Conversational Code-Switching Among Thai Teenage Multilingual Gamers: A Sequential Analysis

Abstract

Using the pragmatic approach to code-switching studies, this paper presents a case study of how a group of Thai multilingual teenagers employ code-switching to organise their discourse while gaming. Auer’s method of sequential analysis was used to reveal the ways participants used code-switching to negotiate the language for interaction and to organise conversational tasks. Participants were found to have used both participant-related and discourse-related code-switching in their interactions with one another. Analysis of these instances of code-switching suggests that code-switching is used as an additional resource by multilingual teenagers to achieve particular conversation goals in interaction, and that multilingualism is a linguistic and interactive resource that is unique to those that are able to communicate in more than one language.