CODE-SWITCHING IN THE INTERNATIONAL SCHOOLS OF PRISHTINA: A STUDY OF ALBANIAN/ENGLISH BILINGUALISM

Abstract

This paper examines the speech of Albanian students who are highly exposed to English. They are educated in international schools at the primary and secondary level, with English as their medium of instruction. However, they reside in an otherwise monolingual society with the majority of the population speaking Albanian. Among other bilingual phenomena, code-switching is examined in terms of whether and how much it occurs in their naturalistic speech. The initial hypothesis expressed at the outset was that code-switching is a prevalent linguistic behavior among Albanian bilingual students observed in informal environments within international schools. Furthermore, while Albanian remains their primary language, English insertions within an Albanian syntactic frame are common. The data gathered from the students through participant systematic observation reveal that the Albanian language is influenced by English. Students are noticed to switch back and forth between English and Albanian. But this varies among different age groups under investigation as proven by quantitative analysis. Furthermore, in terms of structure, Albanian set the morpho-syntactic frame of the mixed clause, while English is the embedded language inserted within an Albanian clause.