switching by three older male Arizona Tewa speakers, who are trilingual in Tewa, Hopi, and English. The topic concerns the selection of a site for a new high school on the eastern Hopi Reservation:
- English Translation:
In this two-hour conversation, these men had been speaking primarily in Tewa. However, when Speaker A makes a statement that considers the Hopi Reservation as a whole, he switches to Hopi. This usage of the Hopi language when speaking of Hopi-related issues is a conversational norm in the Arizona Tewa speech community. Kroskrity makes the claim that these Arizona Tewa who identify both as Hopi and Tewa use the different languages to help construct and maintain these discrete ethnic identities linguistically.
See also
External links
- Discussions of code switching
- Gayle Tufts, a Berlin-based American performer whose comedy is often based on code-switching between German and English
Bibliography
- Kroskrity, Paul V. (2000). Language ideologies in the expression and representation of Arizona Tewa identity. In P. V. Kroskrity (Ed.), Regimes of language: Ideologies, polities, and identities (pp. 329-359). Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.
Code-Switching | Alternance-codique | Commutazione di codice
"Code-switching"