Information Code-Switching

Albarillo, F. (2018). Information Code-Switching: A Study of Language Preferences in Academic

Code-Switching
Code-switching, a linguistic phenomenon where speakers change between two or more
languages or between varieties of a language within a speech act or discourse.
Information Code-Switching
Since information is coded in language, the author coined Information code-switching which
refers to switching languages for a particular information task. The author coined the term
“information code-switching” to distinguish it as a kind of code-switching that refers specifically
to the preferences of a person when it comes to choosing a language or dialect for a particular
kind of information behavior.
The research investigates whether there are types of information activities and places where
multilingual students code-switch.
Carol Myers-Scotton, a linguist writing in the 1990s about research in code-switching,
summarizes Gumperz’s characterization of CS as the use of language codes as a type of “social
strategy” and extends it to include not only changing languages for content, but speakers using
it to frame discourse to show social meanings like solidarity or power relations. Similarly, in the
data of this paper, the author will discuss how languages are used strategically for different kinds
of information including normal situational and demographic contexts like language choice at
home as an expression of cultural identity.
Another concept that is important to this discussion is the notion of a language domain, or the
context in which a certain language is chosen. Joshua Fishman traces the history of this concept
in his article on the topic, and defines domains as created by “institutional contexts” and their
“congruent behavioral co-occurrences.”6 Fishman further elaborates that domains can have
different settings, have a “sociopsychological” component, and, most important, the “domain is
a sociocultural construct abstracted from topics of communications, relationships between
communicators, and locales of communication, in accord with institutions of a society and the
spheres of activity of a speech community, in such a way that individual behavior and social
patterns can be distinguished from each other and yet be related to each other.”
“A domain is not the actual interaction (the setting), but an abstract set of relationships between
status, topic, and locale which gives meaning to the events that actually comprise social
interaction.” (L.B. Breitborde)
Another oft-cited code-switching study is by Shana Poplack, who examines Puerto Rican Spanish
and English in New York City.13 Poplack provides examples of “intra-sentential” CS, where English
and Spanish are mixed in the same sentence. For example, “Me iban a layoff” is translated as
“They were going to lay me off”14 and includes both English and Spanish in the same sentence.
Poplack also notes the influence of Spanish phonology on the perfectly formed grammatical
English when “That’s what he said” is pronounced “[da ‘wari se].”15 And Poplack reports that
most of the CS discourses were grammatical: “Perhaps the most striking result of this study is
that there were virtually no instances of ungrammatical combinations of L1 and L2 [first language
and second language] in the 1,835 switches studied, regardless of the bilingual ability of the
speaker.”16 Another important finding by Poplack is the positive attitude of the speakers who
code-switched more toward their language.17 This landmark research underscores how
important CS is for multilingual individuals in defining social relations when speakers have access
to more than one language. CS has a situational context, in terms of location, prestige, and
institutional support. CS is fluid and natural and is not something that is planned ahead of time.
Furthermore, switches have grammatical patterns and should not be seen as “broken”
utterances. A significant theme in CS research aims at dispelling these myths about ill-formed
languages and dialects. The languages in an individual’s linguistic repertoire will be important to
the individual’s or community’s identity, and it is important to think about how libraries recognize
or do not recognize languages through their signage, public services, collection development, and
implementation of technology.

The Sociolinguistic Dimension of Code Switching

For a long time, code switching has been considered as a lack of linguistic competence since it
was taken as evidence that bilinguals are not able to acquire two languages or keep them apart
properly. Thus, it was regarded as result of not knowing at least one of the languages very
well. Consequently, there was a lack of interest in studying this phenomenon until the 1970ies.
Since then linguists began to deal with the subject in considerable detail. Nowadays it is the
common belief that code switching is grammatically structured and systematic and therefore can
no longer be regarded as deficient language behavior.
Code switching is categorized and classified as a language contact phenomenon. Moreover,
defining code switching includes distinguishing the term from other language contact
phenomena such as borrowing.
Joshua Fishman’s domain analysis serves an appropriate example of an approach applying a
macro-level perspective. It has set an important milestone in sociolinguistic research focussing
on the relationship between language and society and more precisely on the relationship
between language choices and certain types of activity. The assumption is that language choices
become predictable on the basis of the domain in which they occur.
Jan Blom and John J. Gumperz were the first to concentrate on the functions of code switching
for the discourse itself and later on introduced the term conversational code switching. Code
switching is, according to Gumperz, regarded as a contextualization cue which speakers
strategically use to mark their speech. Gumperz’s work proved to be very influential for the
ongoing research on code switching.
It is especially Peter Auer’s work which can be understood as a detailed reflexion and
modification of Gumperz’s theory of conversational code switching. Auer proposes the method
of conversation analysis which is a detailed transcription of speech exchanges between
interlocutors within a conversation in order to get to an interpretation of the meaning conveyed
by code switching.
With a particular focus on the psychological forces underlying language behaviour, speech
accommodation theory set up by Howard Giles and his colleagues serves as an attempt to explain
languages choices in terms of convergence and divergence. Thus, speakers adjust their speech
style as a way of expressing certain attitudes and intentions towards the interlocutor.
Monolingualism
Monolingualism or unilingualism describes the condition of an individual or a community having
access to only one linguistic code and therefore speaking only one language. This usually refers
to the language which is acquired as a first language or mother tongue. Besides, the term is
sometimes used to refer to a language policy which enforces one official or national language
over others. Although monolingualism had been so far and is in some communities still regarded
as the norm, there are less monolingual people or groups than there are bilinguals or
multilinguals within the world population nowadays.
On the one hand, monolingualism is likely to occur in isolated tribes and on the other hand
particularly among native speakers living in many of the Anglosphere nations like the United
States, Australia or the United Kingdom due to the worldwide perception that English speakers
see little relevance in learning a second language. This is considered to be above all a result of
the widespread distribution of English and its use as a lingua franca even in non-English speaking
countries. According to Edwards (1994) the possession of a powerful language as English but also
French, German or Spanish can lead to monolingual perspectives. The assumption that it is not
necessary to learn a second language is based on the consideration that speakers of a minority
group in a community need to learn the dominant language in order to accommodate to the
majority and manage their everyday lives. Such notions have triggered off local discussions which
deal with the question to which extent a non-native group should integrate its language and its
culture into the public life of a community.
A good example illustrating this problem is the discussion in Germany about the integration of
Turkish language and culture in everyday life. Due to the bad results in the PISA study which most
of all uncovered the strong correlation between education and social background in Germany it
has been proposed that German should be the obligatory language not only in lessons but also
on the school grounds (Reimann 2006). This proposal on monolingualism at school is heavily
disputed. With regard to cultural integration, there is for instance deep disagreement whether
female teachers of Turkish nationality should be allowed to wear the traditional headscarf during
their lessons. Monolingual perspectives also include the perception that bilingualism is
something exotic with an either romantic or threadbare background since the speaker was either
the child of European nobility or a child of refugees (Myers – Scotton 2003).
Myers-Scotton further claims that especially some Americans associate bilingualism with migrant
and uneducated, unskilled workers.
In the end, monolingualism does not only describe the condition in which individuals only speak
one language but furthermore a viewpoint which comes along with cultural narrowness which is
often enforced by state policies attributing only one language an official status.

Bilingualism
It has already been mentioned that bilingualism is the standard rather than the exception these
days. Individual as well as societal bilingualism has been promoted by several factors.
Bilingualism derives from the contact between people with different nationalities whereas this
contact can be forced under certain circumstances or chosen by the people themselves.
On the one hand, the geographical proximity between two communities is the reason for the
development of bilingual communities and speakers. Close proximity between groups includes
amongst others living in a border area between two nations. In border areas speakers often learn
the language which is spoken across the frontier as being the case at the Dutch-German border.
Moreover, close proximity also means living in a bilingual or multilingual area especially as a
minority group. These conditions naturally call for the need to communicate with each other
particularly for the purposes of trade. The marriage outside one’s ethnic group is also a result
from geographical proximity which then leads to the creation of bilingual families.
While close proximity on the one hand is a main factor for language contact, conditions of
displacement (Myers-Scotton 2003) are another one. Due to certain events and developments
throughout history, there are various reasons to explain migration of groups or an individual. An
example for migration under force is the involuntary movement of Africans during the slave trade
area to the Caribbean and southern states of America. This has resulted in the development of
African American Vernacular English, a pidgin and creole language as a particular form of
bilingualism. In addition, the movement of people to other countries has been a consequence of
a prevalent war with the aim to seek political or religious refuge.
Another major historical factor explaining the development of bilingualism is colonialism since
wielding power on the colonized nation also meant to impose the language of the conquerors on
the local population. However, today the displacement of people does not exclusively occur
under forced circumstances. The reasons to migrate in search of employment might be more or
less voluntary. In some cases the economic situation of the home town certainly coerces people
into moving away but there are also a number of people who leave their home town voluntarily.
Due to economic as well as mental changes globalization has brought about, people are willing
to learn additional languages in order to improve their occupational skills and therefore assure
their mobility. This in particular applies to the learning of English for the purposes of international
businesses. And apart from political or economic reasons there are still some people who learn
additional languages out of curiosity and for the purposes of travelling.
Nevertheless, all these factors have finally resulted in the contact of people from different
nationalities and therefore in the contact of different languages which has inevitably led to
bilingualism.
In the history of bilingualism research various definitions have been proposed. Those have in
common to use bilingualism as a cover term for speaking at least two or more languages. Yet,
there is a distinction between societal and individual bilingualism. While the latter refers to the
psychological state of an individual having access to two linguistic codes (Hamers; Blanc 2000),
societal bilingualism is given when two languages are spoken in a community. This for instance
used to be the case in Canada or Belgium.
Definitions on individual bilingualism have mainly differed in terms of proficiency meaning how
fluent an individual can communicate in a second language. Narrow definitions such as the one
of Leonard Bloomfield consider the perfect mastery of at least two languages as a criterion to
define bilingualism. Thus, Bloomfield defines bilingualism as the “native-like control of two or
more languages” (Apple/Muysken 1987:2). In contrast to that Mcnamara suggests that any
person who possesses a minimal competence in only one of the four basic language skills
(reading, writing, speaking, and listening) in another language than his mother tongue, can
already be called a bilingual (Hamers; Blanc 2000). Whereas the above-mentioned descriptions
are very limited and diverge extremely, the concept of bilingualism has become broader
throughout the twentieth century and involves different degrees of competence in the languages
that are involved.
According to Myers-Scotton (2003) for instance bilingualism does not imply the complete
mastery of two languages and just a few bilinguals are as proficient in a second language as they
are in their second. Bilingual speakers rarely achieve equal proficiency in both languages since
they are, for the most part, not exposed to these languages to the same extent. In addition, the
different languages are usually not used in the same situations and with the same frequency.
The difficulty in defining the term is to set a specific limit on the proficiency a speaker has to
possess on a second language. Therefore, recent definitions as the one of Carol Myers-Scotton
(2003) tend to define bilingualism in a very broad sense describing it as the “ability to use two or
more languages sufficiently to carry on a limited casual conversation”.
Multilingualism
Today it is very common to use the term multilingualism either instead of bilingualism or at least
in the same context although the two terms do not exactly identify the same phenomenon.
Bilingualism and multilingualism merely differ in the number of linguistic codes an individual or
a community has access to. Thus, multilingualism describes the ability to speak more than two
languages and comes about when speakers of different languages are brought together within
the same political entity (Hoffmann 1991). Although there is barely a difference towards the
concept of bilingualism, multilingualism remains a topic worth mentioning since in many parts of
the world this phenomenon has become an indisputable fact of life.
Multilingualism on a societal level is particularly very common in Asian and African communities.
Several languages co-exist in these countries and large sections of the population speak three or
more languages. On the one hand, speakers use a local, ethnic or another indigenous language
in order to communicate within their own or between different ethnic groups. Next to these local
language speakers often use an additional language for more formal occasions. This language
which may be, for instance, English, French or Spanish which has been introduced during the
process of colonisation often serves as the language of education, bureaucracy and privilege (Wei
2000).
Attitudes towards multilingualism have also changed throughout history. With regard to societal
multilingualism, many governments have chosen to ignore the linguistic diversity of their
community in the past and gave only one language an official status (Hoffmann 1991). Nowadays
the linguistic diversity of many countries is more or less accepted and there are some bilingual
states, in which even two languages hold an official status. Brussels and Canada are the best-
known examples for states with two official languages. Nevertheless, the majority of multilingual
communities still hold one official language and choosing this language can turn out to be a
challenge for the government which then has to face possible internal conflicts especially if the
nation has a colonial past.
Individual multilingualism is often regarded as an additional skill improving the occupational
opportunities and mobility of the speaker. In many European countries, it is therefore very
common today to learn at least two additional languages next to their mother tongue. The
availability of different languages in a community can serve as a useful interactional resource for
the multilingual speaker who usually assigns different roles to different languages. Thus, speakers
may use one language in formal contexts as work, education and government and another one
in more informal contexts with family and friends. The use of different languages is likely to occur
in the same utterance. This very typical language behaviour performed by bilinguals or
multilinguals is then known as code switching which will be the central subject matter in the
following chapters.