Is Codeswitching only a matter of convergence?

Studienarbeit aus dem Jahr 2012 im Fachbereich Didaktik für das Fach Englisch - Pädagogik Sprachwissenschaft Note: 13 Universität zu Köln Sprache: Deutsch Abstract: Code- switching (CS) is a worldwide phenomenon and has been the norm in many differentcommunities but it was unnoticed and neglected by researchers for years. However due tosocial changes such as globalization and immigration CS has surfaced in new places andthereby attracted attention. Nevertheless those linguistics who researched into theoccurrences of CS mostly commented on it negatively and categorized it as a form ofinterference and broken language. The perception of CS changed when Blom and Gumperz in1972 focused on CS between dialects in a Norwegian fishing village and pointed at its socialdimension and function. As a result further studies of CS in various parts of the world wereintroduced and up until today it is a major research topic. Especially the motivations for CSremain an interesting focus for those studies. Moreover globalization and with this theformation of multi-ethnical societies with a variety of different languages in a country is anon-going process and hence a late- breaking topic. Different sociolinguistic theories to explainthis phenomenon have been developed. Two well-known approaches are Giles's SpeechAccommodation Theory nowadays revised as Communication Accommodation Theory(CAT) and Myers- Scotton's Markedness Model (MM). The first has its basis in psychologyas it explains CS as a form of accommodation to converge to the addressee in order to becomemore alike and therefore narrow social distance. In contrast the socio-psychological MM alsotakes macro-level perspectives into consideration and provides a generalization about howmotivations for CS are interpreted. In this paper I will focus on CS in multilingual societiesand examine whether this process is only a matter of convergence as CAT claims. Further Iwill match this theory with the