Code-switching - Dayang Fatimah Awang Chuchu

Awang Chuchu, Dayang Fatimah Haji. Code-switching in a Mutlilingual Environment. Perak Darul Ridzuan, Malaysia: Universiti Prendidikan Sultan Idris, 2007.

Awang Chuchu draws on Gumperz's definition of code-switching to draw attention to switching within a language, rather than just between languages.  The key definition is "the juxtaposition within the same speech exchange of passages of speech belonging to two different grammatical systems or subsystems."  Grosjean expands beyond two languages by defining it as "the alternate use of two or more languages in the same utterance or conversation" and Heller puts it into a sociolinguistic framework by defining it as "the use of more than one language in the course of a single communicative episode" while Myers-Scotton introduces the idea of matrix and embedded varieties as a selection process for bilinguals or multilinguals (12-14).

Using Gumperz for the social meaning of code-switching, she gives examples of quotations, addressee specification, interjections, reiteration, message qualification, and personalization vs. objectivization (9-10).  She also draws on Halliday's and Marasigan's modeling of language functions with speech acts.  These include the following functions:

micro (child)

• instrumental - satisfy needs
• regulatory - controlling behavior
• interactional - language between
• personal - identity through interaction
• heuristic - learning and exploring reality
• imaginative - creating environment
• representational - communicating information

macro (adult)

• ideational - world experience and interpretation
• interpersonal - roles, attitudes, wishes, judgements
• textual - resources for creating a text

In Marasigan's model, instrumental and regulatory categories have been collapsed into the "regulatory," and interactional, heuristic, and interpersonal have been collapsed into "interpersonal" (8).

In Awang Chuchu's own study of code-switching between Malay, local Brunei dialect, and English in educational settings, she reports that code-switching is an important educational resource.  Its motivations or triggers include needing to "facilitate understanding, fill lexical gaps, express emotional feelings, respond, clarify, emphasise, elicit, ascertain, save time and be able to cope with [constraints] and mediat[ing] various speech acts" (268).  She also writes that "there are no specific linguistic constraints on code-switching.  It happens at all syntactic levels and in all components" (197).  This is useful as a way of identifying contexts, resources, strategies, and scope of code-switching.