I’m Going To Lis The Cows: Development Of Code Switching In The Speech Of Sesotho- English Bilingual Preschool Children

Abstract

Code Switching as a topic in linguistics has been dealt with so extensively that it no longer needs to be defined. For some people it means a “dialectal mixture” (see, for example, Labov, 1972:188). For others it means “…some sort of relationship – negative or positive – between languages” (Khati, 1992:181) or even “…switching languages or linguistic varieties within the same conversation” (Slabbert and Finlayson, 1999). The present study uses a naturalistic approach to examine development of lexical, morphological and syntactical mixing of English L2 and Sesotho L1 in the same utterance between ages 3;0 and 6;0. In this way it differs from some current local studies whose focus is on the sociological (Khati, 1992; Slabbert and Finlayson, 1999; Kamwangamalu, 1999; Matee, 2000) and educational (Keiswetter, 1995; Akindele and Letsoela, 2001, du Plessis and Louw, 2008) functions of code switching. It shows a bell-shaped rate of code switching development from the beginning of exposure to the second language, where there is very little switching to L2, through the “grey area” period, where children switch easily from one language to another, to the period where they largely separate the two linguistic codes. It further shows a productive switching of morphemes, lexical items, phrases and sentences from one language to the other.