Latvian-English Code-Switching on Social Media

Abstract

People draw on the languages in their linguistic repertoire, depending on the speech participants’ needs and the conversational setting. The English language has gained salience replacing the Russian language as the foreign language most often studied at schools after Latvia regained independence in 1990. Since then, it has been used widely as a lingua franca in various fields, for instance, international diplomacy, science, and education. This has been a fruitful environment for code-switching, as it is claimed that many young people alternate effortlessly between the Latvian language and the English language, which they often use as a means of communication, especially on social media. In order to ascertain the linguistic manifestation of code-switching, a study was conducted by using a qualitative descriptive research design. Extra-sentential, inter-sentential, and intra-sentential code-switching was explored on social media. Extra-sentential switching or inserting tag elements from English into Latvian, inter-sentential switching characterized by a switch from Latvian to English outside the sentence or the clause level, and intra-sentential switching or switching from Latvian to English at the clause, phrase, or word level were observed. It was found out that the most frequent linguistic manifestation of code-switching was the insertion of single words. It may be assumed that code switching between the Latvian language and the English language may point at the social status of English among young people in Latvia.