INTRODUCTION

In a previous chapter code-switching was defined, and distinguished from borrowing and interference (I.V). Some testimonia were cited which established that the phenomenon was recognised in antiquity. Code-switching is common both in literary texts and primary material, particularly inscriptions. I turn in this chapter to its determinants.

There is now a variety of opinion about the nature and motivation of code-switching. An old view was that the ‘ideal bilingual switches from one language to the other according to appropriate changes in the speech situation (interlocutors, topics, etc.), but not in an unchanged speech situation, and certainly not within a single sentence’ (Weinreich (1953: 73), my italics). Weinreich goes on to ‘visualize two types of deviation from the norm’ (i.e. the norm whereby the ideal bilingual is resistant to switching). The second of his ‘deviations’ is ‘in the direction of insufficient adherence to one language in a constant speech situation’ (1953:74). He observes that this ‘tendency (abnormal proneness to switching) has been attributed to persons who, in early childhood, were addressed by the same familiar interlocutors indiscriminately in both languages’. Switching is thus acknowledged to exist, but is seen as an aberration, or, as Weinreich puts it (1953:74), a ‘deviant behaviour pattern’. Such claims have now been rejected as a result of study of bilingual communities in which in unchanged speech situations speakers have been observed to switch languages with considerable freedom even within sentence or clause boundaries.