Code Switching

In many multilingual communities around the world, speakers need to choose, often at an unconscious level, which language to use in their interactions with other members of the community. One of the choices that bilingual speakers often make is to code switch; that is, speakers switch back and forth between languages (or varieties of the same language), even within the same utterance. This article reviews the major theoretical approaches that have been proposed to answer the question of why bilingual speakers choose to code switch