The functions of Code-switching in a Korean Sunday School

Abstract

In a bilingual community, people often switch from one language to another in their daily conversations and the use of code-switching often reflects the social or cultural identities of the speakers. The switch to a particular language in the bilingual discourse can also be employed as an effective vehicle to signal ethnic identity. This paper seeks to explore the functions of code-switching in a Korean Sunday school through an analysis of codeswitching data. I identify situation-related code-switching by examining participants’ talk and the particular situations which prompt the use of Korean. I also demonstrate how Korean is used in particular conversational acts, for example in directives, to invoke figures of authority and how Korean may also be used to avoid saying things which might be found offensive. In this vein, I argue that the use of Korean in bilingual discourse may index Korean ethnic identity by evoking the traditional social ideology of relative status and increasing solidarity.

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 — 55 citations exist upstream.

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