Publisher's Synopsis
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.
