Code Switching and Social Prestige: Code Switching among Iranian University Learners

Abstract

"Two or more phonemic systems may coexist in the speech of a monolingual." This was what initiallycalled "switching code" by Fries and Pike (1949). People change codes or use words other than theirnative ones while speaking in their native language. Codes are thus defined as a verbal componentthat can be as small as a morpheme or as comprehensive and complex as the entire system oflanguage. (Ayemoni, 2006) code-switching is related to and indicative of group membership inparticular types of bilingual speech communities, such that the regularities of the alternating use of twoor more languages within one conversation may vary to a considerable degree between speechcommunities. (Auer, 1991) As basically defined, the result of bilingualism, code switching has beenstudied widely by psychologists, anthropologists and linguists in order to reveal other possible causesof the phenomenon. Different issues have been discovered and called the results of code switching byprofessionals in each field (See Nelip, 2006 for a review).