Provides that in bilingual conversation, the unmarked choice can be identified via a frequency-based criterion. Data come from a Malawian family temporarily living in the United States. Both parents and children engage in code switching, but how the two languages are employed and their frequency within the overall codeswitching pattern shows that…

Analyzes negotiation of meaning and code switching in discourse between 29 language students from classes at a German and a North American university, who teamed up with their peers to collaborate on projects whose results hey had to present to the other groups in the MOO during the final weeks of the project. (VWL)

A study for assessing automatic vocabulary switching from a thesaurus to Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) revealed that a maximum 61%, but a more realistic 41.5%, of the terms could be switched automatically; as long as LCSH is used for subject descriptions in online catalogs, interfaces for vocabulary switching can only be partially…

Provides an overview of current research on grammatical, phonological, semantic, and pragmatic development in African American English child language, as opposed to adult or adolescent language, and discusses the implications of these findings for professionals involved in second-dialect instruction, speech-language assessment, or intervention…

Examines code-switching and code-mixing behavior of a child learning English and Cantonese simultaneously. The choice of code was dependant on socialization, and code-mixing was dependent on base language. (14 references) (LT)

This study applies perspectives from sociolinguistics to investigate the language mixing of a bilingual two year old acquiring Norwegian and English simultaneously in Norway. The investigation stresses the need to examine more carefully the roles of dominance and context in the language mixing of young bilingual children. (40 references) (JL)

Black English (BE) and standard English are treated as two different closely related linguistic systems that coexist in African-American linguistics. Focus is on a middle-class female informant who appears to be a balanced bilingual and who offers counter evidence to the claim that BE is spoken mainly by poor and uneducated persons. (13…

An ethnographic study of two secondary schools in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, is reported that examined the functions of English-Kiswahili code-switching among students. It argues that code-switching is used strategically by both teachers and pupils for meaningful classroom interaction and also reinforces the view that English is more appropriate for…

Sixteen African Americans affiliated with a university reported on their experiential, attitudinal, and descriptive responses to Black English Vernacular (BEV). Three issues emerged: BEV as a label, the possibility that BEV was socially constructed, and the perception that BEV is a limited linguistic system. Interview questions are appended. (44…

Consideration of the use of Panjabi by British Black adolescents and White adolescents in a mixed peer group, analyzing contexts of Panjabi occurrence and crossing, showed that Panjabi was important in managing the divisions that cross-cut youth community and in extending horizons beyond the confines of local neighborhood experience. (31…

Presents an overview (from a broad cultural and historical perspective) of the effect of two languages and cultures on the creation of literature, the cosmopolitanism, and bilingualism of writers, and the effects of the related phenomena of biculturalism and diglossia on the production of literary texts. Shows that bilingualism has been a feature…

Develops diagnostics for distinguishing word-internal codeswitching from borrowing, based on Ukrainian-English bilingual discourse: a typological different language pair. Focuses on conflict sites in the morphosyntactic structure of Ukrainian (a fusional language) and English (an analytical one). (Author/VWL)

Using the variationist comparative method, the status of ambiguous lone Spanish-origin nouns in Catalan discourse is determined by analyzing their distribution and conditioning and by comparing them to their counterparts in unmixed Spanish or in multiple-word code switches. Suggests that the grammar of these nouns is Catalan, and their categorical…

Describes one child's varied use of two languages, English and German, as she interacts with her adult caregivers during play. Two broad questions were used to guide the study: (1) What kinds of activity are the child and her adult interlocutors involved in? How does the child use her two languages to constitute her involvement in play?…

Argues that the compartmentalism of structures observed in mixed languages is the result of the cumulative effect of different contact mechanisms. These mechanisms are defined in terms of the cognitive and communicative motivations that lead speakers to model certain functions of language on an alternative linguistic system: lexical…