Monday, May 12, 2014

"A look into a typical latina mom's text messaging"



Codeswitching : 
The practice of alternating between two or more languages or varieties of language in a conversation




Intersentential: 
the alternation in a single discourse between two languages, where the switching occurs after a sentence in the first language has been completed and the next sentence starts with a new language


 "Que quieres comer? I never know what I want to eat."



Intrasentential: consists a shift in language in the middle of a sentence, usually performed without pause




My investigation was the influence of emotional context and topic on code switching in CMC. 



MOM 

A native from Peru and has been living in the states for over 30 years. She is bilingual even though she might have a very heavy accent 




SMS data collection consisted of them being extracted from my phone and uploaded to my laptop.
310 SMSes were gathered for my qualification

These text messages were classified into 3 different categories: 

a.SMSes that were familia related



 

b.SMSes that were escuela related



c.SMSes that were anything miscellaneous



Afterwards the emotional context were qualified
  • Angry/stressed
  • happy 
  • neutral




Then the code switching has been split between intersentential and intrasentential




The distribution of SMSes in each category is summarized in chart below:





 



 Angry 







Happy










Neutral

LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL





In conclusion







According to Bertram,Codeswitching--changing from one language or lexicon to another--is highly context dependent. I believe that my mother is a “typical” Latina mom. She code switched the most when she had a lot of emotion like being angry/stressed. She was able to illustrate how she was feeling with codeswitching. However, when it came to being happy she need to codeswitch with mostly intrasentential. As if there was a lack of equivalent lexical words to get the meaning of her feelings. Lastly, I believe my mom is able to code switch within her texts with different emotions depending on the context.