Codeswitching on the Web

Book excerpt: Based on a corpus of private email from Jamaican university students, this study explores the discourse functions of Jamaican Creole in computer-mediated communication. From this participant-centered perspective, it contributes to the longstanding theoretical debates in Creole studies about the 'Creole continuum'. This book will likewise be useful to researchers of computer-mediated communication, the use and development of non-standardized languages, language ecology, and code switching. The central methodological issue in this study is code switching in a written medium, a neglected area of study at the moment since most literature in code switching research is based on spoken data. The three analytical chapters present the data in a critical discussion of established and more recent theoretical approaches to code switching research. The fields of research that will benefit from this book include pragmatics and discourse analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, Creole studies, English as a world language, the study of language in computer-mediated communication, and linguistic anthropology.