Examination Thesis from the year 2008 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, University of Duisburg-Essen, language: English, abstract: According to the World Atlas of Language Structure there are nearly seven thousand languages spoken throughout the world and more than half of the worlds' population is estimated to be bilingual and engages in code switching. Due to such statistics it becomes obvious that nowadays the alternation between two languages is rather the norm than exception in many communities. However, the fact that bilingualism is so widespread is not the only reason why there has been and still is such an interest in this phenomenon as a research topic. The question arises why the study of language behaviour over and over remains an interesting subject in linguistic research.

The study of code-switching has been carried out from linguistic, psycholinguistic, and sociolinguistic perspectives, largely in isolation from each other. This volume attempts to unite these three research strands by placing at the centre of the enquiry the role played by social factors in the occurrence, forms, and outcomes of code-switching. The contributions in this volume are divided into three parts: “code-switching between cognition and socio-pragmatics”, “multilingual interaction and identity”, and “code-switching and social structure”. The case studies represent contact settings on five continents and feature languages with diverse linguistic affiliations. They are predictive and descriptive in their research goals and rely on experimental or naturalistic data. But they share the common goal of seeking to explain how social structures, ideologies, and identity impact on the grammatical and conversational features of code-switching and language mixing, and on the emergence of mixed languages. Given its scope, this volume is a significant addition to the empirical and theoretical foundations of the study of code-switching. It is also of relevance to the general debate on the inter-relationships between language and society.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE brings to students, researchers and practitioners in all of the social and language-related sciences carefully selected book-length publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications. It approaches the study of language in society in its broadest sense, as a truly international and interdisciplinary field in which various approaches, theoretical and empirical, supplement and complement each other. The series invites the attention of linguists, language teachers of all interests, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, historians etc. to the development of the sociology of language.

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2.3, University of Stuttgart (Institut für Linguistik), 40 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: The aim of this paper is to provide a complete overview over the phenomenon of code-switching and code-mixing. The history of the research of code change has undergone various periods that have shown how complex the phenomenon of codeswitching and code-mixing are. In the course of research of code change it has become clear that code-switching and code-mixing can be investigated from different perspectives. Researchers focused on code change after they had realized that linguistic forms and practices are interrelated. And code-switching/-mixing, in their turn, embodies not only variation, but the link between linguistic form and language use as social practice. Research from a linguistic and psycholinguistic perspective has focused on understanding the nature of the systematic of code change, as a way of revealing linguistic and potentially cognitive processes. Research on the psychological and social dimensions of code-switching/-mixing has largely been devoted to answering the questions of why speakers code change and what the social meaning of code change is for them. The sociological perspective later goes on to attempt to use the answer to those questions to illuminate how language operates as a social process. Throughout the history of research on code-switching/-mixing it has been proposed that it is necessary to link all these forms of analysis and that, indeed, it is that possibility that is one of the most compelling reasons for studying code-switching/- mixing, since such a link would permit the development and verification of hypotheses regarding the relationship among linguistic, cognitive and social processes in a more general way (Heller, Pfaff 1996). As with any aspect of language contact phenomena, research on code- switching

The most comprehensive overview available, this Handbook is an essential guide to sociolinguistics today. Reflecting the breadth of research in the field, it surveys a range of topics and approaches in the study of language variation and use in society. As well as linguistic perspectives, the handbook includes insights from anthropology, social psychology, the study of discourse and power, conversation analysis, theories of style and styling, language contact and applied sociolinguistics. Language practices seem to have reached new levels since the communications revolution of the late twentieth century. At the same time face-to-face communication is still the main force of language identity, even if social and peer networks of the traditional face-to-face nature are facing stiff competition of the Facebook-to-Facebook sort. The most authoritative guide to the state of the field, this handbook shows that sociolinguistics provides us with the best tools for understanding our unfolding evolution as social beings.

Studienarbeit aus dem Jahr 2012 im Fachbereich Didaktik für das Fach Englisch - Pädagogik, Sprachwissenschaft, Note: 1,3, Universität zu Köln, Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: Code- switching (CS) is a worldwide phenomenon and has been the norm in many different communities, but it was unnoticed and neglected by researchers for years. However, due to social changes, such as globalization and immigration, CS has surfaced in new places and thereby attracted attention. Nevertheless, those linguistics who researched into the occurrences of CS mostly commented on it negatively and categorized it as a form of interference and broken language. The perception of CS changed when Blom and Gumperz in 1972 focused on CS between dialects in a Norwegian fishing village and pointed at its social dimension and function. As a result, further studies of CS in various parts of the world were introduced and up until today it is a major research topic. Especially, the motivations for CS remain an interesting focus for those studies. Moreover, globalization and with this, the formation of multi-ethnical societies with a variety of different languages in a country is an on-going process and hence a late- breaking topic. Different sociolinguistic theories to explain this phenomenon have been developed. Two well-known approaches are Giles’s Speech Accommodation Theory, nowadays revised as Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) and Myers- Scotton’s Markedness Model (MM). The first has its basis in psychology as it explains CS as a form of accommodation to converge to the addressee in order to become more alike and therefore narrow social distance. In contrast, the socio-psychological MM also takes macro-level perspectives into consideration and provides a generalization about how motivations for CS are interpreted. In this paper I will focus on CS in multilingual societies and examine, whether this process is only a matter of convergence as CAT claims. Further, I will match this theory with the MM as it is the leading model in terms of CS in multilingual communities. First, I am going to explain the basic theory of both approaches. After the establishment of a profound theoretical basis, I will introduce a study by Burt, who re-examined CAT’s claim that every code- switch is motivated by convergence, respectively divergence. By this, the theoretical approaches will be put into practice and further examples from a multilingual family will be offered and closely analysed in terms of the motivations for the code- switches. Finally, an evaluation of the given analyses completes the paper and answers the question of the title.

Code-switching - the alternating use of two languages in the same stretch of discourse by a bilingual speaker - is a dominant topic in the study of bilingualism and a phenomenon that generates a great deal of pointed discussion in the public domain. This handbook provides the most comprehensive guide to this bilingual phenomenon to date. Drawing on empirical data from a wide range of language pairings, the leading researchers in the study of bilingualism examine the linguistic, social and cognitive implications of code-switching in up-to-date and accessible survey chapters. The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Code-switching will serve as a vital resource for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, as a wide-ranging overview for linguists, psychologists and speech scientists and as an informative guide for educators interested in bilingual speech practices.