Patterns of English-Finnish codeswitching in Finland and in the United States

This paper investigates the intrasentential codeswitching patterns of two sets of English-Finnish bilingual teenagers in a corpus of 208 bilingual sentences. Two of the subjects live in Finland and two in the United States; therefore, the macro-sociolinguistic situations for them are reverse. For those living in the United States, the minority language is Finnish. Despite the fact that the subjects belong to two different, geographically far apart speech communities,_their codeswitching patterns appear to be surprisingly similar. The investigation into the explanation of the similarities of their codeswitching patterns underscores the role of the two unifying forces: on one hand, formal syntax and universal grammar seem to provide the general guidelines for switching; on the other hand, the similarities are explained by the need in every speaker to look for the best and the most accurate expressions to convey the meanings attempted during the flow of spontaneous conversation. (Author/VWL) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the origMal document.

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