Abstract
This chapter reports on the results of an automatic analysis of 67,515 clauses from a Welsh-English corpus (www.bangortalk.org.uk and http://talkbank.org/data/BilingBank/Bangor) collected from 151 speakers. We aimed to identify the role of age, gender, first language acquired, the language of education, social network, and the accuracy of self-report regarding individuals’ code switching. We studied both intraclausal and interclausal code switching, using an innovative automatic glossing mechanism to extract clauses and analysis by Rbrul relating extralinguistic factors to the production of bilingual versus monolingual clauses. Our results showed that both intraclausal and interclausal code switching were more common in younger speakers and those who had acquired Welsh and English simultaneously, and that people were surprisingly accurate in reporting their own code-switching usage.
Mae’r bennod hon yn adrodd ar ganlyniadau dadansoddiad awtomatig o 67,515 o gymalau mewn corpws Cymraeg-Saesneg sy’n cynnwys 151 o siaradwyr. Nod yr ymchwil oedd canfod i ba raddau mae oedran, rhywedd, iaith gyntaf, iaith addysg a rhwydwaith gymdeithasol yn dylanwadu ar gyfnewid cod ac archwilio a oedd gwerthusiadau’r siaradwyr o’u hymddygiad ynglŷn â chyfnewid cod yn gywir. Astudiwyd cyfnewid cod o fewn cymalau a rhwng cymalau drwy ddefnyddio awtoglosydd ac fe ddadansoddwyd dylanwad ffactorau all-ieithyddol ar gynhyrchu cymalau dwyieithog neu uniaith drwy ddefnyddio modelau effeithiau cymysg. Dengys ein canlyniadau fod cyfnewid cod yn fwy cyffredin yn lleferydd siaradwyr ifainc ac ymhlith siaradwyr sydd wedi caffael y Gymraeg a’r Saesneg ar yr un pryd. Roedd y siaradwyr yn rhyfeddol o gywir ynghylch eu canfyddiadau o’u defnydd o gyfnewid cod.
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Notes
- 1.
An example from her data is Why make Carol sentarse atrás pa’ que (‘sit in the back so’) everybody has to move pa’ que se salga (‘for her to get out’).
- 2.
This included both ‘sentential’ (switches between sentences, also called ‘intersentential’) and ‘tag’ switches.
- 3.
- 4.
Participants were asked to rate their ability to speak Welsh and English. For each language, there were four possible responses: (i) only know some words and expressions, (ii) confident in basic conversations, (iii) fairly confident in extended conversations, and (iv) confident in extended conversations.
- 5.
Details of the areas where individual participants were brought up (NW, NE, Mid, SW, and SE Wales) are provided in the Siarad ‘questionnaire data’ file available at www.bangortalk.org.uk.
- 6.
Constraint grammar contains rules which help to identify which gloss is correct in dictionary entries containing more than one possible gloss. For example, i in Welsh could be either a first person singular pronoun or a preposition. Constraint grammar identifies it as a first person singular pronoun if it follows a first person verb form.
- 7.
Words in lower case bold are Welsh, in upper case English, and bold italics are used for words belonging to both languages. The glosses have been aligned with the words for the ease of reading and are explained in the Siarad documentation file to be found at www.bangortalk.org.uk.
- 8.
Examples (2)–(10) are referenced by giving the name of the file they come from, followed by the number of the utterance (called the ‘main tier’ in CLAN).
- 9.
For more information about how the corpus was segmented, see section 4.2 of an earlier version of this paper at http://www.ling.cam.ac.uk/COPIL/.
- 10.
For this analysis, we removed two speakers EVA and GLA who had learned Dutch as their first language, because we wished to focus on the role of Welsh and English acquisition in early childhood as a predictor of code switching. It was also necessary to remove a further speaker, ARD, since the data on first language acquired were missing. Removing these three speakers gives a large data set for the analysis of 148 speakers and 79,116 clauses.
- 11.
More detailed information about each speaker’s age and gender is available in the documentation file at http://www.bangortalk.org.uk/speakers.php?c=siarad.
- 12.
Word-internal code switching can occur in Welsh when an English verb is given a verbal suffix, for example, concentrate-io. There were 333 instances of this in the 11,061 clauses that we removed and thus these instances were not included in our analysis of intraclausal code switching.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful for the financial support of the AHRC and ESRC in the collection and analysis of the data, and for the contribution of all those who provided, collected, and transcribed data.
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Deuchar, M., Donnelly, K., Piercy, C. (2016). ‘Mae pobl monolingual yn minority’: Factors Favouring the Production of Code Switching by Welsh–English Bilingual Speakers. In: Durham, M., Morris, J. (eds) Sociolinguistics in Wales. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52897-1_8
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