Code switching

[John Burton]

>Strikes me that  part of the problem is trying to decide when one is
dealing with a foreign "loan" into
>TP and when the speaker has been code-switching -- dipping into his/her
>"other language store" to grab a term felt to be appropriate and/or
intelligible to the audience.

Consider these:

Em i photocopy bilong mama bilong en  - 'she is the spitting image of her
mother'
Mipela mas wokim wanpela drama na soim yu - 'we'll have to put on a dramatic
sketch to demonstrate it to you'
Projekt bai kikof long wanpela taim? - 'when will this project start?'

As opposed to these:

Em wanpela korupt man - 'he's bloody corrupt!'
Ol i wok long delay yet - 'they're delaying things'
Ol mas givim rispekt long mi - 'they should respect me'

All use post-Mihalic (I better check!) English derived words, but in the
case of the former these are essentially stable forms that are not cases of
code switching because they were used by non-English speakers. You don't
have to speak English to know what a photocopier is. (Perhaps I should have
spelled that fotokopi by the way.) 'Drama' is very well established now.

'Kikof' is different. It's a cousin of words like of 'sotkat'. You don't
have to know English to immediately understand them. The TP speaker can
immediately follow the idiom. He or she already has plenty of words like it:
'piss off' (very similar to the English one in its emphasis on 'move away
from me as rapidly as possible'), 'kikbek' (not kickback, but
repercussion!), and so on.

The second group are, by contrast, much less likely to be uttered by the
non-English speaker. 'Korupt' is gaining a fair degree of prominence at the
moment so I may have to revise this. 'Delay' - most people around Wau do use
this, but it's not a guessable word from its formation. 'Rispekt' - if you
need to use this word, you probably don't deserve it.

So I say the second group are code switches!

John Burton