Read more
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 differentcommunities, but it was unnoticed and neglected by researchers for years. However, due tosocial changes, such as globalization and immigration, CS has surfaced in new places andthereby attracted attention. Nevertheless, those linguistics who researched into theoccurrences of CS mostly commented on it negatively and categorized it as a form ofinterference and broken language. The perception of CS changed when Blom and Gumperz in1972 focused on CS between dialects in a Norwegian fishing village and pointed at its socialdimension and function. As a result, further studies of CS in various parts of the world wereintroduced and up until today it is a major research topic. Especially, the motivations for CSremain an interesting focus for those studies. Moreover, globalization and with this, theformation of multi-ethnical societies with a variety of different languages in a country is anon-going process and hence a late- breaking topic. Different sociolinguistic theories to explainthis phenomenon have been developed. Two well-known approaches are Giles's SpeechAccommodation Theory, nowadays revised as Communication Accommodation Theory(CAT) and Myers- Scotton's Markedness Model (MM). The first has its basis in psychologyas it explains CS as a form of accommodation to converge to the addressee in order to becomemore alike and therefore narrow social distance. In contrast, the socio-psychological MM alsotakes macro-level perspectives into consideration and provides a generalization about howmotivations for CS are interpreted. In this paper I will focus on CS in multilingual societiesand examine, whether this process is only a matter of convergence as CAT claims. Further, Iwill match this theory with the MM as it is the leading model in terms of CS in multilingualcommunities.First, I am going to explain the basic theory of both approaches. After the establishment of aprofound theoretical basis, I will introduce a study by Burt, who re-examined CAT's claimthat every code- switch is motivated by convergence, respectively divergence. By this, thetheoretical approaches will be put into practice and further examples from a multilingualfamily 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.
