Advances in the Study of Bilingualism

lexicalization-type switches in Southwestern speakers of mixed racial origin
reflects the norms of language separation versus lack of separation which
prevails in these two communities.
The next section reports on the data collected for our study comparing
CS patterns among Welsh-English and Spanish-English bilinguals in Wales
and in Miami.

Methodology

Participants

Participants were recruited using a variety of advertising methods, such as
recruitment letters and the ‘friend of a friend’ approach (see Milroy, 1987 and
Chapter 5, for more details of our methodology). A total of 151 Welsh-English
and 85 Spanish-English participants were recorded for the two corpora. Out of
those participants, the recordings from a sub-group of six Welsh-English and
six Spanish-English speakers were chosen for the multivariate analysis. Of the
six Welsh-English participants from three recordings which were selected at
random from the larger corpus, four were female and two were male. See
Chapter 6.5 for details of the language background questionnaire. As shown
in Table 6.2, two of the females and two of the males were between the ages
of 19 and 29, and the remaining two females were between the ages of 29–39
and 49–59. All of the participants had received Welsh-medium schooling, and
all either used Welsh or both English and Welsh at home while growing up.
The six participants were born and raised in Wales and therefore had also been
exposed to English at an early age. The females reported that they had acquired
both languages at the age of two or earlier while the two males reported that
they had learned Welsh by age two and English by age four. All of the speakers
had completed at least secondary school education.

Factors Influencing Code-Switching 121

Table 6.1 Muysken’s view of the relation between code-mixing patterns and extra-
linguistic factors (reproduced from Deuchar et al., 2007: 309)

Code-mixing

pattern

Linguistic factors

favouring this pattern

Extra-linguistic factors favouring this

pattern

Insertion Typological distance Colonial settings; recent migrant

communities; asymmetry in speaker’s

profi ciency in two languages

Alternation Typological distance Stable bilingual communities; tradition

of language separation

Congruent

lexicalisation

Typologically similar

languages

Two languages have roughly equal

prestige; no tradition of overt

language separation