Irish-english code-switching: A sociolinguistic perspective

Abstract

Irish is a minority language in a contact situation with a major world language, and language contact phenomena have been a feature of Irish for hundreds of years. Code-switching (CS) is the most visible and marked of language contact features and it forms part of the active linguistic repertoire of most speakers of Irish. It has been under-represented in Irish language corpora and in linguistic and dialectological description and analysis of Irish. Irish-English CS follows international trends in being perceived as aberrant and thereby generally stigmatised by the speech community.1.