ASPECTS OF DIGLOSSIC CODE SWITCHING SITUATIONS: A SOCIOLINGUISTIC INTERPRETATION

Code switching, a type of discourse that occurs as a natural outcome of language contact, has attracted linguists‟ attention and been studied from a variety of perspectives. Scholars do not seem to share a single definition of the concept, and this is perhaps inevitable, given the different concerns of formal linguists, psycholinguists, sociolinguists, anthropo-linguists and so forth. Whatever the definitions are, it is obvious that anyone who speaks more than one code switches back and forth between these codes or mixes them according to certain circumstances. CS can occur in a monolingual community, or in a plurilingual speech collectivity. In a monolingual context, Code switching relates to a diglossic situation where speakers make use of two varieties for well-defined set of functions: a H variety, generally the standard, for formal contexts, and a L variety typically for everyday informal communicative acts. In addition to alternation between H and L varieties, speakers may also switch between the dialects available to them in that community via a process of CS. In such a case, i.e. monolingual context, CS is classified as being ‘internal’, as the switch occurs between different varieties of the same language. In a multilingual community, the switch is between two or more linguistic systems. This is referred to as „external‟ code switching. Hence, the present research work includes a classification of the phenomenon in terms of „internal‟ code switching which is of a diglossic nation as well as „external‟ one with denotes a kind of extended diglossic contexts.