Code Switching and Social Prestige: Code Switching among Iranian University Learners

Abstract

“Two or more phonemic systems may coexist in the speech of a monolingual.” This was what initially called “switching code” by Fries and Pike (1949). People change codes or use words other than their native ones while speaking in their native language. Codes are thus defined as a verbal component that can be as small as a morpheme or as comprehensive and complex as the entire system of language. (Ayemoni, 2006) code-switching is related to and indicative of group membership in particular types of bilingual speech communities, such that the regularities of the alternating use of two or more languages within one conversation may vary to a considerable degree between speech communities. (Auer, 1991) As basically defined, the result of bilingualism, code switching has been studied widely by psychologists, anthropologists and linguists in order to reveal other possible causes of the phenomenon. Different issues have been discovered and called the results of code switching by professionals in each field (See Nelip, 2006 for a review)

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