iSwitch: Spanish-English Mixing in Computer-Mediated Communication (original) (raw)

Communicative Aspects of Multilingual Code Switching in Computer-Mediated Communication

Indonesian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 2017

The quintessential role of language has been punctiliously studied relative to intercultural communication, cultural heritage, social development, education, identity construction and many more domains. One forum wherein language is investigated is the Computer-mediated Communication (CMC) which provides a fertile ground for linguistic and sociolinguistic analyses. The present study aims at investigating the preferred codes used in code switching (CS), functions of CS, and the motives of users for employing CS in CMC. The present study was based on the investigation of 200 status updates and 100 wall posts of 50 Facebook accounts of students who are enrolled in a leading state university in Mindanao and professionals who graduated from the same university. Besides English and Filipino, these Facebook users speak various regional languages such as Chavacano, Cebuano, and Tausug. Their posts were analyzed employing eclectic approaches in analyzing inter-sentential and intra-sentential...

Mixing Catalan, English and Spanish on WhatsApp: A case study on language choice and code-switching

Spanish in Context, 2022

The purpose of this study is to examine language choice, language alternation and code-switching practices in Instant Messaging (IM). Specifically, this article presents the results from an analysis of the written conversations of a specific community formed by Valencian adults fluent in English. Taking a computer-mediated, discourse-centred ethnographic approach to online discourse, the study has shown that, in this specific trilingual online community of language teachers, language choice and the choice of a specific written variety is intimately related to audience. The group members mix Catalan, English and Spanish regularly, their language choice and code-switching strategies serving to establish in-group solidarity, familiarity and lessen face-threatening acts. Switches to English, sometimes followed by a switch to Catalan, are usually employed for humorous word play. Interestingly, the case study exemplifies how the use of a certain language may be highly correlated to ideological and political considerations.

Cultural impact of code-switching on modern bilingualism

2018

In modern society, code switching is considered a bridge between two multilingual groups, which allows them to overcome the difficulties they face of staying inside two language groups by favorably influencing the modern language culture. In this article, we are trying to study cultural influence of code-switching on the language of modern-day bilinguals. We are trying to understand what advantages the ability of using two languages in one sentence brings to the societies, where bilinguals live. The world is changing and the language doesn’t stand still, so now more and more linguists are looking into the computer language (the language of social networks and messengers). Some social networks are even focused on common ethnolinguistic characteristics of the users and can be used by ethnolinguistically heterogeneous individuals. Modern linguists compare the computer language to everyday speech in order to find the synchronous or asynchronous features in them. Therefore, it is believe...

Socio Linguistic Study of Code Switching of the Arabic Language Speakers on Social Networking

Researches on code-switching in the past have a concentration on the verbal language, few on its written form. This study attempts to cover and analyze the notion of code-switching in electronic contexts. The objective of this study is to discuss the code-switching functions performed by Arabic-English bilingual users in their Facebook interactions. The data of this study were collected from status updates posted by the bilingual users on their Facebook wall. They were classified and analyzed according to the functions they served in the Facebook context. Findings indicate that code switching occurs in online interaction to serve addressee specification, reiteration, message qualification, clarification, emphasis, checking, indicating emotions, availability, principle of economy and free switching functions. This study hopes to provide insights on the code-switching phenomenon in Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC). Additionally, the findings of this study will be of value for the development of code-switching studies in the socio linguistic area.

Spanish-English Codeswitching in Email Communication

While spoken codeswitching (CS) among Latinos has received significant scholarly attention, few studies have examined written CS, specifically naturally-occurring CS in email. This study contributes to an under-studied area of Latino linguistic practices by reporting the results of a study of CS in the emails of five Spanish-English bilingual Latinos. Methods are employed that are not often used in discourse analysis of email texts, namely multi-dimensional scaling and tree diagrams, to explore the contextual parameters of written Spanish-English CS systematically. Consistent with the findings of other studies of CS in CMC, English use was most associated with professional or formal contacts, and use of Spanish, the participants' native language, was linked to intimacy, informality, and group identification. Switches to Spanish functioned to personalize otherwise transactional or work-related English-dominant emails. The article also discusses novel orthographic and linguistic forms specific to the CMC context.

PJSRR (2017) 3(2): 1-9 Code-Switching in Online Communication Among Arabic-English Speakers

– Language is essential for communication. People who are involved in cross cultural communication have to be bilingual in order to interact with people from a different language background (Blackwell. Woolard, K. (2005). Bilingualism opens up various new pathways of thoughts, expressions, and it helps to reduce misunderstanding in interactions (Hidayat, T. 2012). The purpose of this review is to find out how code-switching plays a vital role in language communication especially in the social media such as Facebook, Twitter, SMS and Chat. This study reviewed fifteen journal articles to examine the ways code-switching was used. The review was to discover social phenomena and authentic identities of social actors. The study discovered that code-switching has been used widely to unmask bilinguals' cultural background and group identity during online communication via Facebook. Finally, code-switching can be used to obtain positive feelings to the interlocutor, which here was combined with introducing humour as an in-group marker, quoting, and to some extent topic specificity as well as possible vocabulary limitation in one language or the other, in the online conversation by bilinguals such as to express group solidarity.

Code-switching in the computer-mediated communication

RUDN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, 2020

Most authors admit that code-switching is the process of switching different languages, their varieties, speaking styles, etc. Today the majority of people in the world are multilingual and often mix languages in different ways, which makes code-switching a quite common global phenomenon. Code-switching incorporates government, cultural, religious and network contexts, and the frequency of code-switching in such multilingual conversations is an indicator of the global dominance of multilingualism. Online communication fosters social communicative practices consisting of code-switching and marks the development of verbal behaviour of multilingual communities. Code-switching also affects language visuality, its images are tools for the social construction of reality. The developed verbal practices support effective communication and affect the expression of new meanings. The article aims at presenting the features of code-switching in digital communication with 8 examples of different length, topic and author, in which the native Lithuanians code-switched to English and used elements of the Internet language. These examples were taken from the social networks Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, and the authors analyzed the grammar, spelling and punctuation of both Lithuanian and the English words, the type and use of the code-switched English elements, special characters, abbreviations, emoji and other features of the Internet language. The results show that online communication is not entirely textual, with various means of text composition communicators make their code-switched English elements more visible and alter the appearance of messages. Such practices correspond to the features of social networks and seem to follow the popular Internet culture trends.

Code-switching patterns of Ilocano discourse in Facebook

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2022

Multilingual speakers make use of two or three languages while conversing as it makes the conversation fluid and smooth. This mixing of languages in sentences is called code-switching which is observed in communicative contexts such as on Facebook. In this study, the descriptive method of research was used. 25 Facebook posts, comments, and memes were coded according to the type of code-switching patterns. These patterns were also analyzed morphologically to determine the wordformation used. The findings reveal that among the four code-switching patterns, intra-sentential code-switching was mostly used with an average of 47.6%. It is followed by inter-sentential codeswitching with an average of 32.5%, intra-word code-switching with 14.71%, and extrasentential code-switching with 5.19%. This implies that the speakers use two or three languages in order to express easily and conveniently the thoughts or message that they want to convey online.

Codeswitching in Online Written Communication among Arabic English Bilinguals: A Sociolinguistic Perspective

International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature

This study aims to investigate the sociolinguistic functions of code-switching in tweets. It also examines the potential effects of two social variables, namely gender and education, as well as whether language choice relates to topic. The study adopts Myers-Scotton’s (1993) Markedness Model and Malik’s (1994) Model to analyze the data. The findings revealed that each code choice served different functions such as avoiding a lack of facility, addressing a different audience or showing users’ religious or cultural identity. Gender of twitter users showed significant effects on language choice, i.e., females preferred posting tweets completely in their native language whereas males preferred posting codeswitched tweets. Educational level, also, revealed some effects on language choice. Namely, tweets in the native language were posted more frequently by participants with below college education, while the combination of the bilingual’s two languages was utilized more often by those wi...