CESAR: A new metric to measure the level of code-switching in corpora -Application to Maghrebian dialects

International audienceIn this paper, we are interested in a sociolinguistic phenomenon that occurs in daily conversations of Maghrebi people, commonly known as code-switching or also code-mixing. This problem consists of alternating languages during communication or writing. In this work, we measure the importance of this phenomenon in the Maghrebi languages. To this end, we harvested from YouTube, comments written in Algerian, Moroccan and Tunisian dialects. Each of which contains at least 17 million words. Although there are several metrics in the literature to measure the code-switching, to the best of our knowledge, there isn't yet a measure that takes into account the degree of mixture according to a reference language. In contrast to the existing measures, we propose a new metric named CESAR (CodE-Switching According to a Reference language) that estimates the degree of the language mixtures, in accordance with a reference language. Experiments are carried out on the three collected corpora by considering the local dialects as reference languages. Experimental results show that CESAR is well adapted to this purpose and allows to compare the three Maghrebi dialects according to their level of code-switching.. .

Codeswitching auf einem hochdiversen urbanen Wochenmarkt: Kommerz, Kommunikation und Identität

Today's European cities exhibit a great cultural and linguistic diversity. Highly diverse urban areas bring together people from different sociolinguistic backgrounds and thus facilitate intense language contact, with speakers accessing diverse linguistic resources that they creatively use and mix (cf. e. g. Wiese 2020; Otsuji/Pennycook 2010; Pennycook/Otsuji 2015). Such linguistic practices include code-switching. In previous research on code-switching the focus was on relatively homogeneous settings, mostly bilingual communities (cf. Poplack 2015; Torres Cacoullos/Travis 2015; Bullock/ Toribio 2009). As a part of a larger project, we collected spontaneous speech data through audio and video recordings from a highly diverse street market in Berlin-Neukölln that is popular among locals and tourists, the “Maybachufer-Markt”. The analysis of our data reveals new insights with respect to sociolinguistic motivations underlying code-switching. In light of commercial intentions, vendors try to switch to a language according to how they construct the customers’ identity (cf. Bucholtz/Hall 2005; Pfaff-Czarnecka 2011). Besides vendors also commodify specific languages or multilingualism (Heller 2010) based on their and others’ language attitudes or they switch to a language for the purpose of maintaining the communication in sales conversations. Correlating these different factors, we will argue that code-switching is used with a commercial motivation in interactions between vendors and customers