Early code-switches in young Russian bilingual siblings

Abstract

The number of bilinguals and multilinguals of all age groups, including the youngest ones, constantly grows in many countries of the world, which explains the topicality of the study. While researchers explore various aspects of bilingual development, linguists concentrate their efforts on the analysis of bilingual speech, including code-switches. The author deals with Russian-English code-switches in the utterances of two siblings at the earliest stages of their bilingual development - before they were 36 months old. The children had acquired two languages since their first month in a monoethnic Russian family, their first language being Russian and their second (non-native) language being English. The aim of the study is to reveal specific structural, semantic, and pragmatic characteristics of mixed utterances observed in early code-switches of the siblings. The author argues that children’s code-switches at the earliest stages within one family reflect specific features of the communicative situations where children have to cope with the choice between the two languages spoken by their adult interlocutors. It is shown that the application of the Matrix Language Frame Model to the analysis of early childhood bilingual speech is possible, but has several restrictions and limitations related to incomplete and imperfect acquisition of both grammars. The originality of the research is not only in the use of specific data (the earliest stage of bilingual speech observed in simultaneous Russian-English dual-language development), but also in the employment of the Matrix Language Frame Model to study them. This work can contribute to the research of typical features of emerging code-switches in developmental perspective.