Why do they code-switch? Examining code-switching, use of vernacular, and linguistic insecurity in a minority French-speaking context of Canada
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the reasons why young French-English bilingual speakers of Vancouver (Canada) code-switch to English when speaking in French. It also discusses how the use of code-switching might be related to the absence of a French vernacular variety, which in turn is associated with a feeling of linguistic insecurity. The study is based on classroom observations and interviews with 31 grade-11 teenagers who attend a French-language school in Vancouver. A qualitative content analysis of the data revealed that these youth code-switch for three main reasons: lexical, conversational, and social. These motivations for code-switching are divided into nine types of code-switches. All these switches form a communicative strategy and constitute a resource that the participants use to support their peers, participate in activities underway, maintain a conversation in French, and connect with their peers. The findings also indicate that English is a dominant language for most participants, and that supporting the development of a strong vernacular variety in French might encourage them to speak French with their friends and support their feeling of linguistic security.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it