WHY SHOULD WE AND HOW CAN WE DETERMINE THE "BASE LANGUAGE" OF A BILINGUAL CONVERSATION?

PETER AUER
University of Hamburg (Germany)

Many researchers on bilingualism, both in the more grammatical and in the more discourse-oriented research traditions, feel the need to state that a given bilingual stretch of talk is "basically" in language A although elements of language B may also be present in some way or other within it. In my contribution, I would like to discuss (a) the limits of our ability (as analysts) to attribute a given stretch of bilingual talk to language A or language B, i.e., to determine a "base language" at all, and (b) the proper way of proceeding within these limits, i.e. in those cases in which it is indeed possible and useful to reconstruct what language participants are "basically" speaking at a given point (or during a given activity).

In the first part of this paper, I will argue that in an interpretive approach to code-switching, based on conversation analytically inspired methodology, great care needs to be taken not to confound linguists' and participants' identifications of languages. If code-switching is defined as the juxtaposition of two varieties or languages in a way such that co-participants perceive it as such (and not as the juxtaposition of stretches of talk which linguists believe to belong to one or the other language system), then we have to concede that in many cases, what we observe is code-mixing rather than code-switching. (Contrary to code-switching in which the "codes" are juxtaposed in functional / meaningful ways, code-mixing refers to bilingual speech in which the "codes" are used alternatingly without this fact becoming noticeable or pragmatically relevant. Code-mixing often tends to stabilize into a mixed code, i.e. it may grammaticalize and lead to the evolution of a new variety with its own structural and social/pragmatic regularities.)

Obviously, it does not make sense to determine the base language in such a case: it is the mixed code itself which is the code that is used.

More interesting is the case of bilingual contexts in which participants themselves draw a more or less sharp line between the languages involved. Here, we have two fundamental ways of determining the "base language"; one is global, or text-based, i.e. it determines the "base language" for the whole of an interactional exchange, the other is local, or activity-based, i .e. it determines the "base language" for each and every utterance as the conversation develops in time.

In text-based approaches, the "base language" may be determined statistically (for instance, by counting the number of words or morphemes in the two "codes"), or socially (by determining the language that is usually spoken or "unmarked" in a given type of interaction). I will argue that text-based approaches are fundamentally at odds with a CA-type approach to bilingual speech since they impose the "base language" externally on a given interactive exchange and do not allow taking into account its sequential unfolding, in which language choice may be an ongoing concern for bilingual speakers.

In activity-based approaches, on the other hand, the base language is seen to be established by bilingual speakers themselves (if there is indeed one); in my paper, I will discuss several examples of how the "language-of-interaction" (the term I prefer to "base language") is negotiated sequentially. The principal domain on which language negotiations of this type rest is that of the turn-constructional unit (not that of the turn). But even within turn-constructional units, the final part sometimes has a greater impact on language negotiation than the first part.

A final and important point to be made will be the numerous strategies of ambiguity by which bilingual participants may choose to leave the question of one language-of-interaction locally unsettled. Thus, establishing a common language in bilingual interaction is not an aim in itself; rather, it is the outcome of participants' collaboration in establishing it. In various contexts, there are reasons due to the structure of the interaction which make such a collaboration inappropriate, and rather call for "strategies of neutrality".