Interpersonal Awareness and Self-Moderation of Code-Switching in Estonian-English-Japanese Facebook Communication: a Usage-Based Approach

Abstract While English is a language that is commonly spoken among youth in Estonia, the prevalence of Japanese has also been increasing in the recent years, with the rising popularity of Japanese media, as well as different local opportunities to learn the language. I draw from Muysken’s probabilistic model for variation in mixing patterns and I suggest that in the case of Japanese, that is spoken only by a minority of Estonians with interspersed micro-communities, interpersonal awareness seems to be an underlying factor in the self-moderation of code-switching. I am using the Estonian-English-Japanese Facebook communication dataset that consists of synchronous private Facebook messages between 2015 and 2021: a total of 54 conversations and 16,743 tokens. There are 7 informants, four of whom are present in more than one conversation pair, which enables an analysis of the characteristics of their speech patterns that vary according to their interlocutor. The data suggest that interpersonal awareness can be both an enabling and inhibiting factor in both the prevalence of code-switching in general, and also the style of code-switching (e. g. insertional or alternational), dependent on the speaker’s interpretation of their interlocutor’s language dominance, proficiency, attitudes and sociocultural norms, as well as a way to show solidarity.