THE INFLUENCE OF THE LISTENER ON CODE‐SWITCHING

Abstract

This research investigates the influence of the listener on the dialectal code‐switching behavior of a group of bilingual teachers in Thailand. The variable of the listener's ethnic identity is manipulated, whereas previous research has been focussed primarily on the speaker's ethnic identity. The primary finding of the study is that the Chinese‐Thai bilinguals selected the “Thai” vruriant for each of the nine phonological variables a higher percentage of the time when they were speaking Thai to a Thai listener than when they were speaking Thai to a Chinese listener. And conversely, they chose a “Chinese” variant more frequently when speaking to a Chinese‐Thai than to an ethnic Thai. The significance of these findings is that linguists must discontinue the still accepted practice of defining speech style in terms of the listener if they want to obtain reliable data. The data also point to the need for educators in bilingual and second language programs to continue researching the factors which affect dialectal codeswitching and other verbal encoding strategies used by language teachers and their students.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 43 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.