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Code-switching is a term in linguistics
Linguistics

Linguistics is the science study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of Meaning ....
 referring to using more than one language or variety
Variety (linguistics)

In sociolinguistics, a variety, also called a lect, is a language or dialect considered as a variety or development of another language or dialect....
 in conversation. Bilinguals
Multilingualism

The term multilingual can refer to an individual speaker who uses two or more languages, a community of speakers in which two or more languages are used, or speakers of different languages....
, who can speak at least two languages, have the ability to use elements of both languages when conversing with another bilingual. Code-switching is the syntactically
Syntax

In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing Sentence s in natural languages. In addition to referring to the discipline, the term syntax is also used to refer directly to the rules and principles that govern the sentence structure of any individual language, as in "the Irish syntax"....
 and phonologically
Phonology

Phonology is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use. Just as a language has syntax and vocabulary, it also has a phonology in the sense of a sound system....
 appropriate use of multiple varieties.

Code-switching can occur between sentences
Sentence (linguistics)

In linguistics, a sentence is a grammatical unit of one or more words, bearing minimal syntactic relation to the words that precede or follow it, often preceded and followed in speech by pauses, having one of a small number of characteristic intonation patterns, and typically expressing an independent statement, question, request, command, et...
 (intersentential) or within a single sentence (intrasentential).

Although some commentators have seen code-switching as reflecting a lack of language ability, most contemporary scholars consider code-switching to be a normal and natural product of interaction between the bilingual (or multilingual) speaker's languages.

Code-switching can be distinguished from other language contact
Language contact

Language contact occurs when speakers of distinct speech varieties interact. The study of language contact is called contact linguistics....
 phenomena such as loan translation (calques)
Calque

In linguistics, a calque or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal, word-for-word or root-for-root translation....
, borrowing
Loanword

A loanword is a word directly taken into one language from another with little or no translation. By contrast, a calque or loan translation is a related concept whereby it is the Meaning or idiom that is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself....
, pidgins
Pidgin

A pidgin is a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common, in situations such as trade....
 and creoles
Creole language

A creole language, or simply a creole, is a stable language that originates seemingly as a nativization pidgin. This understanding of creole genesis culminated in Robert A....
, and transfer or interference.

There are different perspectives on code-switching.






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Encyclopedia


Code-switching is a term in linguistics
Linguistics

Linguistics is the science study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of Meaning ....
 referring to using more than one language or variety
Variety (linguistics)

In sociolinguistics, a variety, also called a lect, is a language or dialect considered as a variety or development of another language or dialect....
 in conversation. Bilinguals
Multilingualism

The term multilingual can refer to an individual speaker who uses two or more languages, a community of speakers in which two or more languages are used, or speakers of different languages....
, who can speak at least two languages, have the ability to use elements of both languages when conversing with another bilingual. Code-switching is the syntactically
Syntax

In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing Sentence s in natural languages. In addition to referring to the discipline, the term syntax is also used to refer directly to the rules and principles that govern the sentence structure of any individual language, as in "the Irish syntax"....
 and phonologically
Phonology

Phonology is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use. Just as a language has syntax and vocabulary, it also has a phonology in the sense of a sound system....
 appropriate use of multiple varieties.

Code-switching can occur between sentences
Sentence (linguistics)

In linguistics, a sentence is a grammatical unit of one or more words, bearing minimal syntactic relation to the words that precede or follow it, often preceded and followed in speech by pauses, having one of a small number of characteristic intonation patterns, and typically expressing an independent statement, question, request, command, et...
 (intersentential) or within a single sentence (intrasentential).

Although some commentators have seen code-switching as reflecting a lack of language ability, most contemporary scholars consider code-switching to be a normal and natural product of interaction between the bilingual (or multilingual) speaker's languages.

Code-switching can be distinguished from other language contact
Language contact

Language contact occurs when speakers of distinct speech varieties interact. The study of language contact is called contact linguistics....
 phenomena such as loan translation (calques)
Calque

In linguistics, a calque or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal, word-for-word or root-for-root translation....
, borrowing
Loanword

A loanword is a word directly taken into one language from another with little or no translation. By contrast, a calque or loan translation is a related concept whereby it is the Meaning or idiom that is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself....
, pidgins
Pidgin

A pidgin is a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common, in situations such as trade....
 and creoles
Creole language

A creole language, or simply a creole, is a stable language that originates seemingly as a nativization pidgin. This understanding of creole genesis culminated in Robert A....
, and transfer or interference.

There are different perspectives on code-switching. A major approach in sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used....
 focuses on the social motivations for switching, a line of inquiry concentrating both on immediate discourse factors such as lexical
Lexicon

In linguistics, the lexicon of a language is its vocabulary, including its words and expressions. More formally, it is a language's inventory of lexemes....
 need and the topic and setting of the discussion, and on more distant factors such as speaker or group identity
Identity (social science)

Identity is an umbrella term used throughout the social sciences to describe an individual's comprehension of him or herself as a discrete, separate entity....
, and relationship-building (solidarity). Code-switching may also be reflective of the frequency with which an individual uses particular expressions from one or the other language in his/her daily communications; thus, an expression from one language may more readily come to mind than the equivalent expression in the other language.

A second perspective primarily concerns syntactic
Syntax

In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing Sentence s in natural languages. In addition to referring to the discipline, the term syntax is also used to refer directly to the rules and principles that govern the sentence structure of any individual language, as in "the Irish syntax"....
 constraints on switching. This is a line of inquiry that has postulated grammatical rules and specific syntactic boundaries for where a switch may occur.

While code-switching had previously been investigated as a matter of peripheral importance within the more narrow tradition of research on bilingualism, it has now moved into a more general focus of interest for sociolinguists, psycholinguists
Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychology and neurobiology factors that enable humans to acquire, use, and understand language....
 and general linguists.

Code-switching can be related to and indicative of group membership in particular types of bilingual speech communities, such that the regularities of the alternating use of two or more languages within one conversation may vary to a considerable degree between speech communities. Intrasentential code-switching, where it occurs, may be constrained by syntactic and morphosyntactic factors which may or may not be universal in nature.

Motivation

People code-switch for a number of reasons.
  • Code-switching a word or phrase from language-B into language-A can be more convenient than waiting for one's mind to think of an appropriate language-B word.
  • Code-switching can help an ethnic minority community retain a sense of cultural identity, in much the same way that slang
    Slang

    Slang is the use of highly informal words and expressions that are not considered standard in the speaker's dialect or language....
     is used to give a group of people a sense of identity and belonging, and to differentiate themselves from society at large.
  • Code-switching is a common means to shift footing (Goffman 1979) or contextualization
    Contextualization

    Contextualization is the process of assigning meaning, either Meaning or as a means of Meaning_#Meaning_as_internal_interpretation the environment within which an speech or Action is executed....
     (Gumperz 1982).


One of the more complete theories of code switching within sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used....
 is the Markedness Model, developed by Carol Myers-Scotton (1993). According to the markedness model, language users are rational
Rationality

Rationality as a term is related to the idea of reason, a word which following Webster's may be derived as much from older terms referring to thinking itself as from giving an account or an explanation....
, and choose a language that marks their rights and obligations relative to others in the conversational setting. When there is no clear unmarked
Markedness

Markedness is a Linguistics concept that developed out of the Prague School. A marked form is a non-basic or less natural form. An unmarked form is a basic, default form....
 choice, code switching is used to explore possible choices.

Many sociolinguists object to the markedness model, and to the suggestion that language choice is entirely rational (e.g. Auer 1998; Woolard 2004).

Competing sociolinguistic theories examine code-switching as language behavior, often using discourse analysis
Discourse analysis

Discourse analysis , or discourse studies, is a general term for a number of approaches to analyzing written, spoken or signed language use....
, ethnography
Ethnography

Ethnography is a genre of writing that uses fieldwork to provide a descriptive study of human societies. Ethnography presents the results of a holism research method founded on the idea that a system's properties cannot necessarily be accurately understood independently of each other....
, or elements of both. Scholars such as Monica Heller (1988, 1992, 1995), Ben Rampton (1995, 2007), and Joan Pujolar (2004) describe the effects that the use of multiple language varieties have on class, ethnicity, gender, or other identity
Identity (social science)

Identity is an umbrella term used throughout the social sciences to describe an individual's comprehension of him or herself as a discrete, separate entity....
 positions.

Scholars in interactional linguistics and conversation analysis
Conversation analysis

Conversation analysis is the study of talk in interaction. CA generally attempts to describe the orderliness, structure and sequential patterns of interaction, whether this is institutional or casual conversation....
 also study code-switching as a means of structuring talk in interaction. Analysts such as Peter Auer (1984) suggest that code-switching does not simply reflect social situations, but is a means to create them. Other conversation analysts studying code-switching include Li Wei (1998, 2005), Mark Sebba (2000; Sebba and Wooton 1998), and Jakob Cromdal (2001, 2004).

Mechanics

Code-switching is distinct from pidgin
Pidgin

A pidgin is a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common, in situations such as trade....
, in which features of two languages are combined. However, creole languages (which are very closely related to pidgins), when in close contact with related standard languages (such as with Jamaican Creole English or Guyanese Creole English
Guyanese Creole language

Guyanese Creole is a creole language spoken by more than seven hundred thousand people in Guyana.Guyanese English is based on, and strongly influenced by the English language....
), can exist in a continuum
Post-creole speech continuum

Due to the relationship between a creole language and its superstrate language, that is, a language that is very closely related and whose speakers assert social, political, and economic dominance over speakers of said creole language, a post-creole continuum may arise....
 within which speakers may code-switch along a basilect-mesolect-acrolect hierarchy depending on context. Code-switching is also different from (but is often accompanied by) spontaneous borrowing
Loanword

A loanword is a word directly taken into one language from another with little or no translation. By contrast, a calque or loan translation is a related concept whereby it is the Meaning or idiom that is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself....
 of words from another language, sometimes outfitted with the inflection
Inflection

In grammar, inflection or inflexion is the way language handles grammatical relations and relational categories such as grammatical tense, grammatical mood, grammatical voice, grammatical aspect, grammatical person, grammatical number, grammatical gender, grammatical case....
s of the host language, sometimes not.

Linguists have made significant efforts to define the differences between borrowing and code-switching. Borrowing is generally said to occur within the lexicon, while code-switching occurs at the level of syntax or utterance construction.

Code-switching within a sentence tends to occur more often at points where the syntax
Syntax

In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing Sentence s in natural languages. In addition to referring to the discipline, the term syntax is also used to refer directly to the rules and principles that govern the sentence structure of any individual language, as in "the Irish syntax"....
 of the two languages align; thus it is uncommon to switch from English
English language

English is a West Germanic language that originated in Anglo-Saxon England and has lingua franca status in many parts of the world as a result of the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and that of the United States from the mid 20th century onwa...
 to French
French language

French is a Romance language spoken around the world by around 80 million people as first language, by 190 million as second language, and by about another 200 million people as an acquired tongue, with significant speakers in 54 countries....
 after an adjective
Adjective

In grammar, an adjective is a word whose main syntax role is to grammatical modifier a noun or pronoun, giving more information about the noun or pronoun's definition....
 and before a noun
Noun

In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open class lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition....
, 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
Relative clause

A relative clause is a subordinate clause that modifies a noun. For example, the noun phrase the man who wasn't there contains the noun man, which is modified by the relative clause who wasn't there....
 or other sentence sub-structure.

Work in syntax and morphology has suggested several constraints on where language alternation can occur. None of these suggestions are universally accepted, however, and linguists have offered apparent counter-examples to each proposed constraint (e.g. Bokamba 1989; Bhatt 1995).
  • The free-morpheme constraint states that switching cannot occur between bound morphemes (Sankoff & Poplack 1981).
  • The equivalence constraint says that code-switching can only take place in positions where "the order of any two sentence elements, one before and one after the switch, is not excluded in either language" (Sankoff & Poplack 1981). For example, the sentence "I like you porque eres simpatico" is allowed, since it obeys the rules for relative clause formation in both Spanish and English.
  • The closed-class constraint says that closed class
    Closed class

    In linguistics, a closed class is a word class to which no new items can normally be added, and that usually contains a relatively small number of items....
     items such as pronouns, prepositons or conjunctions cannot be switched (Joshi 1985).
  • The Matrix Language Frame model (Myers-Scotton 1997, 2002) distinguishes the roles of the participating languages. The Matrix Language provides the grammatical frame of bilingual clause. This model is complemented by the 4-M model of morpheme classification (Myers-Scotton and Jake, 2000).
  • The functional head constraint says that code-switching cannot occur between a functional head (such as a complementizer, determiner or inflection) and its complement (a sentence, noun phrase or verb phrase) (Belazi et al. 1994).
Note that some of these constraints make specific assumptions about the nature of syntax
Syntax

In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing Sentence s in natural languages. In addition to referring to the discipline, the term syntax is also used to refer directly to the rules and principles that govern the sentence structure of any individual language, as in "the Irish syntax"....
, and are therefore controversial, especially among linguists who make different theoretical assumptions.

Shana Poplack
Shana Poplack

Shana Poplack is a leading proponent of variation theory, the approach to language science pioneered by William Labov. She has extended the methodology and theory of this field into bilingual speech patterns, the prescription-praxis dialectic in the co-evolution of standard and non-standard languages, and the comparative reconstruction of ancest...
's approach to language mixing is relatively independent of choice of syntactic theory, and use notions such as equivalence switching, nonce borrowing, flagged switching and constituent insertion to categorize, based on quantitative analysis of large corpora of bilingual conversation, the intrasentential mixing phenomena characteristic of different bilingual speech communities. These patterns can be rather different for even for two communities sharing the same language pairs.

Scholars use different names for various types of switching.
  • Intersentential switching is switching outside the sentence or clause level, for example at sentence or clause boundaries.
  • Intra-sentential switching is switching within a sentence or clause.
  • Tag-switching is switching a tag phrase or word
    Word

    A word is a unit of language that represents a concept which can be expressively communication with Meaning . A word consists of one or more morphemes which are linked more or less tightly together, and has a phonetic value....
     from language B into language A. (This is a common intra-sentential switch.)
  • Intra-word switching is switching within a word itself, such as at a morpheme
    Morpheme

    In morpheme-based morphology, a is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantics Meaning .In spoken language, morphemes are composed of phonemes , and in written language morphemes are composed of graphemes ....
     boundary.


Examples


Zentella (1997) offers the following example of code-switching from her work with Spanish speakers in New York City. In this example, Marta and her younger sister Lolita speak both Spanish and English with Zentella (ACZ) outside of their apartment building.

Lolita: Oh, I could stay with Ana?
Marta: - but you could ask papi and mami to see if you could come down.
Lolita: OK.
Marta: Ana, if I leave her here would you send her upstairs when you leave?
ACZ: I'll tell you exactly when I have to leave, at ten o'clock. Y son las nueve y cuarto. ("And it's nine fifteen.")
Marta: Lolita, te voy a dejar con Ana. ("I'm going to leave you with Ana.") Thank you, Ana.


Zentella explains that the children in this predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhood speak both English and Spanish. "Within the children's network, English predominated but code switching from English to Spanish occurred once every three minutes on average" (1997:32).

Kroskrity (2000:340-341) gives the following example of code-switching by three older male Arizona Tewa
Arizona Tewa

The Arizona Tewa are a Tewa Pueblo people group that resides on the eastern part of the Hopi Reservation on or near First Mesa in northeastern Arizona....
 speakers, who are trilingual in Tewa
Tewa language

Tewa is a Kiowa-Tanoan language spoken by Pueblo people, mostly in the Rio Grande valley in New Mexico north of Santa Fe, New Mexico. The 1980 census counted 1,298 speakers, almost all of whom are bilingual in English....
, Hopi
Hopi language

Hopi is a Uto-Aztecan languages spoken by the Hopi people of northeastern Arizona, USA, although today some Hopi are monolingual English language speakers....
, and English
English language

English is a West Germanic language that originated in Anglo-Saxon England and has lingua franca status in many parts of the world as a result of the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and that of the United States from the mid 20th century onwa...
. The topic concerns the selection of a site for a new high school on the eastern Hopi Reservation
Hopi Reservation

The Hopi Reservation, or simply Hopi, is a Native Americans in the United States reservation for the Hopi and Arizona Tewa people -- surrounded entirely by the Navajo Nation -- in Navajo County, Arizona and Coconino County, Arizona counties of Arizona, USA....
:

Speaker A: Tututqaykit qanaanawakna. [spoken in Hopi]
Speaker B: Wédít’ókánk’egena’adi imbí akhonidi. [spoken in Tewa]
Speaker C: Naembí eeyae naelaemo díbít’ó’ámmí kaayi’i wédimudi. [spoken in Tewa]


English translation:
Speaker A: "Schools were not wanted." [spoken in Hopi]
Speaker B: "They didn't want a school on their land." [spoken in Tewa]
Speaker C: "It's better if our children go to school right here rather than far away." [spoken in Tewa]


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

  • Language contact
    Language contact

    Language contact occurs when speakers of distinct speech varieties interact. The study of language contact is called contact linguistics....
  • Macaronic language
    Macaronic language

    Macaronic refers to text spoken or written using a mixture of languages, sometimes including bilingual puns, particularly when the languages are used in the same context ....
  • Diglossia
    Diglossia

    In linguistics, diglossia is a situation where a given language community uses not just one dialect, but two: the first being the community's present day vernacular and the second being either an ancestral version of the same vernacular from centuries earlier or a distinct yet closely related present day dialect ....
  • Mixed language
    Mixed language

    A mixed language is a language that arises through the fusion of two source languages, normally in situations of thorough bilingualism, so that it is not possible to classify the resulting language as belonging to either of the language families that were its source....
  • Style shifting


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