2023-24 Academic Catalog

Code-switching, or shifting between two shared languages, is a common practice of bilinguals around the globe. This course reviews key linguistic research on code-switching, focusing particularly on when and why code-switching occurs and what linguistic, cultural, and cognitive restrictions it is subject to. These questions will take us on a wide-ranging exploration of bilingualism as a phenomenon, touching on sociolinguistic issues, questions of language structure, and the impacts of code-switching on pronunciation, as well as a variety of issues in the study of multilingualism broadly construed, such as how bilinguals maintain multiple linguistic systems within a single cognitive environment. Prerequisite: Any previous Linguistics course