![]() Some scholars of literature use the term to describe literary styles that include elements from more than one language, as in novels by Chinese-American, Anglo-Indian, or Latino writers. The term "code-switching" is also used outside the field of linguistics. Since the 1980s, however, most scholars have come to regard it as a normal, natural product of bilingual and multilingual language use. In the 1940s and the 1950s, many scholars considered code-switching to be a substandard use of language. The earliest known use of the term code-switching in print was by Lucy Shepard Freeland in her 1951 book, Language of the Sierra Miwok, referring to the indigenous people of California. Several theories have been developed to explain the reasoning behind code-switching from sociological and linguistic perspectives. There are many ways in which code-switching is employed, such as when a speaker is unable to express themselves adequately in a single language or to signal an attitude towards something. Code-switching can happen in the context of speaking a different language or switching the verbiage to match that of the audience. Likewise, code-switching can occur when there is a change in the environment one is speaking. However, some linguists consider the borrowing of words or morphemes from another language to be different from other types of code-switching. Code-switching may happen between sentences, sentence fragments, words, or individual morphemes (in synthetic languages). ![]() Thus, code-switching is the use of more than one linguistic variety in a manner consistent with the syntax and phonology of each variety. Multilinguals (speakers of more than one language) sometimes use elements of multiple languages when conversing with each other. ![]() Code-switching is different from plurilingualism in that plurilingualism refers to the ability of an individual to use multiple languages, while code-switching is the act of using multiple languages together. The inclusion of African metalinguistics and indigenuous knowledge consequently is an important task of linguists studying communicative repertoires in Africa or its diaspora.In linguistics, code-switching or language alternation occurs when a speaker alternates between two or more languages, or language varieties, in the context of a single conversation or situation. The fact that linguistic reflexivity to African speakers might almost always involve the negotiation of the self in a (post)colonial world invites us to consider a critical evaluation, based on approaches such as Southern Theory, of established concepts of “language” and “multilingualism”: languaging is also a postcolonial experience, and this experience often translates into how speakers single out specific ways of speaking as “more prestigious” or “more developed” than others. Individual speakers thereby perceive and evaluate ways of speaking according to the social meaning, emotional investment, and identity-constituting functions they can attribute to them. A more productive perspective on the phenomenon of complex communicative repertoires puts the concept of languaging in the center, which refers to communicative practices, dynamically operating between different practices and (multimodal) linguistic features. Therefore, communicative repertoires are never stable, neither in their composition nor in the ways they are ideologically framed and evaluated. Which linguistic features a person uses thereby depends on factors such as socialization, placement, and personal interest, desires and preferences, which are all likely to change several times during a person’s life. These speakers differ from the ideological concept of the “Western monolingual,” as they employ diverse practices and linguistic features on a daily basis and do so in a very flexible way. This applies to the majority of people living on the planet and to most people who speak African languages. Such a perspective on language isn’t helpful in understanding any sociolinguistic setting and linguistic practice that is not a European one and that doesn’t correlate with ideologies and practices of a standardized, national language. The term “multilingualism” bears in itself the notion of several clearly discernable languages and suggests that regardless of the sociolinguistic setting, language ideologies, social history and context, a multilingual individual will be able to separate the various codes that constitute his or her communicative repertoire and use them deliberately in a reflected way. Even though the concept of multilingualism is well established in linguistics, it is problematic, especially in light of the actual ways in which repertoires are composed and used.
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