Carol Myers-Scotton talking to LIN 471 students. Undergraduate students in LIN 471 Sociolinguistics today heard a guest lecture from Dr Carol Myers-Scotton, emerita professor of Linguistics at Michigan State. The theme in class this week was multilingualism. Dr Myers-Scotton is a world-renowned scholar of code-switching: the practice of switching between languages across social contexts and utterances and within sentences. Students heard about her experiences collecting data in Uganda and Kenya, and learned from many interesting naturalistic examples about the social motivations for code-switching. We saw speakers switching between English, Swahili and other languages to create or close social distance; assert authority; gain privileges; show respect; deliberately offend, and much more. Many thanks to Dr Myers-Scotton for giving us her time today!
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