Code-switching in electronic writing: The levelling and maintaining of linguistic borders

Foued Laroussi

Lab. DYALANG (Fre 2787 CNRS - Université de Rouen, France

Workshop

Code-switching in electronic writing : the weblog’s case Marie-claude Penloup, Fabien Liénard
Code-switching on Harissa.com Dora Aida Carpenter Latiri
Code-switching on internet sites for the Moroccan diaspora Marley, Dawn
Dynamiques des contacts de langues dans des sites et forums créolophones Pierozak Isabelle
Electronic writing in multilingual context. The concept of basic language for Arabic-French code-switching Foued LAROUSSI
« Others’ languages » use in electronics’ writings in professional and school settings: imposed or selected languages? Régine Delamotte-Legrand, Cecile Desoutter

Most researchers, analysing code-switching as a verbal strategy used by the bilingual, have stressed the need to place it in a twin context, that of speech economy in a multilingual sociolinguistic community and that of the verbal repertories of the speaking members of this same community. These researchers agree on the pluridimensionality of the phenomenon, and, consequently, do not advocate an exclusive approach when studying it. As early as 1988, in a collective work , Monica Heller proposed unifying the micro- and macrosociolinguistic approaches. She approached code-switching as a “social process” and wished to show how in order to study it, anthropological and sociolinguistic questions must be asked about the relation between linguistic facts and social processes in any interpretation and construction of social reality.

Whether socio-interactional, discursive or referential, the significance of code-switching can only be grasped by placing it in the context of a multilingual community where “strategies of definition, negotiation and indexation of common reference systems [are] distributed” (ibid).

This approach based on correlations between linguistic changes and social processes has been highly efficient when analysing code-switching as a research subject in itself and not as a marginal phenomenon in relation to a well-established norm of a standard, one might say dominant, language.

However these sociolinguistic or even anthropological approaches have analysed code-switching essentially on the basis of oral production. In this panel that we are proposing for the Sociolinguistics Symposium 17, we are looking at code-switching in written production, in electronic writing in fact. With the arrival of the Internet (nearly 750 million Internet users throughout the world) and the staggering development of electronic communication (email, text messages, forums and blogs), communication not only happens faster and faster but actually transcends national borders. Analysing Computer-mediated Communications (CMC) and mobile-mediated communications (MMT), we will enquire into the status of code-switching in this diverse electronic writing. Should the same theoretical tools used for analysing oral production be pressed into service? Does the analysis of electronic messages allow us to tackle questions unanswered up till now, even if the guidelines for code-switching theory would appear these days to be fairly clear? Does the widely accepted hypothesis that says that with code-switching we can see a levelling at the same time as a maintaining of linguistic borders stand up in the light of electronic writing?

These few suggestions in no way circumscribe the problematic, but open up a debate. We shall endeavour to work towards some answers.