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Introduction

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Code-Switching

Part of the book series: New Approaches to English Historical Linguistics ((NAEHL))

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Abstract

This chapter introduces the reader to the topic of code-switching as a diachronic phenomenon and shows that using more than one language in one single communicative event was just as common in multilingual communities of the Middle Ages as it is now. It describes the structural approach to the data taken in this book as a way of determining which features of code-switching are variable and which ones are stable across time. Lastly, it addresses the issue that modern and historical studies of code-switching could benefit from both mutual inspiration and collaborative projects.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The excerpt in (1) is taken from a conversation between a German American and her American-born bilingual niece; see Tracy and Lattey (2010) for a description of the corpus and the project (Sprachkontakt Deutsch-Englisch: Code-switching, Crossover & Co, DFG project number 5466620).

  2. 2.

    There are many pros and cons to any annotation scheme for linguistic data, depending on the core objective of the text as well as on the needs of the readership. My priority for this publication was legibility. Therefore visual language tagging is simplified, and I have decided not to use additional marking for ambiguous words or morphemes. If relevant for the interpretation of the data, homophonous and/or visual diamorphs are pointed out in the main text. All examples follow this simplified language tagging scheme: One language is rendered in roman and the other in italics, in the original texts as well as in the translations. Bold is used to highlight individual words or phrases that are the focus of the discussion. For the sake of clarity, all examples taken from other sources (editions, papers, manuscripts) have been adapted to this scheme.

  3. 3.

    Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.

  4. 4.

    Following the convention in Myers-Scotton (2002), in this book the label bilingual refers to any person speaking two or more languages.

  5. 5.

    Sebba (2013: 100) addresses this phenomenon as “hegemonic monolingualism, an ideology which legitimates only texts which conform to the norms of a single (usually named and standardised) language.”

  6. 6.

    Here, Luther refers to the two tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments that Moses received on Mount Sinai. The first tablet contains rules about man’s relationship to God, and the second tablet regulates relationships between people (Exodus 20, 2–17).

  7. 7.

    See also Stolt (1969, 2014) and Hiebsch (2002: 22–23).

  8. 8.

    Additionally, Gardner-Chloros (2017) pursues the question why as of yet there has been so little interaction and mutual inspiration between historical and modern bilingual studies in the field of sociolinguistics.

  9. 9.

    Findings from code-switching studies have implications for monolingual processing as well, because bilingual and monolingual language processing are not fundamentally different. Observed differences concern speed of access and executive control rather than basic cognitive processes. For more detailed information, see for example Paradis (2004), Bialystok and Craik (2010), Hayakawa and Marian (2019).

  10. 10.

    Freely available recordings and transcripts of bilingual conversations from several corpora are provided by BilingBank at https://talkbank.org.

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  1. Anglistik IV, University of Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany

    Mareike L. Keller

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Keller, M.L. (2020). Introduction. In: Code-Switching. New Approaches to English Historical Linguistics . Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34667-6_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34667-6_1

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-34666-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-34667-6

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