Anna Ulatowska

Polnglish Code-switching Among Polish Immigrants in the USA Anna Ulatowska

In the past twenty years the existence of code-switching among diverse immigrant communities has become the focus of frequent debates and polemics among sociolinguists and linguists all over the world. Code- switching is a linguistic process of an encounter of two or more languages and its outcome is a hybrid language. The existence of the code-switching in bilingual communities is an inevitable part of their colloquial speech. Bilinguals that regularly use two languages in their environment make use of code-switching on a daily basis. This book investigates what happens when two languages come into contact, namely Polish and English. It looks closer into the spoken language of Polish immigrants of the first and second generation living in the USA and their skilled language performance carrying social and semantic messages. Multiple speech samples of code-switching taken from the colloquial language of Polish communities in the USA, CT and MA were collected over a period of time. The gathered speech samples, which are Polish/English code-switching are analyzed in this book.