Coulmas Handbook of Sociolinguistics / Part 2 - Social dimensions of Language / part 2 - 13. Code-switching

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First, the Markedness Model (Scotton, 1983, 1988a; Myers-Scotton, 1993a, 1993c) claims that, for any interaction type and the participants involved, and among available linguistic varieties, there is an “unmarked choice.” While there is a continuum of markedness between choices for any given interaction type in a community, one (or more) choice(s) is more unmarked than others, its status demonstrable by frequency. Discourses including CS are no different; that is, they also show an “unmarked choice.”

Frequently, the unmarked choice in CS is comparatively more associated with in-group membership, an index of solidarity. In these cases, the unmarked choice is often not the language of greater sociopolitical prestige in the larger community. That such a variety should hold sway in CS is not surprising, given that CS is more typically an in-group mode of communication than one used with strangers or even acquaintances in many communities. For example, while Alsatian-speaking families in the Alsace area of France often also speak French, Alsatian is the main language of CS discourse (Gardner-Chloros, 1991). In other types of communities, where one of the potential partners in CS is hardly used in informal settings, the main venue for CS will not be in-group interactions, but formal encounters where relationships are being negotiated. For example, in the Arabic-speaking world, it is in interviews between educated strangers where much CS takes place. The interviewees wish to express their education and therefore mainly speak a variety which might be called “oral educated Arabic.” Since they also wish to express their roots/sincerity/nationality, they switch to some features of the local colloquial variety of Arabic (Walters, 1994).

One can see how the unmarked choice for the interaction plays a role in setting certain quantitative dimensions of CS. First, one language usually quite obviously contributes more material (i.e., more CPs come from this language), especially if the discourse is more than a few turns long.

Second, the same social conditions promote CS patterning such that switching is most often from one language to the other and not in the other direction. For example, Irish is the language from which switches are made to English in Gaelic-speaking Ireland, not the other way around (Stenson, 1990); switches in Bukavu Swahili/French CS in Bukavu, Zaire (Goyvaerts and Zembele, 1992) are from Swahili to French. This was also the case among the Moroccan immigrants studied in Utrecht, the Netherlands (Nortier, 1990), who switched more often from Arabic to Dutch than vice versa.

Third, although this aspect of prominence has not been studied systematically, it seems that the unmarked choice is the language setting various aspects of the discourse frame, e.g., how narratives or arguments are organized.

In communities where CS itself is the main medium of in-group conversation, CS itself – rather than either language alone – is the unmarked choice. Multilingual urban communities in Africa and India often show CS as their unmarked informal medium, as do some immigrant communities or families in Europe and North America. Yet, even if CS itself is the unmarked choice, one language still dominates in setting the dimensions of CS.

6.2 CS and community norms

CS patterns may be indicative of how speakers view themselves in relation to the sociopolitical or cultural values attached to the linguistic varieties used in CS. For example, when CS itself is the main in-group medium, its use is evidence that speakers see both codes as salient indices of the values they incorporate in their identities, at least in the social context where it occurs. This is often the case in the Third World, where an indigenous variety is used in a CS pattern with the language of the former colonial power (e.g., Baba Malay/English in Singapore (Pakir, 1989); SeSotho/English in South Africa (Khati, 1992).

In contrast, if much CS indexes positive associations with more than one language and the groups closely associated with these languages, little CS should index polarization between groups. That is,

one would predict little CS at all in communities marked by intergroup tensions.5 This prediction seems to hold for Brussels today (Treffers-Daller, 1992).

One would also expect little CS at all in communities where prescriptive attitudes about maintaining the “purity” of the language are part of the culture. Thus it is no surprise that in Basel, Switzerland, while immigrants from French-speaking areas and their children become fluent speakers of Swiss German, they do relatively little switching between their languages, compared to other second-

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generation immigrant groups in Europe. A striking comparison is the heavy incidence of CS among second-generation Italians in Basel or Zurich. Any switching among Francophone Swiss tends to be between turns rather than even between CPs and more rarely within a single CP (Jake and MyersScotton, 1994).

6.3 CS and language proficiency

Bentahila and Davies (1992) studied two groups of Moroccan Arabic/French bilinguals, with age and its interrelation to French proficiency as the main independent variable. The older group received its education while Morocco was still a French protectorate or soon afterward and show a very high proficiency in French along with their native Arabic variety. In contrast, the younger group was educated after the policy of Arabization was well underway. These speakers received the bulk of their schooling in Arabic, but studied French and scientific subjects in French.

While both groups engage in CS, their main patterns are different. The older group uses much more French, often producing full CPs in French. When these speakers engage in intrasentential CS, it often is marked by a switching to French NPs which are embedded in a larger Arabic frame (Bentahila and Davies, 1992: 449):

[8] hda LE DIX-SEPTIEME ETAGE f dak LE FEU ROUGE near the seventeenth story at the fire red “near the seventeen-story [building] at the red light”

In contrast, the younger, Arabic-dominant group shows fewer full constituents in French in their CS discourse and more French content morphemes in mixed constituents. For example, these younger speakers inflect French verb stems with Arabic suffixes.

A similar division in CS patterns among Turks engaging in Turkish/Dutch CS in Tilburg, the Netherlands, can also be associated with linguistic proficiency. Backus (1994) explains a change from mainly intrasentential CS in the 1980s to intersentential CS in the 1990s as related to the newer CS speakers’high proficiency in both languages, brought about by extensive contact with both monolingual Turkish and Dutch. Examples [9a] and [9b] illustrate the contrast between the CS patterns of two different groups of young Turks. [9a] comes from speakers who came to the Netherlands when they were already of school age; they are Turkish-dominant bilinguals. Their speech shows much intrasentential CS (mixed constituents such as O blond-e-dan “that blonde [girl]” in which the Dutch NP is framed by Turkish system morphemes), as well as the “do” construction with a Dutch infinitive (afstuder-en yap-tl “do graduate”). In contrast, [9b] comes from speakers who had all of their schooling in the Netherlands. Their speech shows more instances of complete CPs in either Turkish or Dutch (intrasentential CS):

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Note that the CS pattern characterizing both the Moroccan Arabs and the Turks who were more balanced is the pattern with more instances of full constituents (or even full CPs) produced in one language. This finding is at odds with earlier claims (Poplack, 1980; Nortier, 1990) that the “more difficult” pattern of CS is one in which single nouns or verb stems are inserted into a frame from the other language. Myers-Scotton (1993a) arrives at a similar conclusion, based not so much on proficiency as on structure: No matter what the level of speaker proficiency, it should be easier to insert a verb stem in a frame of affixes from another language or to insert a noun in an otherwise fully specified NP in another language than it is to produce an entire constituent up to the level of CP as a monolingual segment.

Why should highly proficient bilinguals bother to engage in CS at all, which in both the Morocco and Tilburg case goes well beyond filling lexical gaps? The answer is that speakers wish to signal their memberships in the communities of speakers of both languages, not just one. CS is emblematic of dual membership, which is also the conclusion of Lüdi (1992), who discusses in-country Francophone immigrants to German-speaking areas in Switzerland.

7 Variation in Structural Patterns across Communities

A comparison of the two Moroccan groups has already demonstrated that there can be qualitative and quantitative differences in the role of the EL in CS. There, we saw that while the younger group inflected French verbs with Arabic affixes, the older group did not.

To date, there has been little emphasis on differences in the role of the EL across language pairs. The following examples are not exhaustive, but they give an idea of the types of phenomena whose study could be enlightening. First, data sets can be compared in terms of how EL verbs are treated. In some data sets, EL verbs inflected with ML suffixes are common, but they are not found at all in others. They are especially frequent when the ML is an agglutinative language (e.g., Finnish in Finnish/English CS in Halmari, 1993; Swahili and Shona in CS with English in Myers-Scotton, 1993a), but not necessarily so (e.g., they are not attested in Turkish/Dutch CS by Boeschoten, 1991, or Backus, 1993, 1994). And there are at least some cases in which the ML is not agglutinative, yet such verb forms appear (e.g., English verb stems inflected for Irish in Stenson, 1990). An alternative strategy for handling EL verbs is the “do construction.” In diverse language pairs (from Japanese/English to Tamil/English to Chewa/English), an ML verb for “do” receives all relevant verbal inflections and is used in conjunction with a nonfinite EL verb form, typically the infinitive. See [10] for an example:

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[10] Avan enne CONFUSE-paNNiTTAan 3S/M 1S/OBJ confuse do/PAST “He confused me.”

(Tamil/English, Annamalai, 1989: 51)

A second way to look at EL material in CS is to classify it according to the lexical categories represented by singly occurring EL lexemes (e.g., Nortier, 1990, on Moroccan Arabic/Dutch CS in Utrecht, the Netherlands). Singly occurring forms were the largest class by far in her corpus.

A third way in which EL participation in CS can be studied is to consider the frequency of EL islands and their structural roles. (See Treffers-Daller, 1994; Jake and Myers-Scotton,

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