diastratal variation, or functional and social code-switching... non-standard does not mean incorrect... It may be assumed that in modern society the diastratal variation (directly connected with functional and social stratification) is much more important than diatopic (territorial) variation." They remark that in Czech there are practically no native speakers of the Standard national language. Indeed, most children get acquainted with this formal language in a passive way, i.e. watching television, listening to teachers at school, reading books. As a result of thus learning virtually two languages--or dialects simultaneously, they are apt to switch both intra- and intersententially from one language to the other.
Diglossia is a common source of code-switching. The Random House Dictionary of the English Language (1983, 2nd ed.) defines the term thus: "The widespread existence within a society of sharply divergent formal and informal varieties of a language each used in different social contexts or performing different functions, as the existence of Kathardvusa and Demotic in modern Greece." Good examples of this phenomenon are to be found in Japan with its system of addressing people according to perceived social rank, and in Iraq where "the Christian Arabs speak a Christian Arabic dialect when talking among themselves but speak the general Baghdad dialect, Muslim Arabic, when talking in a mixed group" (Ferguson, 1975:232).
"Intersentential switching consists of shifting languages at sentence boundaries which are frequently principal discourse boundaries... Intrasentential language switching involves the shift from L1 to L2 in the middle of a sentence, often with no interruptions, hesitations, pauses, or other indications of a major categorical shift... " (Lipski, 1985:2).
Whatever name given to code-switching, the mechanism must perforce involve a switch, i.e. a tagging mechanism which unequivocally labels lexical eleme...