Code Switching in the Lexical Corpora of Children

Abstract

Code switching is the hallmark of communication in a multilingual society. Code switching occurs in everyday speech at words, morphemes sentence and discourse levels. There are varied perspectives on the phenomenon of code switching where linguists have viewed code switching as inevitable in a plurilingual situation. Few believe that code switching helps to express meanings more precisely, others believe that code switching vitiates a language, rather than enhance the communication between individuals. In the Indian context extensive research on code switching in children has been undertaken which focus on how children use languages in the home setting with adults/parents or their siblings and suggest that bilingual children switch between language/s according to the cognitive demands of the tasks and the contextual demands such as participants and topics. The present study is designed to address code switching in children’s speech corpora. In the present study, the speech corpora elicited from six to eight-year-old children who are native speakers of Kannada language living in Mysore city but exposed to other languages by virtue of the multilingual environment both in their neighbourhood as well as in school, showed instances of code switching in their speech sample. The children switched languages while describing certain aspects of language like categories of nouns referring to vegetables, furniture, verb categories, and identification of colours. In the present study, the base language is Kannada, a language that shows highest number of morphemes in an utterance (Scotton, 1993). The study gives evidence for children’s ability from very early age to use linguistic codes from different languages as an equivalent of native language code depending on the context.