Polish-English Code-Switching in the Language of Polish Facebook Users
Abstract
Social networking services, such as Facebook, are important channels of communication both for monolingual users and for those having various degrees of proficiency in L2, with the latter deploying expression both from L1 and L2. It can, therefore, be presumed that communication on FB plays a role in practicing the use of L2. One of the phenomena that can be examined in relation to that are various forms of code-switching. There is an
immense research gap related to Polish-English code-switching appearing on this SNS. To obtain a full picture of the issue, the paper identifies and discusses types, strategies, and functions of Polish-English code-switches found in posts and comments published by Poles on Facebook in 2014–2019. It also indicates possible applications of FB tools and materials including CS in foreign language teaching and learning and shows how Facebook enables “social learning” (Mallia, 2013). The research is based on a corpus constructed by the author of this article. An integrated approach with both qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis is used in the paper. Three main CS types (intrasentential, intersentential, and tag-switching) and strategies (alternation, insertion, and congruent lexicalisation) have been attested in the material. The code-switches mostly indicate in-group membership but also, for example, introduce humor, quotes, and signal a lack of L1 equivalents. The study points out that there are certain relations between the types, strategies and functions. The results
of the research are collated with the recent studies on Polish-English and Indonesian-English CS on Facebook.
Keywords
code-switching; social media; Facebook; the Polish language; the English language
References
Aranoff, M., & Rees-Miller, J. (2003). The Handbook of Linguistics. Blackwell Publishers: Oxford.
Backus, Ad. (2001). The role of semantic specificity in insertional codeswitching: Evidence from Dutch-Turkish. In Jacobson, R. (Ed.), Codeswitching Worldwide II (pp.125–154). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Blom, J., & Gumperz, J. (2001 [2000]). Social Meaning in Linguistic Structure. Code-Switching in Norway. In Wei, L. (Ed.), The Bilingualism Reader (pp.111–126). London: Routledge.
Błasiak, M. (2011). Dwujęzyczność i Ponglish: zjawiska językowo-kulturowe polskiej emigracji w Wielkiej Brytanii. Kraków: Collegium Columbinum.
Boztepe, E. (2003). Issues in code-switching: Competing theories and models. Working Papers in TESOL & Applied Linguistics, 3(2), 1–27.
Bullock, B. E., & Toribio, A. J. (2009). Themes in the study of code-switching. In Bullock, B. E., & Toribio, A. J. (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Code-switching (pp. 1-17). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chalker, S., & Weiner, E. (1994). The Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Crystal, D. (2008). A dictionary of linguistics and phonetics (6th ed.). Malden: Blackwell.
Diki. Multimedialny słownik angielskiego online. Retrieved September 1, 2019 from http://www.diki.pl/.
Esen, S. (2014). Code Switching: Definition, Types, and Examples. Retrieved September 2, 2019, from https://owlcation.com/humanities/Code-Switching-Definition-Types-and-Examples-of-Code-Switching.
Gabryś-Barker, D. (2007). Zjawisko wtrąceń z języka drugiego u osoby dwujęzycznej: charakterystyka i funkcje. In Chłopicki, W. (Ed.), Komunikacja międzykulturowa; perspektywy badań interdyscyplinarnych, (pp. 293–305). Kraków: Wydawnictwo Tertium.
Gardner- Chloros, P. (1987). Code-switching in relation to language contact and convergence. In Lüdi, G. (Ed.), Devenir bilingue-parler bilingue; actes du 2ème colloque sur le bilinguisme, (pp. 99–115). Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Gardner-Chloros, P. (1995). Code-switching in community, regional and national repertoires: the myth of the discreteness of linguistic systems. In Milroy, L., & Muysken, P. (Eds.), One speaker, two languages (pp. 68–90). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gardner-Chloros, P. (2011 [2009]). Code-switching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gonzalez, J. (Ed.). (2008). Encyclopedia of bilingual education. California: SAGE Publications, Inc.
Halmari, H. (1997). Government and codeswitching: Explaining American Finnish. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Hamada, M. (2012). A Facebook Project for Japanese University Students: Does It Really Enhance Student Interaction, Learner Autonomy, and English Abilities? In Bradley, L., & Thouësny, S. (Eds.), EUROCALL Conference Proceedings: Using, Learning, Knowing (pp. 104–110). Dublin-Voillans: Research-publishing.net.
Grosjean, F. 2008. Studying Bilinguals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Haspelmath, M. (2008). Loanword typology: Steps toward a systematic cross-linguistic study of lexical borrowability. In Stolz, T., Bakker, D., & Salas Palomo, R. (Eds.), Aspects of language contact: New theoretical, methodological and empirical findings with special focus on Romancisation processes (pp. 43–62). Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Haugen, E. (1956). Bilingualism in the Americas: A Bibliography and Research Guide. Alabama: University of Alabama Press.
Hoffman, Ch. (1991). An introduction to bilingualism. New York: Longman.
Jedamska, K. (2015). Portale społecznościowe – nowe narzędzie komunikacji politycznej. Retrieved September 1, 2019 from http://apcz.umk.pl/czasopisma/index.php/TEST_UMK/article/view/5866.
Le Page, R. B., & Tabouret-Keller, A. (1985). Acts of identity: Creole-based approaches to ethnicity and language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
MacSwan, J. (1997). A Minimalist Approach to Intrasentential Code Switching: Spanish-Nahuatl Bilingualism in Central Mexico (Doctoral dissertation). Los Angeles: University of California. Retrieved September 1, 2019, from http://www.public.asu.edu/~macswan /diss.html.
Manfredi, S., Simeone-Senelle, M. C., & Tosco, M. (2015). Language contact, borrowing and codeswitching. In Mettouchi, A., Vanhove, M., & Caubet, D. (Eds.), Corpus-based Studies of lesser-described Languages: the CorpAfroAs Corpus of spoken AfroAsiatic languages. Studies in Corpus Linguistics 67 (pp. 283–308). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Muysken, P. (1997). Code-switching processes: Alternation, insertion, congruent lexicalization. In Pütz, M. (Ed.), Language choices: Conditions, constraints, and consequences (pp. 361–380). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Muysken, P. (2000). Bilingual Speech: A Typology of Code-Mixing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Myers-Scotton, C. 1993. Social motivations for codeswitching. Evidence from Africa. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Pahta, P. (2004). Code-switching in Medieval English Medical Writing. In Taavitsainen, I., & Pahta, P. (Eds.), Medical and Scientific Writing in Late Medieval English (pp. 73–99). Cambridge: Cambridge Univeristy Press.
Panocová, R. (2015). Categories of Word formation and Borrowing. An Onomasiological Account of Neoclassical Formations. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Author, D. (2019). Hejting, trolling i unboxing – o współczesnym wpływie języka angielskiego na język polski używany na Facebooku. In Welskop, W., & Tanaś, V. (Eds.), Mass media we współczesnym świecie (pp.113–123). Łódź: Wydawnictwo Naukowe WSBiNoZ.
Pfaff, C. W. (1979). Constraints on Language Mixing: Intrasentential Code-Switching and Borrowing in Spanish/English. Language, 55(2), 291–318.
Poplack, S. (1980). Sometimes I'll start a sentence in Spanish y termino en espa ol: toward a typology of code-switching. Linguistics, 18(7/8), 581-618.
Poplack, S. (1981). Syntactic Structure and Social Function of Codeswitching. In Duran, R. P. (Ed.), Latino Language and Communicative Behaviour (pp. 169–184). New Jersey: Ablex Publishing Corporation.
Poplack, S. (2004). Code-switching. In Ammon, U., Dittmar, N., Mattheier, K.J. & Trudgill, P. (Eds.), Sociolinguistics/Soziolinguistik: An international handbook of the science of language (pp. 589–596). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Romaine, S. (1995). Bilingualism. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Schmidt, A. (2014). Between The Languages: Code-Switching in bilingual communication. Hamburg: Anchor Academic Publishing.
Skowron-Nalborczyk, A. (2003). Zachowania językowe imigrantów arabskich w Austrii. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Akademickie Dialog.
Walid, R. M. (n.d.). Why do People Code Switch: A Sociolinguistics Approach. Arab Open University. Retrieved August 22, 2019, from http://www.academia.edu/2649532/Why_do_People_Code-switch_A_Sociolinguistic_Approach.
Wielki slownik języka polskiego. Retrieved September 1, 2019 from https://www.wsjp.pl.
Zabawa, M. (2012). English lexical and semantic loans in informal spoken Polish. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
The Copyright Holders of the submitted texts are the Authors. The Reader is granted the rights to use the material available in the TAPSLA websites and pdf documents under the provisions of the Creative Commons 4.0 International License: Attribution - Share Alike (CC BY-SA 4.0). The user is free to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.
1. License
The University of Silesia Press provides immediate open access to journal’s content under the Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). Authors who publish with this journal retain all copyrights and agree to the terms of the above-mentioned CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
2. Author’s Warranties
The author warrants that the article is original, written by stated author/s, has not been published before, contains no unlawful statements, does not infringe the rights of others, is subject to copyright that is vested exclusively in the author and free of any third party rights, and that any necessary written permissions to quote from other sources have been obtained by the author/s.
If the article contains illustrative material (drawings, photos, graphs, maps), the author declares that the said works are of his authorship, they do not infringe the rights of the third party (including personal rights, i.a. the authorization to reproduce physical likeness) and the author holds exclusive proprietary copyrights. The author publishes the above works as part of the article under the licence "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International".
ATTENTION! When the legal situation of the illustrative material has not been determined and the necessary consent has not been granted by the proprietary copyrights holders, the submitted material will not be accepted for editorial process. At the same time the author takes full responsibility for providing false data (this also regards covering the costs incurred by the University of Silesia Press and financial claims of the third party).
3. User Rights
Under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license, the users are free to share (copy, distribute and transmit the contribution) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material) the article for any purpose, provided they attribute the contribution in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
4. Co-Authorship
If the article was prepared jointly with other authors, the signatory of this form warrants that he/she has been authorized by all co-authors to sign this agreement on their behalf, and agrees to inform his/her co-authors of the terms of this agreement.
I hereby declare that in the event of withdrawal of the text from the publishing process or submitting it to another publisher without agreement from the editorial office, I agree to cover all costs incurred by the University of Silesia in connection with my application.
