Language Code-Switching as a Phenomenon of Interlanguage Interaction: On Examples from Bulgarian and Turkish

Interlanguage interaction refers to the linguistic outcomes that occur when communities speaking different languages interact with each other. One of these linguistic phenomena, code-switching, is analysed under two different headings: code-switching and code-mixing. Code-switching, which is the subject of our study, is a type of linguistic modification that takes the form of switching from one language to another at the boundary of sentences or phrases according to certain communicative goals. The aim of this study is to identify the communicative functions and the frequency of code-switching in the everyday discourse of native Turkish bilinguals in the Northeast, and thus to show in which function the group in question uses code-switching most frequently. The study is based on a corpus consisting of transcriptions of 9 recordings of everyday speech with a total duration of 5 hours and 11 minutes. The results show that native Turkish bilinguals in the Northeast use code-switching for 11 different communicative functions and that the most frequently used functions are “emphasizing/confirming the topic, refusing to use code-switching, clarifying the topic”.