Of Presbyters and Stonemasons, or Switching Codes in a Syrian Village (original) (raw)
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Code-switching in Judaeo-Arabic documents from the Cairo Geniza
Multilingua, 2017
This paper investigates code-switching and script-switching in medieval documents from the Cairo Geniza, written in Judaeo-Arabic (Arabic in Hebrew script), Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic. Legal documents regularly show a macaronic style of Judaeo-Arabic, Aramaic and Hebrew, while in letters code-switching from Judaeo-Arabic to Hebrew is tied in with various socio-linguistic circumstances and indicates how markedly Jewish the sort of text is. Merchants in particular employed a style of writing devoid of Hebrew elements, whereas community dignitaries are much more prone to mixing of Hebrew and Judaeo-Arabic (and Arabic), although the degree of mixing also depends on a number of other factors, such as on the individual education. Analyses show great variation within the repertoire of single authors, as shown on the example of Daniel b. ʿAzariah, according to the purpose of the correspondence, with religious affairs attracting the highest Hebrew content, whereas letters pertaining to trade...
Code-switching and dialogism: Verbal practices among Catalan Jews in the Middle Ages
From a strict linguistic viewpoint, code-switching intertwines with a diverse range of language contact phenomena, from strict interference to several kinds of language mixture. Code-switching has also been addressed as an interactional phenomenon in everyday talk, an approach that implies a synchronic perspective. In this article, however, data are drawn from the records of communicative practices left behind by Catalan Jewish communities of the 14th and 15th centuries. These communities lived under well-defined cultural, political, and social conditions and displayed a rather complex linguistic repertoire of both linguistic resources and verbal genres. I analyze two of these verbal genres, which themselves must be viewed in the context of a broader Hispano-Arabic cultural tradition; they draw on a heteroglot background in which Semitic and Romance languages merged. In this analysis of the functions that code-switching played in these verbal practices, a contrast emerges between the use of code-switching and lexical borrowing (or alternation vs. insertional types of code-switching) in both verbal genres. This has implications for a much debated issue – the alleged existence of a medieval Catalan Jewish language – and challenges the idea that forms of linguistic practice must always be reduced to a bounded code. (Language contact, Hebrew/Catalan, code-switching, verbal repertoire, verbal genres, Jewish languages.)
Bilingualism, which as a term is included into the fields of linguistics and sociolinguistics, although being examined and classified in different forms, defines a situation in which an individual knows two languages or his using two languages in social relations. Borrowing or code-switching refers to a bilingual's using the elements of two languages alternately in daily speech. Code-switching appears in many bilingual societies. Likewise, it appears in Bashkortostan, which has two official language. The official languages of Bashkortostan, which is a federative republic in Russia Federation, are Russian and Bashkir. In daily speech, a Bashkir sometimes code-switches with Russian. However, this phenomenon is not restricted to spoken language, it also reflected to Bashkir literary language. Code-switching appears in publications in which literary language is used such as novels, short stories, newspapers and magazines. In the present paper, the samples of code-switching in Bashkir literary language is analyzed according to code-switching theory.