Volume: 10  Number: 3  Page: 298–340  doi:10.2167/beb445.0

Structured Variation in Codeswitching: Towards an Empirically Based Typology of Bilingual Speech Patterns

Margaret Deuchar1, Pieter Muysken2 and Sung-Lan Wang3 1ESRC Centre for Research on Bilingualism in Theory and Practice, University of Wales, Bangor, UK, 2Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands and 3School of Linguistics and English Language, University of Wales, Bangor, UK

This paper aims to accomplish two things: first, to develop precise criteria to establish profiles for bilingual speech, following the typology of insertion, alternation and congruent lexicalisation developed in Muysken (2000); and second, to test these criteria on specific data sets. A first set involves Welsh–English bilingual data analysed by Deuchar, a second set comprises Tsou–Mandarin Chinese data collected and analysed by Sung-Lan Wang, and a third set involves Taiwanese–Mandarin Chinese data, also collected and analysed by Sung-Lan Wang. We conclude that it is indeed possible to establish more precise quantitative profiles which capture the intuition that different data sets show different codeswitching properties, but that there are a number of conceptual and methodological issues that require further investigation.

Keywords: bilingual speech, codeswitching, Chinese, Mandarin, Taiwanese, Tsou, Welsh

© 2007 M. Deuchar et al.

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