Code-switching and translanguaging

Rakesh M. Bhatt & Agnes Bolonyai
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign | North Carolina State University
Table of contents

The current scholarship in the sociolinguistics of bilingual language use has been occupied with mainly two empirical realities: mobility and multiplicity. As such, we find ourselves with a myriad of theoretical and methodological shifts: ‘turns’ – the mobility (Blommaert 2010), multilingual (May ed. 2014), trans- (García & Li 2014; Li 2018), and super-diversity (Blommaert & Rampton 2011) turns. The (re-)turn to multilingualism has unleashed inquiries not only in the sociolinguistics of globalization and all the attendant forms and functions of mobility and complexity implicated in globalization (Blommaert 2010, 2017), but it has also begun to re-assess established paradigms of understandings of bilingual language use. In this chapter we focus on one aspect of the ‘multilingual turn’ that has to do with a well-attested, very well documented, and rigorously analyzed sociolinguistic behavior characterized with the use (mixing and switching) of elements from two or more languages (or registers, styles, genres, etc.) within a single semiotic frame, described in the literature as code-switching (inter-sentential) and code-mixing (intra-sentential). These terms were used to capture sociolinguistically significant generalizations of routine use of two or more languages as in Example (1) below, where the different roles (‘voice’) of a 58-year-old, upper middle-class, Kashmiri woman in New Delhi are flagged by switches in languages (Bhatt & Bolonyai 2011: 534).

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