Code-switching in computer-mediated communication - a case study of croatian-english discussion forums

Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,1, University of Freiburg, language: English, abstract: It has now been about a decade and a half since the Internet and the World Wide Web have come to represent a major realm of research in various fields of linguistics. This is of course largely due to the fact that they offer easy access to a massive and unlimited amount of language data, which do not have to be transcribed in arduous ways as is the case with speech recordings. However, alongside this major cause of attraction, and despite the overall dominance of English, it is also the multilingual nature of the Internet which has naturally sparked the interest of bilingualism research as well as language contact research. It is the choice of and the switching between the available codes of the users' repertoires which mark a major topic of interest, and which shall be explored in the thesis at hand. The final focus of investigation will be the communicative functions and meanings of the phenomenon called code-switching (CS) as it naturally occurs in a Canadian-Croatian discussion forum.