Search

This paper examines the increasing role of English in the modern day mass media of Thailand, and the rapid increase in the use of English names and code-mixing since the turn of the century. It provides a description of the present day phenomena of English naming and code-mixing in both the broadcast and print media of Thailand. The paper also provides an assessment of the impact of English, which explains the adoption of English names or English-Thai hybrids, and the assimilation of Western cultural dimensions by the indigenous population of Thailand, who use English as a foreign language. The intended audience of the mass media in this study are Thais. The data supports knowledge about the widespread use of English among users in the Expanding Circle, and about world Englishes as mixed codes that are used among people who share a common language, other than English, for their intranational communication.

While it has been shown that bilingual code-mixing (CM) is not random and that there exist rules that determine what code-mixes are or are not allowed in bilingual speech, it has not been established yet whether the rules in question ‘come’ predominantly from one language, the matrix language, or whether they are evenly contributed by each of the languages participating in CM. More specifically, the issue has been whether there exists a matrix language to a code-mixed sentence, that is, a language whose morphosyntactic rules govern the syntactic structure of CM, or whether it is the case that no feasible linguistic analysis can reliably assign a matrix language to a code-mixed sentence and that, therefore, CM is acceptable only where it does not violate the syntactic integrity of either of the languages involved. This paper attempts to address this issue in light of data drawn from natural conversations involving Chinese–English bilinguals in Singapore. Based on this data it is argued that there exists a matrix language to a code-mixed sentence; that bilingual speakers can intuitively identify the matrix language; and that it is this language that licenses the ‘mixability’ of linguistic elements of the other language, the embedded language. This argument receives support from the language assignment test that we conducted asking Chinese–English bilinguals to determine the matrix language in a set of Chinese–English code-mixed sentences. This paper reports on the results of this test. It also discusses the implications of these results for the syntactic structure of CM in general, and for studies of constraints on CM in particular.

Few studies have focused on borrowing and code-mixing across generations of United States Spanish speakers. This study focuses on code-mixing and borrowing across two generations of New York Puerto Ricans. A principle aim of this study is to explore the possibility of the existence of a ‘life cycle of language use’ in the community, as suggested by the Language Policy Task Force (1980). This concept is explored with reference to the use of Spanish, English, borrowing and code-mixing by two generations of adult Puerto Ricans in New York City.

Current studies of code-mixing (CM) have been limited to analyzing CM only in individual bilingual communities. This paper focuses on the neglected dimension of CM: the treatment of CM as a cross-cultural phenomenon. Three points are presented which show that CM has characteristic features one can witness in every bilingual community. First it is shown that from a sociofunctional perspective, the bilingual may use CM for expressing modernization. The concept of modernization is viewed here with respect to how a bilingual code-mixer perceives himself/herself, how he/she would like to be perceived, how he/she is actually perceived, and why he/she often resorts to CM when interacting with other bilinguals with whom he/she shares the same linguistic repertoire of codes. The second section contrasts such sociofunctional use of and attitudes toward CM. It is found that although people's attitudes toward CM have until recently generally been negative, CM has imposed itself as the norm of language use in most bilingual communities. The last section discusses briefly the impact of CM on language structure, with special reference to the vernaculars. A survey of the literature on CM in various bilingual communities reveals that the use of CM, whether for expressing modernization or any other function, is generally accompanied by changes and innovations in the structure of the languages involved. Some such innovations and changes are presented with particular reference to vernacular-English CM across cultures.

This study provides a critical review of the syntactic study of code-mixing with particular reference to the syntactic constraints paradigm. It examines seven major surface constraints deemed to have universal applicability and shows on the basis of cross-linguistic data that none of them is universal. It is argued in the light of this finding that the postulation of universal syntactic constraints on code-mixing may be premature and that the constraint-oriented theory to the study of this phenomenon is descriptively inadequate because it fails to explicate its socio-psycholinguistics. The study maintains that factors such as degree of multilinguality, who speaks what variety of language to whom, when, and for what reason are crucial parameters in the formulation of an adequate theory of code-switching and code-mixing. To achieve this objective, it is suggested that researchers integrate in their analysis three different but interrelated types of data: structural, psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic.

A study was conducted among Chinese–English bilingual teachers from the People's Republic of China (PRC) to find the sociolinguistic and social psychological factors affecting their choice of codes when interacting among themselves, and the functional and linguistic features of their code-mixing behaviour. Findings indicated that participants and their role relationship, topic, setting, the speaker's social psychological motivation, and his/her perception of his/her social reality all affected the bilinguals' choice of codes, and that socio-cultural norms exerted an overall influence as well. Three functions of code-mixing by the subjects were identified as: (1) to achieve ease of expression, (2) to achieve articulateness and simplicity, and (3) to produce rhetorical effect. Linguistically, transfer occurred at the lexical, phrasal, clausal and sentential level, but not at the morphemic level. The code-mixed texts were all marked by textual cohesion and functional appropriateness.

While the formal characteristics of codes switching and mixing, such as free morpheme constraints and equivalence constraints, have been well documented accross aa varity of languages, relatively little is known about how codw switching and mixing are used as communicative strategies in a multilingual community. This paper is an attempt to fill this gap. It examines various spoken texts which involve code switching and mixing between some of the main languages spoken in Singapore, such as English, Mandarin, Hokkien and Toechew. The analysis demonstrates how code switching and mixing are used as a communicative strategy, as a device for elucidation and interpretation, to establish solidarity and rapport in multilingual discourse. Despite differences in the formal characteristics of the languages concerned, common communicative strategies have evolved as a results of languages in contact. This paper also discusses the linguistic, psychological and sociolinguistic implications of studies on code mixing and switching. It argues that such studies help us to better understand the functions and forms of language used in a dynamic, multilingual community. This paper concludes with a plea to look at languages in multilingual communities as independent systems instead of as merely deviant or different forms of native English.

In studies on code-mixing considerable attention has been paid to certain genres of writing in prose. However, there is a paucity of studies on how code-mixing and the resulting code variation may be exploited in various types of poetic creativity. This paper examines the Hindi poetry of the last three decades to determine the effects—aesthetic and other—of such language and dialect mixing in which English is one partner. This programmatic study focusses on the following: style repertoire in the context of Hindi literature; functions of code-mixed varieties in Hindi literary works in general; analysis of illustrative texts with mixing from English in poetic works by Madan Vatsyayan, Muktibodh, and others; and finally, the implications for sociolinguistics of such investigations from linguistic and stylistic perspectives.