Is Codeswitching only a matter of convergence?

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 different

communities, but it was unnoticed and neglected by researchers for years. However, due to

social changes, such as globalization and immigration, CS has surfaced in new places and

thereby attracted attention. Nevertheless, those linguistics who researched into the

occurrences of CS mostly commented on it negatively and categorized it as a form of

interference and broken language. The perception of CS changed when Blom and Gumperz in

1972 focused on CS between dialects in a Norwegian fishing village and pointed at its social

dimension and function. As a result, further studies of CS in various parts of the world were

introduced and up until today it is a major research topic. Especially, the motivations for CS

remain an interesting focus for those studies. Moreover, globalization and with this, the

formation of multi-ethnical societies with a variety of different languages in a country is an

on-going process and hence a late- breaking topic. Different sociolinguistic theories to explain

this phenomenon have been developed. Two well-known approaches are Giles¿s Speech

Accommodation Theory, nowadays revised as Communication Accommodation Theory

(CAT) and Myers- Scotton¿s Markedness Model (MM). The first has its basis in psychology

as it explains CS as a form of accommodation to converge to the addressee in order to become

more alike and therefore narrow social distance. In contrast, the socio-psychological MM also

takes macro-level perspectives into consideration and provides a generalization about how

motivations for CS are interpreted. In this paper I will focus on CS in multilingual societies

and examine, whether this process is only a matter of convergence as CAT claims. Further, I

will match this theory with the MM as it is the leading model in terms of CS in multilingual

communities.

First, I am going to explain the basic theory of both approaches. After the establishment of a

profound theoretical basis, I will introduce a study by Burt, who re-examined CAT¿s claim

that every code- switch is motivated by convergence, respectively divergence. By this, the

theoretical approaches will be put into practice and further examples from a multilingual

family 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.