Social Motivations for Codeswitching

This book deals with codeswitching - the use of two or more different languages in the same conversation. Using data from multilingual African contexts, Carol Myers-Scotton advances a theoretical argument which aims at a general explanation of these motivations. She treats codeswitching as a type of "skilled performance", not as the "alternative strategy" of a person who cannot carry on a conversation in the language in which it began. When engaging in codeswitching, speakers exploit the socio-psycological values which have come to be associated with different linguistics varieties in a specific speech community - they switch codes in order to negotiate a change in social distance between themselves and other participants in the conversation, conveying this negotiation through the choice of a different code. Switching between languages, the book suggests, has a good deal in common with making different stylistic choices in the same language - it is as if bilingual and multilingual speakers have an additional style at their command when they engage in codeswitching between languages.
This book should be of interest to anyone interested in the social aspect of language, for example linguists, social anthropologists and social psychologists, and to Africanists of any discipline.