Codeswitching

CODE-SWITCHING

My task is to write a critical survey of one of the major areas within sociolinguistics. I have chosen to focus on the area of code-switching (CS hereafter) which greatly interests me and is also one of the most researched areas in sociolinguistics. I plan to begin with an introduction to my area including definitions and a brief discussion of the concepts involved. Afterwards, I will be concentrating on the main approaches along with a historical overview of research in the area. Lastly, I will critically evaluate the work done so far and put forward prospects for future study and developments in the area.

Most researches on CS have been done in two separate but related directions, namely Structural and Sociolinguistic. The structural approach to code-switching mainly concentrates on the grammatical features. On the other hand, the main attention in sociolinguistic studies is to observe how social meaning is created in CS and what specific discourse functions it serves. In fact these two approaches are complementary to each other and do not contradict as Boztepe (2003) clearly explains, "The structural approach tries to identify the structural features of morphosyntactic patterns underlying the grammar of CS, whereas the sociolinguistic approach builds on this in its attempts to explain why bilingual speakers talk the way they do." However, in this assignment I will primarily focus on the social aspects of CS rather than the grammatical aspects.

One of the major issues which has been long debated is concerned with the terminology of CS as not all researchers use the same terms in the same way, and there is a wide range of disagreement on the part enclosed by terms such as code-switching, code-mixing, borrowing, or code-alternation. Indeed, various scholars have made different distinctions among these terms and I feel it is important here to elaborate on the distinctions made; starting with the difference between code-switching and code-mixing. 'Switching' is when a complete switch is made from one language to another and there is no matrix language. Gumperz (1982:59) defines CS as "The juxtaposition within the same speech exchange of passages of speech belonging to different grammatically systems." whereas Poplack and Meechan (1995: 200) define code- switching as "the juxtaposition of sentences of sentence fragments from two languages, each of which is internally consistent with the morphological and syntactic (and optionally phonological) rules of its lexifier language." Myers-Scotton (1993a:3) believes code-switching "is the selection by bilinguals or multilinguals of forms from an embedded variety (or varieties) in utterances of a matrix variety during the same conversation."

On the other hand 'Mixing' is when a word or syntactic unit, or a phrase is inserted from one language to another. In 'mixing' one of the languages is a matrix language and the grammar of one language is incorporated into the grammar of the other. (class notes) Blanc& Hamers (2000:369) describe 'code-mixing' as "a communication strategy used by bilinguals in which the speaker of one language Lx transfers elements or rules of a different language (LY) to Lx (the base language); and these elements are not integrated into the linguistic system of Lx." Fasold (1984:181) categorises code mixing with 'borrowing', but distinguishes them by stating that 'borrowing' relates to single lexical items and mixing to short phrases.

The scholars also have different opinions about 'borrowing' and 'switching'. Blanc & Hamers (2000:369) define 'borrowing' as "the taking over of linguistic forms by one language from another; such borrowings are known as loan words." While emphasising that the distinction between borrowing and switching is not of an absolute nature, Gardner-Chloros (1984) identifies borrowing as being distinct from switching by the brevity of the contribution, the fact that it is more likely to be linguistically integrated, and the fact that it is more likely to fill in a semantic gap. In regards to 'code-alternation' some researchers such as Auer (1995) use the term code-alternation as a hyponym to replace code-switching, but Boztepe (2003) believes it is only slightly used in that sense and explains that "the term 'alternation' is, in fact, used in the literature to refer to instances of one language being replaced by the other halfway through the sentence, and it is mostly, but not always, associated with longer stretches of code-switching."

In general sociolinguistic studies of CS have been mainly carried out from two perspectives, which can be identified as the macro-level and the micro-level. Macro-level studies tend to explore the 'language choice' at community level. 'Language choice' occurs when a speaker uses one language in one area and another language in another area. At micro level, the analysis on CS has been done at an interactional level. Indeed, in a multicultural society different languages are usually allocated for different tasks and similarly, in many societies and speech communities, the speakers use varieties of the same language under different conditions. Fasold (1984:34) describes this relationship of language form and social function as 'diglossia'. The term 'diglossia' was first introduced by Charles Ferguson in 1959 and he used a list of nine criterions to determine whether a situation was diglossic or not. These were as Fasold (1984:34) lists: function, prestige, literary heritage, acquisition, standardization, stability, grammar, lexicon, and phonology. Considering all the features of diglossia, a complete definition of 'diglossia' in Ferguson's words, is as Fasold (1984:38-39) relates " Diglossia is a relatively stable language situation in which, in addition to the primary dialects of the language (which may include a standard or regional standards) there is a very divergent, highly codified (often grammatically more complex) superposed variety, the vehicle of a large and respected body of written literature, either of an earlier period or in another speech community, which is learned largely by formal education and is used for most written and formal spoken purposed but is not used by any sector of the community for ordinary conversation"

Ferguson's concept of diglossia failed to recognise contexts where the standard and dialects maybe used for different functions and also contexts where separate languages are spoken. So, in 1967 Joshua Fishman introduced a model of diglossia which extended Ferguson's original proposals. Fishman expanded the concept