Multi-Variety Code-Switching in Conversation 903 of the Køge Project

Abstract

This article documents some of the ways in which the languages, or varieties, are taken into possession by the young speakers and made their own. It is illustrated how they play with language, in particular switches between codes, both as contributions to social negotiations and as pure performance. The material comes from a group conversation between four male bilingual students in the last grade of the Danish public school system. The young people have Turkish as their mother tongue, and Danish is their L2. By grade 9, they have had several years of experience with English, and almost all of the students have had two years of German. The conversation is a part of the Køge material (see Turan 1999). The four boys were asked to create a collage or a picture series with free post cards and glue them on a large piece of cardboard. The theme of the collage was to be “My worst nightmare”. The conversation lasts about half an hour, and all four boys participate actively in the conversation. The conversation has been transcribed according to the CHILDES conventions (MacWhinney 1995), but have been simplified slightly for the excerpts given in the article. In the excerpts, Turkish is italicized. The lines beginning with %eng give translations into English. Lines beginning with %com give background information or comments to the transcript.