"Bilingual Conversations:

Code-Switching as Social Action"

By

Lesley Milroy

This presentation is a part of the 2003 Barbara Gordon Lecture Series

The FIU Linguistics Program presents 2003 Barbara Gordon Lecture "Bilingual Conversations: Code-Switching as Social Action" By Lesley Milroy Tues, March 4, 2003.

Code-switching, the mixing of languages in the same conversation and even the same utterance, is currently a very live issue in bilingualism research. In this lecture, language mixing practices in several bilingual and bidialectal speech communities will be examined to show that code-switching is not a deficit to be stigmatized, but rather, an additional resource by which a range of social and rhetorical meanings are expressed.

Dr. Lesley Milroy is Hans Kurath Professor and Chair of the Department of Linguistics at University of Michigan. Her research interests cover a variety of subareas of sociolinguistics, including bilingualism, language ideology, and conversation analysis.