Linguistic change and social meaning: Codeswitching in the media

I’d like to thank the editors of this special volume, in particular Ad Backus, for their many helpful comments. I’d also like to thank Lewis Gebhardt for his useful comments and suggestions. This article investigates the relationship between code choice, bilingual identity and language change. Code choice and codeswitches in a bilingual Spanish-English publication are examined with two questions in mind. The first asks the extent to which stylistic and social variables, including identity, govern code choice. The second looks at the relationship of code choice to language change. Based on the pattern of code choice found in a popular women’s magazine, I conclude that codemixed discourse is one of three varieties of code available to the bilingual, and where this variety is used intentionally, it is meant to emphasize the speaker’s bilingual identity. I also consider structural aspects of codemixed discourse and determine that although the L1-L2 structure of this discourse is distinct from the monolingual L1 and L2 structures, it nevertheless follows from universal principles of grammar and does not require the positing of a third grammar. I further argue that the use of mixed-code discourse, especially in written media, as a pragmatically and structurally distinct variety available to bilingual speakers, falls within the Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog (1968) and Labov (1972 a,b) conceptions of language change. Thus, I suggest that in some contexts, codeswitching, is itself an instantiation of language change.